After five gruelling years of surging cost-of-living pain, there is a feeling in the air among young working Australians that is hard to deny.
“We are getting screwed,” says a mate of mine, who earns around $250,000 per year with his partner. Two years into a mortgage with their repayments fluctuating at the behest of the RBA, they have found themselves among millions of Aussies locked into in an increasingly lopsided wealth game.
News.com.au has covered this issue extensively in recent years, but a few key points still haven’t lost their shock value. Nationwide, Australia’s house-price-to-income ratio has almost doubled since the year 2000 with the cost of everyday goods and services also skyrocketing.
Real wage growth has remained largely stagnant, leaving some earning the national average wage (roughly $100,000) feeling poorer than they did ten years prior on nearly half that pay packet.
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Those who grew up in a world where home ownership was achievable even for low single-income households are now feeling like the door was shut on them as soon as they entered the workforce.
Even those with the bank of mum and dad behind them feel as if they’re getting fleeced, especially if they’ve just bought into an ex-sharehouse terrace with mouldy holes in the roof out of fear of “missing out”.
Couples are starting families much later than usual, and the idea of a prosperous single-income household paying their own way in major cities has largely faded into myth.
‘People’s economist’ warns Australia’s middle
The widespread frustration is precisely why former big bank trader Gary Stevenson has accumulated over 200 million views on his social channels.
He recently landed in Australia to bring his no-bulls**t brand of economics commentary to his fans Down Under.
Yep, it’s so bad that people in their 20s are actually lining up (and paying) to see economists.
Stevenson, 39, has tapped into the frustration of a generation squeezed between a rock and a hard place to become a prominent voice in the UK for urgent tax reform. But the message is lighting beacons across many age groups all over the globe as several first-world countries tackle similar issues.
He spoke to news.com.au this week ahead of his “The People’s Economist” speaking tour to warn young Aussies that the time to act was yesterday.
“My big thing is that inequality is killing us. Inequality is making housing unaffordable. Inequality is driving living standards down. And the way to fix it is to tax the rich,” he said on Wednesday.
Stevenson says he could have taken the show anywhere but chose Australia because of its unique position in 2026. In his view, Australia’s relative prosperity and natural wealth should make it a model of shared prosperity. But instead it’s beginning to show patterns of inequality he fears will unravel social cohesion around the world.
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“Obviously, I could have gone and done this tour in America. I could have done it in the UK. But I wanted to do it here,” he said.
“What you’ve got here in Australia is a very rich country — lots of wealth, lots of natural resources, great living standards internationally.”
Australia’s wealth is built on iron ore, gas, minerals, farmland and property. Stevenson stresses this should be a strength for the working population, but the advantages are now being eroded by wealth concentration.
He warns that if left unchecked, Australia could rapidly erode to levels of wealth inequality seen in developing countries.
“There are a lot of countries in the world (like this) — look at countries in Africa, look at countries like Venezuela,” he continued.
“There’s a lot of great countries in the world that have a phenomenal amount of natural resources, and they have allowed those natural resources to be captured by a tiny elite, and the vast majority of people live in poverty.
“Is Australia going to become Norway, or is Australia going to become Venezuela?”
Unlike some optimists, Stevenson wants to stress to Aussies that the “next five to ten years are going to be hard,” even if rapid changes to tax law occur.
“What you’re seeing here is the death of social mobility,” he said.
“That’s very un-Australian. It’s not very ‘fair go’. The only people who get a fair go in housing are people with rich parents.”
Dude, where’s my cash?
Amid the rapid deterioration of living standards is a very convenient coincidence. Billionaires across the globe have seen unprecedented levels of asset growth in a few short years post-Covid.
While the issue of absurd wealth inequality has been a thorn in the side of human history going as far back as the pharaohs, the internet era has allowed anyone to piece together data on just how fast the scales the scales are tipping.
In short, it would take the combined wealth of about 3.2 million typical Australian 30-year-olds to match that of the country’s top 200 wealthiest individuals.
Globally, the numbers tell a very interesting story indeed.
In 2020, the Forbes rich list reported 2,095 billionaires globally with a combined net worth of about US$8.0 trillion (A$11.22 trillion).
In 2025, the number of billionaires had grown by nearly 1,000.
Now 3,028 billionaires hold a total net worth of about $16.1 trillion (A$22.58 trillion).
