Australia is socially being torn apart by a rapidly widening income gap, which is afflicting the majority of the population with rising poverty levels, increased homelessness, long-term unemployment, and a skyrocketing suicide rate.

On June 25, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) hailed Australia's economy as one of the top six economic performers for the past decade, along with the U.S., Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands and Norway. This was backed up by a study commissioned by The Australian newspaper, which found that since 1983, Australia?s living standard has risen by 50 per cent, and the number of classified as salary-earning rich has doubled—the top ten per cent of whom have enjoyed a $200 per week salary increase since 1983.

However, every wealth gain for the highest-placed minority has come at the expense of the majority: while the top 20 per cent receive 48 per cent of the gross weekly income, the lowest 20 per cent receive just 3.8 per cent; the middle class has been disappearing since 1983, because while the number of salary-earning rich has doubled, so has the number of wage-earning poor; 700,000 or 14.2 per cent of Australian children were classified as living in poverty in 1997-98, up 12.5 per cent from 600,000 in 1995-96; welfare agency St Vincent De Paul in Adelaide reported a 18 per cent increase in the demand for welfare assistance this year from last year, increases repeatedly confirmed by welfare agencies Australia-wide; the country's 1.7 million aged pensioners, 599,000 disability pensioners, and 397,000 single parents have seen their pensions fall far behind the rate of inflation over the past four years; a "silent epidemic" in dental health has struck low-income earners thanks to government budget cuts, to the point where dental health has become indicative of the wealth divide—low-income earners are half as likely as better-off Australians to have natural teeth, and they have twice as many extracted; and, most tragically, 50 Australians now commit suicide each week, 80 per cent of them male, and the suicide rate for men aged between 20 and 39 has skyrocketed by 70 per cent in the past 20 years.

On June 26, an alarmed Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) committed Australia?s union movement to halting the spread of the wealth divide. "There is a widening income gap between rich and poor, between regions and between social groups," ACTU Secretary Greg Combet said. Australian Labor Party (ALP) Opposition leader Kim Beazley picked up the theme: "Under [Prime Minister] Howard the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer and the middle is getting squeezed—we are seeing the growth of two Australias," charged Beazley in a televised message to the Australian nation on July 4.

However, Beazley and the ALP are blatantly hypocritical, for two reasons: 1, they have committed their party to policies to shift Australia into the so-called "new economy" of information/communication industries, away from traditional primary and secondary industries that were Australia's strength. One of these new economy (or "knowledge economy" as the ALP prefer) polices is the promotion of share ownership among Australians, the current rate of which is already the highest in the world, and is setting ordinary Australian citizens up for ruin when the speculative bubble on global stock markets melts down.

Two, Beazley and the ALP are the major architects of the "two Australias", as it was the Hawke/Keating Labor governments of 1983-1996, which Beazley was a senior member of, whose free trade, deregulation and privatization policies, dubbed "economic rationalism", blew out the current account deficit and national debt, through tariff cuts dismantled the bulk of the country's once substantial manufacturing industries, particularly in textiles, clothing and footwear, and machine tools, and made real wages of working people shrink, while unemployment was pushed to record "official" levels of 11.2 per cent.

Beazley's hypocrisy is most evident in his and the ALP's continued commitment to free trade, which has provoked outrage in the party's trade union constituency. Beazley's old boss, former ALP Prime Minister Paul Keating, angered unions on July 21 by claiming that people "are not seeing their jobs disappear. They are seeing a new job appear." Julius Rowe, the president of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU), whose industry has lost 60,000 jobs in the past two years, blasted Keating's claims as "nonsense". "The reality is that most people who lose their jobs in manufacturing end up either unemployed or in low-skilled, low-paid casual jobs such as making hamburgers," he said.

Instead of heeding his constituency, Beazley and the ALP have stuck with Keating's free trade. "We can't go backwards," Beazley told the ALP's Federal Council in Hobart on Aug. 1, speaking against an AMWU resolution to replace free trade with "fair" trade. It would appear his party has become divided along the same lines as the rest of the country: the resolution was only narrowly defeated 105 votes to 82.