We do not have a sovereign PM, we have a PR manager for corporate extraction

Anthony Albanese has tied his fate to fossil fuel majors. In a speech delivered to the Chamber of Minerals and Energy of Western Australia in Perth yesterday, he declared: “I can confirm that the Budget will not undermine existing contracts on gas exports.” He tied this refusal to tax fossil fuel’s windfall profits to Gallipoli, the minimum wage and the eight-hour workday. These memories of labour [sic] politicians’ victories seemed to spit in the face of the Australians of 2026 who will struggle to afford food, be sacked, lose their homes and businesses in the months ahead. Meanwhile, fossil fuel corporations announce staggering profits as a result of the US/Israeli war on Iran.

Worse, instead of acting to build a proper sovereign wealth fund, Albanese committed in the speech to the Abundance scam, promising deregulation at scale. “This will fast-track new energy, housing and resources projects by combining federal and state approvals – effectively removing an entire layer of bureaucracy from the process.” While there is always scope to streamline protections, the survivors of the Grenfell Towers inferno can tell you how trustworthy capital is without earnest government supervision. As one wit observed, Abundance is neoliberalism’s new little black dress. And neoliberalism is soft eugenics: the sooner the “herd” is “thinned” the better.

Governments around the West are frightened. For over a century they have struggled to manage the growing demands of the tycoon class against a labour/consumer class (theoretically) fully equipped with a vote and with an emerging history of union organising. Palestine Action’s damage to an Israeli weapons corporation’s possessions in the UK and the burning down of a warehouse in California are both hints that the governments’ deal with the tycoons is under threat. Queensland police sending eight paramilitarised police to arrest one older Jewish man at a pro-Palestine event is symptomatic of the fear. So is allowing the ominous Palantir corporation into our governments.

The growing evidence of a catastrophic breakdown from global warming has alert citizens deeply concerned. Israel’s gross display over 31 months of eugenicist violence against Palestinians (and its neighbours), aided and reinforced by our governments and media class, have revolted a proportion of the citizenry. Furthermore, austerity measures that are destroying quality of life for the populace in the Global North have made a grievance crowd susceptible to mis- and disinformation even readier to turn to violent protest than those who know the facts. Just to clarify: “austerity” is another way that the tycoons’ governments have funnelled public money from the common wealth to the wealthy.

The neoliberal movement began in the breakdown of Europe’s homeland and distant empires, with the fresh threat of a world war to global trade, a catastrophic depression and the Russian revolution. The one idol to be protected in the face of all those challenges was the free movement of money and commodities. No decolonising country could be allowed to cut off the massive flow of wealth that that foreign nations and businesses had depended upon for centuries, building “the West” and its greatness.

Britain is estimated to have taken approaching $54 trillion from India alone between 1765 and 1938. After a century in Latin America from 1500, Europe is estimated to have multiplied its stocks of gold and silver eight-fold. Western corporations, entwined with the intelligence and military aid of their home countries, extracted billions of barrels of oil until independence movements broke the “Seven Sisters” corporations’ 85% control of foreign oil. Since 1960 and the breakdown of territorial empires, Global North countries have continued to “drain” the Global South: with an estimated 152 trillion more taken in the era of economic empire. 

Much of that extraction of wealth was made possible by the “structural adjustment” of decolonised nations designed by neoliberal thinkers for their donor class. The first experiment was Pinochet’s Chile. Reagan and Thatcher enacted the work against their own publics in the early 1980s. Labour’s Roger Douglas implemented it in New Zealand/Aotearoa in the mid 1980s. In Australia, tory John Howard and the Liberal Dries took on the job that Labor’s Bob Hawke and Paul Keating started. The merging of both domestic and imperial subjects as, in some ways, a single class to be exploited and disciplined has a long history. 

Since the Reagan era in the US, a 2025 Rand Corporation study estimated that “nearly $80 trillion in wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%”. This was not an accident.

The neoliberal economists and partners that designed those programs, gathered around the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) from 1947, knew their class and the tycoons who funded them had much to lose if the new nationalist movements threatened the multinationals’ control. From the early decades of the 20th century, they worked with tycoon backing, to develop a dual order. They would allow nations to have cultural independence but the economic space must be a separate order outside a national government’s control. Nations did not own the resources within their boundaries. Those belonged to the predator corporation that could claim them. The economists worried about governments being susceptible to pressure from the voting (or protesting) public, so helped design a legal and economic framework that placed global trade and capital movement outside most single governments’ control. Their “thought collective” helped design ways to minimise the impact of voting compared to the impact of money.

One of the mechanisms used is the international investment arbitration system where corporate lawyers act as arbitrators to punish, cripplingly, national governments that attempt to put their national interests ahead of corporate contracts that have exploited their country.

