Three hundred and forty years ago, Thomas Hobbes articulated a principle so fundamental that every legitimate political arrangement since has either built upon it or been forced to explain away its violation:
‘No obligation on any man which ariseth not from some act of his own.’
No obligation – including the obligation to surrender your wealth – exists unless you personally created it through your own voluntary action. This wasn’t radical egalitarianism. It was the foundation of civilised political order. If you want my money, my obedience, my compliance with your schemes, you need my actual consent. Not my ancestors’ implied acquiescence. Not some metaphysical ‘general will’ you’ve intuited from electoral tea leaves. My consent. Mine. The specific human being you’re about to rob.
Now observe what Anthony ‘Hand It All Over’ Albanese and his Treasury enforcers actually believe: that they possess an inherent right – arising from what, exactly? – to confiscate between 35 and 60 per cent of your productive life, direct those confiscated resources toward purposes you may find actively abhorrent, expand that confiscation annually through bracket creep while calling it ‘fiscal drag’, and dismiss any objection as moral failure on your part.
Where did this extraordinary claim originate? Not with the reformers who built the modern democratic settlement between the strikes of the 1890s and the postwar order – when governments introduced pensions, arbitration, public hospitals, and schools simply to stop industrial society tearing itself apart. These were stabilisers, not ideological crusades.
But that reasonable perimeter became a launching pad. The modern Left doesn’t nationalise industries anymore. It just nationalises your margin.
The intellectual pedigree of Australia’s current redistributive state runs through Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that magnificently deranged prophet of totalitarian democracy, who decided that individual consent was too messy and inconvenient for his political theology. Rousseau’s innovation was to replace actual consent – unavoidably messy, particular and individual – with something far more useful to ambitious politicians: the ‘general will’.
The general will, Rousseau explained, is not the sum of individual wills. It’s a separate metaphysical entity embodied in the democratic state, which can demand ‘the total alienation of each associate, together with all his rights, to the whole community’. And here’s the beautiful part: if your individual will conflicts with this general will, you must be forced to be free. Your resistance proves you don’t understand your own true interests, which the state understands better than you do. Anyone else hearing Michelle Rowland?
This isn’t a caricature. This is Rousseau’s actual argument, and it’s the unnamed assumption behind every Labor frontbencher who responds to complaints about confiscatory taxation with ‘that’s what Australians voted for’.
David Hume demolished the entire scaffolding of ‘tacit consent’ two and a half centuries ago. People are ‘born into a situation from which they lack the means to escape’ – especially when the state controls 45 per cent of GDP and regulatory compliance requires specialist lawyers to navigate. Calling this ‘consent’ is like calling a protection racket a ‘voluntary security subscription service’.
But the red Left doesn’t need Lockean consent anymore. They have electoral majorities, which in the post-Rousseau framework means they embody the general will, which means resistance is false consciousness, which means shut up and pay.
Consider the multi-generational middle class who followed every rule. They saved instead of spending – denying themselves immediate gratification while building businesses and educating children at their own expense. They built family enterprises, creating employment and wealth, then watched those businesses strangled by industrial relations laws requiring $400/hour lawyers to understand. They paid every tax demanded, in full, on time.
What did Anthony ‘Hand It All Over’ Albanese’s vision offer them? Effective marginal rates – once taxes and benefit withdrawals are combined – can approach 60 per cent. Bracket creep that ratchets their real burden upward while politicians pretend inflation ‘just happened’. Superannuation rule changes mid-stream. Capital gains provisions that function as inheritance taxes by stealth. Zero recognition that educating your own children represents a gift to the commonwealth. Zero acknowledgement that building a business involves risk the public service would never contemplate.
The respectable term for this is ‘progressive taxation’. The accurate term is systematic confiscation justified only by electoral victory.
Canberra’s genius is making you thank them for taking it – like a mugger who hands you a brochure on civic virtue. Create vast populations dependent on redistribution, construct systems so complex that withdrawal seems impossible, present yourself as the indispensable intermediary between chaos and civilisation, then dismiss anyone questioning this as wanting to send children down mines. This is extortion dressed as governance.
What’s genuinely unforgivable isn’t Labor’s embrace of this model – they’re hangdog socialists, however much they’ve abandoned the terminology. It’s that the Liberal Party has accepted identical premises. Both major parties, the entire commentariat, the universities, the public service – all operate on Rousseauian assumptions about the state’s unlimited claim on private productivity. Politics becomes a debate over which causes justify confiscation, never whether the confiscation itself requires justification beyond ‘we control the Treasury’.
The classical liberal foundation said: you have natural rights to life, liberty, and property that arise from your humanity, not from state grant. Taxation requires genuine consent – actual agreement to specific burdens in exchange for specific benefits, not retrospective rationalisation of whatever the electoral winner decided to impose.
We’ve travelled from that to: the state has inherent claims on your productivity limited only by what it thinks it can extract without triggering revolution. Your ‘consent’ consists of not emigrating and getting to vote every three years for which particular set of confiscators will determine how much they’ll take.
This is Rousseau’s totalitarian democracy in sensible Australian clothing. The fact that it arrives via ballot box and parliamentary procedure rather than revolutionary terror doesn’t make it less coercive. It makes it more stable, more insidious, and vastly more successful at convincing victims they’re free.
The left sees no problem with this because they never believed your productivity belonged to you in the first place. Labor doesn’t begin from the Lockean premise that you mixed your labour with the world and thereby made it yours. They begin from the Rousseauian premise that all wealth is social, all property is artificial, and the general will – conveniently embodied in whatever Anthony ‘Hand It All Over’ Albanese proposes this week – has unlimited authority to redistribute as it sees fit.
Perhaps the hyperbole isn’t hyperbolic enough. Perhaps calling this a criminal conspiracy understates the problem. At least traditional crime syndicates never pretended their theft was morally mandatory or that victims should be grateful for the privilege of being robbed. Labor has convinced half the country that confiscation is civilisation, that resistance is selfishness, and that the multi-generational productive class owes everything to the collective that’s actively punishing them for succeeding.
Rousseau wanted to force men to be free. Labor’s happy to force them to be fleeced.
Same principle. Better branding.
