Why We Need to Tax Work Differently
There’s something broken in the way money flows through our economy. The more I look at it, the more absurd it seems.
I’m pretty sure many (if not most) of my readers will hate this idea, and they’ll think it is unworkable. They’ll say that this isn’t how free markets should work. But we don’t live in a ‘free market’ — we live in a mixed economy. And guess what, it’s time to mix things up again. Because the current shape of the incentives and rewards in our economy is completely upside down.
Somewhere along the way we let the market trick us.
We confused price with value.
We told ourselves if someone gets paid a lot, they must be creating a lot. But that’s not how it works anymore. Corporate capture and voracious capitalism have flipped the script. The biggest pay packets now go to people who extract value from the system, not those who create it.
Think about it:
- Teachers shape the future, yet struggle to pay their own mortgage.
- Farmers feed us, but supermarkets skim most of the profit.
- Builders and trades keep the country running, but the margins go upstairs to financial engineers who never get dirt under their nails.
This disconnect matters. When money rewards the wrong things, talent flows to the wrong places. Bright young minds skip medicine, teaching, or research, and instead pile into investment banking, corporate law, or consultancy gigs that are high-pay, low-impact.
A Radical Rethink: Tax Work by Social Contribution
- Nurses, teachers, paramedics, farmers — tax-free up to $200K. These people are the spine of society.
- Average jobs — those that are not evil or life-changing — pay normal tax rates.
- Extractive industries and jobs — investment banking, hedge funds, corporate law designed to game the system — 80% tax rates for every dollar over $200K.
Sound extreme? It’s no different to what we already do. We tax tobacco because it harms society. We give rebates for solar panels because they help the planet. Why not apply the same logic to labour?
What It Fixes
- It rebalances incentives. Bright students might choose to be doctors or teachers if the money isn’t a barrier.
- It reconnects money with value. No more rewarding speculation over contribution.
- It shifts culture. We’d stop glorifying the biggest bonus and start respecting the biggest impact.
Imagine a country where the best-paid people are the ones who keep us healthy, feed us, and build our future. Imagine if the word “banker” meant someone tending food crops, not credit default swaps.
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Here’s the payment plan!
So here’s a thought:
We tax the 161 Australian billionaires—but this time with a wealth tax, not an income tax (so there’s no wriggling out of it). Let’s set it at 10% of their net worth, which collectively sits at around $549 billion. That would generate about $55 billion in tax revenue every year. To put that in context, the total tax collected from everyone earning under $150k is roughly $200 billion. So these numbers could actually work—with a bit of fine-tuning around who pays and who doesn’t – it’s financially workable. We could seriously reshape things
And the billionaires? They don’t need to stress. Their net worth has been growing at around 11% per annum on average for the past decade, so they’d still be getting richer even after paying up.
In fact, we should give them all a trophy engraved with: “Congratulations, you did it!”
That’s the kind of Australia I’d like to live in.
If you want things to be better – then the best place to start is usually with the system, and that takes new thinking and a lot of courage.