The MPS’s Atlas Network, incorporated in 1981, but already spreading around the globe, was one of the weapons that the tycoons’ strategists used to manage former colonies “threatening” their possessions and profits. This think tank “architecture of influence” has been an important tool in limiting the public’s threat to profits. Dr Jeremy Walker has tracked the detail which reveals that Australia is, while denominated Global North, also treated as Global South, a resource field to be managed for transnational and domestic corporate goals.

The parallels between the exploitation of the colonial possessions abroad and the public at home does not only lie in the draining of their resources for the benefit of the Ultra High Net Worth Individual (UHNWI) class and their enablers. Nikhil Pal Singh’s outstanding “Homeland Empire” essay at the exciting new Equator Journal explores how, particularly in Trump’s America, we see the regime “collapsing the foreign and the domestic into a single domain of impunity”. It stands as warning to us all of the spread of similar dynamics within our own governments working to protect the status quo at our existential expense.

In the UK, the high court found the Labour government’s heavy-handed repression of pro Palestine protests unlawful. Juries have refused to convict the activists who damaged property. The system is now re-trying the Palestinian Action group that damaged Israeli state-owned weapons corporation Elbit Systems’ possessions as part of protest against Britain’s complicity in the Israeli genocide. This time, the system is not leaving anything to chance, but rather is stepping further into authoritarian realms. The current case is being tried before a jury that believes it is assessing the accused for the crime of criminal damage. In fact, the convicted will be sentenced by a judge that is part of the intelligence and law enforcement faction for crimes of terrorism with long sentences available. Their defence is not allowed to mention the name of the company, its role in the genocide, Israel or the word genocide. Their property damage is to look merely criminal to the jury rather than, as one commentator said, the “contemporary equivalent of sabotaging the railways to Auschwitz”. It is certainly not terrorism. The British media is not allowed to report on these appalling facts.

In America, we have seen that irregular and barely trained armed forces on the streets are empowered to shoot citizens as well as killing non-citizens without consequence. Protest against Israel’s genocide continues but is chilled by the sending of protesters to the US’s emerging array of concentration camps. Furthermore, the increasingly regime-ally owned media barely covers protest.

In the US, one CEO has been shot. A Californian worker who was paid roughly 2/3 what it costs to survive in the region in which he lives set fire to a warehouse. The continuing enriching of the already rich and impoverishing of the masses in the US is only likely to enflame such tensions. The Atlas Network’s partners immediately stepped in to deny the arsonist “working class hero” status. (This junktank is the one where Peter Thiel of Palantir began his working life as a culture warrior.)

Woodside, an Australian oil and gas company, reacted with great intensity when a West Australian protest group drew attention to the identity of their CEO. For the executive suite class and their owners, “extremism” is pointing the finger at the individuals who execute the choices that will make our lives a misery, risking ending the “civilisation” that we prize. CEO Meg O’Neill vowed “to continue increasing production of oil and gas” while calling our children zealots for seeing the looming cost. For many of us, that relentless and unaccountable profit drive at everyone else’s expense is the extremism. (O’Neill later moved to BP, the petroleum corporation for which the CIA overthrew the Iranian elected Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953, when he tried to nationalise Iranian oil for Iranians’ benefit.)

At the same time our corporations and governments are allowing Peter Thiel’s insidious Palantir corporation to infiltrate our systems too, taking our data as part of the anti-democratic and authoritarian project of its owners. The sinister manifesto just published has been usefully decoded by economist Yanis Varoufakis. The 11th point is a defence of the Epstein class. Other points illuminate that Palantir is prepared to provide the new weaponry that can help contain the threats to profit within borders as well as beyond.

Western machinations brutally punished decolonising countries’ challenge to imperial control. Many millions were killed to ensure the Global North’s ability to continue profiting, in a fight labelled “anti-communist”. First Peoples in Australia continue to be targeted by the neoliberal machine for the threat they are perceived to represent to mining profits. The neoliberal compact punished our political leaders (Ardern?) when they have tried to challenge the arrangement that gave them cultural but not economic control of their countries. Now our leaders seem either fully engaged with the project or too chastened to tackle the entrenched power of money.

Oliver Bullough characterised the UHNWI class as a separate supranational power that tailors national conditions to its desires. He called that supranational country Moneyland and illustrated how we do not see its existence. It’s a useful concept.

As Moneyland prepares to continue to crush our standards of living (always a legitimate goal for most of the neoliberal economists that shaped this moment), and destroy our ability to protest, we need to coordinate to see how we can use our numerical weight to bend the trajectory before our leaders are using drones to kill us, just as Israel uses drones to kill its unwanted population. 

Our politicians and dominant media class need to decide if they are with us or content to function as puppets cooperating with our extinction.

Albanese appears to have made his choice.

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A version of this piece originally appeared on the author’s Substack, here