In June of 2000, in the wake of twenty years of economic reform, Australia's premier national newspaper, The Australian, ran a cover story, and then a week of special reports, under the headlines ‘Advance Australia Where? … Death of the Fair Go’. The caption announced that ‘two decades of reform have … generated feelings of loss and anger’. The cover story continued under the headline ‘Death of the nation's great middle-class dream’. A few weeks later I showed these pages to an audience of American social scientists. They were bewildered. Someone asked whether this was a left-wing newspaper, and another whether such sentiments were overstated. I replied that this was generally a New Right newspaper that has promoted economic reform with ferocious zeal for the whole period; and that, no, the sentiments were everyday concerns in Australia that a prestigious national newspaper would have to address. With a shrug, one person in the audience said, ‘Well, it's obviously not working then.’

But working for whom? For the corporations and elites who drive the reform process, success means reconciling the people to whatever reduced relative incomes are deemed necessary to insure increasing shareholder returns (profits), investment and growth.