A Long Rant on Australia, Extraction, and the Future.
We live inside an economic model that has stopped nurturing its own population. It didn’t happen because someone in a smoke-filled room decreed “no more children.” It happened because of the slow, relentless incentives of a financialised, neoliberal order: inflate asset prices, extract rents from essentials, patch the labour supply with immigration, and turn the consequences into profitable markets. The outcome is an economy that starves childhood and overfeeds aged care. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s worse: it’s the natural result of extraction left to run unchecked.
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Health and Aged Care: The Dominant Industry
The numbers are blunt. Health Care and Social Assistance is Australia’s largest employing sector — roughly one in six workers belong to it. Government spending follows: A$252.5 billion went into health in 2022–23, nearly 10% of the economy, while aged care alone absorbs over A$36 billion annually. Millions more provide unpaid care. These aren’t auxiliary sectors anymore. They are the heart of the economy.
Why? Because the Boomers — the largest cohort in Australia’s demographic history — are aging. Hospitals overflow, aged-care homes expand, and governments pour resources into keeping an older generation alive and supported. For private providers, it’s the growth industry of the age. For politicians, it’s unavoidable. For the workforce, it’s a grind: underpaid, understaffed, emotionally draining. And the bigger the demand, the bigger the strain.
But this boom will not last forever. The very demographic wave that sustains aged care as an industry will eventually recede — and with it, the political and economic oxygen of the sector. That cliff is already visible on the horizon.
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Housing as Extraction: Killing the Family Before It’s Born
At the root of the demographic squeeze sits housing. Once a foundation for family life, it has become a financial instrument. Homes are treated as assets, not dwellings. Properties sit empty, hoarded as speculative bets. Prices ratchet upward year after year. The effect is simple: younger generations cannot afford stable housing at the age when families are usually formed. The “child economy” — nappies, schools, playgrounds, family services — is starved because the homes that make children possible have been turned into chips at a casino.
Governments refuse to fix it. Why? Because politicians, like much of the middle and upper class, are themselves invested in rising housing values. Deflating the bubble would strip billions from their wealth. Better to import workers than to restore homes to families.
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Immigration as Policy Crutch
This is the other leg of the stool. Immigration is presented as population growth, but in reality it is population substitution. Migrants arrive mostly as adults, ready-made workers. They patch the labour supply and keep GDP ticking up. Yes, many migrants have children, but fertility rates among migrants converge quickly to local norms: low, delayed, fewer. The structural anti-child pressures of housing costs, insecure work, and expensive living bite everyone equally.
For now, immigration is Australia’s population plan. But it’s fragile. Source countries are industrialising, building their own consumer classes, and fighting to retain their workers. Migration flows cannot be relied on forever. When the tap closes, Australia will be forced to face the hollowness of its domestic reproduction system.
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Automation and Robotics: The Job Squeeze
At the very moment a younger generation is needed, stable work for them is disappearing. Robotics and AI are replacing warehouse pickers, logistics staff, even mid-skill service jobs. The promise of new jobs is real, but the distribution is uneven. High-skill sectors benefit; mid- and low-skill workers — the ones who once formed families on solid, unionised wages — are left stranded.
So the paradox intensifies: fewer children, fewer jobs, more care burden. The economic base needed to support family life is shrinking just as it is most urgently needed.
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Data Centres: The New Industrial Drain
Layer onto this the silent colossus of data centres. Every cloud service, streaming platform, AI model, and digital product depends on vast warehouses of servers. These centres devour electricity, water, and land. They concentrate demand on already-strained grids, inflating energy costs for households. They compete with housing for land in urban corridors. And they are largely controlled by global tech giants whose profits flow offshore.
Data centres represent a new form of extraction: instead of building industries that support the domestic lifecycle, we host infrastructure that serves global corporations while leaving Australians to bear the environmental and economic costs. They swell GDP figures through construction and investment, but they do not create large numbers of jobs, nor do they lower the costs of living that would let families thrive. In effect, they intensify the squeeze while offering little back to the local population.