The printing of trillions of dollars throughout the global economy to prop up Covid-19 lockdowns was heavily panned by economists daring to go against popular public opinion at the time.
Some argued broad government schemes, like Australia’s rushed-in JobKeeper, would become a runaway freight train for inflation that would rapidly decimate purchasing power.
As the dust finally settles on the pandemic era, serious questions are being asked.
Stevenson argues that overall spending habits through Covid played a massive role in the wealth transfer.
In broad terms, the already-wealthy were able to save massively while being locked at home, while people in the middle and lower tax brackets continued to funnel money pockets through rent, interest payments, groceries and general goods and services.
Only this time, the money was coming from thin air as governments addressed the crisis.
In the UK, he says roughly 20,000 GBP (A$38,000) per working adult was magically pumped into the system to prop up businesses forced to shut down, only for living standards to drop rapidly in the years following.
“Someone’s got your 20,000 pounds,” Stevenson says.
‘Gamble your tits off’ for financial security
With young self-funded Aussies feeling forever priced out of housing, the topic of “rent-vesting” has become more and more popular.
Traditionally, rent-vesting means buying in a cheaper area and renting where you want to live. But as deposit requirements surge, there are people now trying to plan for their future without a home at all.
Relying on compound interest on widely diversified assets is a reliable albeit slow method to becoming financially stable later in life. But Stevenson says the very idea that workers in a wealthy nation like Australia are needing to discuss long-term alternatives to homeownership to stay afloat is a dire signal that inequality had gone too far.
“When we talk about rent vesting, what we are saying to young people is: the best way for you to have a house and financial security and a family is to gamble your tits off,” he said.
“That’s the truth of the situation for a lot of young people. And that’s absurd.”
He says that accepting rent as a lifelong strategy is just the normalisation of poverty, and that those opting to plonk all of their hard-earned into ETFs are buying into a similarly shonky system.
He warns that these assets have likely also become inflated by the same forces driving housing prices up — forces rooted in massive wealth accumulation at the top.
“I look at the markets now — every stock market in the world: highest, highest, highest,” he says. “They’ve all gone up 100, 200 per cent in the last five to ten years. Massive increases.
“Not buying housing doesn’t mean you’re not buying another asset whose price has been massively blown up.”
Isn’t this just socialism?
Stevenson sees a culture of two philosophies in Australia — the egalitarian “fair go” attitude and also a “redneck libertarian” streak.
While critics are keen to bundle him in with the scores of misty-eyed, inner-city socialists who call for a vague revolution, Stevenson, who made millions as a trader in his 20s, says the crux of his ideas can be summed up in four words.
“Tax wealth, not work,” he says
Stevenson says he’s been hit with a lot of criticism from financially conservative commentators, who worry his rhetoric is a slippery slope towards the authoritarianism seen in failed socialist states of the 20th century.
Others argue billionaires are a net positive for the world because they are a result of innovation.
“The value that household-name billionaires have created for the world economy dwarfs their net worth. We need more, not fewer,” Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute wrote in an AFR article titled “Billionaires should be celebrated, not criticised”.
But the fiery Brit, who says he didn’t “grow up as a leftie”, claims he just wants to see heavier taxes on the vast amounts billionaires make on passive income made from rapidly growing assets, coupled with a lower tax rate for those working regular gigs.
“Initially I got a lot of this, a lot of mischaracterisation with people saying, ‘what Gary wants to do is tax you’,” he said.
“I’ve never campaigned to raise tax on working people.
“I would be more than happy to reduce tax on working people if we could balance that by raising tax on the very, very rich.”
He explicitly warned about the current political climate being weaponised, and urged those who actually want inequality dealt with to put aside petty differences to push for reform.
“Resist division,” he says.
“If we hate each other, then we’re not going to be able to fight the real battle, which is against the very rich. This doesn’t have to be a right-left issue. This is an interests issue.
“If you can convince half the country to hate the other half, then they become easy picking for the rich.”
Gary Stevenson – Australia & New Zealand Tour 2026
– Brisbane, Brisbane City Hall, Thursday 26 February
– Melbourne, Melbourne Town Hall, Saturday, 28 February 2026
– Sydney, Sydney Town Hall, Sunday 1 March 2026
– Perth, The Regal Theatre, Monday 2 March 2026
– Auckland, Bruce Mason Centre Theatre, Wednesday 4 March 2026