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The Global South: The External Constraint
For decades, Western economies leaned on cheap imports and young migrant labour from countries that were still climbing the development ladder. That ladder is being pulled up. Nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America are industrialising, retaining their workers, and building their own consumer bases. France’s loss of influence in North Africa is one symptom; similar shifts will confront other Western states, Australia included. When the supply of ready-made workers slows, the West’s internal demographic failure will become impossible to ignore.
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The Feedback Loops of Decline
The system is vicious in its simplicity:
Asset inflation → delayed families → lower fertility.
Lower fertility → need for immigration → substitution, not reproduction.
Immigration → infrastructure stress → political spending on aged care and hospitals.
Care boom → rent extraction by providers → chronic underfunding for staff and family supports.
Automation → job scarcity → fewer families supported on stable wages.
Data centres & extraction industries → high energy costs → higher cost of living → further fertility decline.
Global South industrialisation → immigration tap closes → Western economies face the full weight of their demographic hollowing.
None of this requires malice. It only requires everyone at the top to keep doing what is rational for them: extract today, push the costs onto tomorrow.
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The Mid-Century Cliff
The crucial question: when do Boomers stop being a product for the economy? The answer is mid-century. By the 2040s, the Boomer bulge has largely passed through aged care. Gen X is smaller; Millennials didn’t have enough children. The demand wave collapses. Aged care providers face stranded capital, empty facilities, and dwindling profits. Meanwhile, the workforce is too small, too automated, too burdened to support the tax base. The machine runs out of fuel.
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Why UBI Won’t Save It
Some argue for Universal Basic Income. But the math is crushing: a truly livable UBI would require tax levels far beyond political possibility. And even if implemented, it would simply be swallowed by rents, bills, and inflated essentials. Without dismantling extraction in housing, energy, and care, UBI is not a solution. It is a subsidy to landlords and corporations.
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The Only Real Fix (That Won’t Happen)
A serious correction would mean:
Taxing housing speculation and forcing occupancy.
Building massive affordable housing stock.
Making childcare and early education effectively free.
Paying carers and nurses proper wages.
Regulating data centres to ensure they contribute to the grid and communities, not just drain them.
Steering automation towards complementing, not replacing, workers.
Tying migration policy to actual infrastructure capacity.
These are not impossible. They are politically toxic, because they hurt asset-holders and disrupt the short-term GDP story politicians cling to.
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The Human Consequence
This is not abstract. It is your kids — or the absence of them. It is lonely pensioners rattling around in empty houses while young couples can’t afford one-bedroom flats. It is women trading their most fertile years for precarious jobs, not by free choice but by economic compulsion. It is an economy that counts hospitals and data centres as successes while playgrounds disappear.
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The Preview of Things to Come
2020s–2030s: Care dominates; immigration props up growth; housing remains unaffordable; data centres expand as silent infrastructure, inflating energy demands.
2040s: Boomer care demand peaks, then declines. Aged care bubble deflates. Workforce shrinks. Immigration begins to slow as source countries industrialise.
2050s: Structural crisis. Fewer workers, fewer children, too much care infrastructure, too little family economy. Automation entrenched. Data centres still draining resources. Politics fractured.
Beyond 2060: Either radical reform — or long stagnation, with a hollowed-out population, stratified wealth, and declining global influence.
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Final Word
This isn’t collapse in the Hollywood sense. It’s erosion. It’s the story of a society that traded reproduction for rent-seeking, homes for assets, family life for spreadsheets. Aged care became the biggest business not because anyone planned it, but because it was the only growth sector left in a system that had forgotten how to make children. Data centres now join the same list: infrastructure that serves extraction, not life.
The choice remains stark. Either we dismantle the extraction model and rebuild the conditions for life, or we stagger into a future of dwindling people, endless care cycles, and infrastructure that drains us while enriching someone else. And right now, no one in power seems willing to make the choice that sustains a society.
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