Manufactured Dependence in Australia: The Grounded and the Untethered

Joshua Van Der Neut
2 days ago
6 min read

How manufactured dependence, sticky price inflation, and strategic fragility shift the burden onto the productive base.

Something is shifting in Australia, and it runs deeper than dissatisfaction with one leader, one budget, or one election cycle.

A growing number of Australians no longer believe Labor and the Coalition offer genuinely different destinations. What many now see instead are two management teams presiding over the same broad system: one that expands dependence, protects its own pressure points, and asks the productive base to carry more of the cost each year. That helps explain why One Nation has been climbing in the polls and, in at least one recent national poll, moved ahead of the Coalition on primary vote. ([1])

That does not mean every voter suddenly has a worked-out economic doctrine. It means more people can feel the strain, even if they do not yet share the same language for it.

For years, Australia’s political class has expanded dependence while presenting it as compassion and compliance as consensus. Expand the transfer state. Expand the subsidy state. Expand public demand. Expand the number of people whose security, treatment, credentials, contracts, or income depend on decisions made above them. Then present the resulting arrangement as democratic stability.

But dependence is not the same thing as legitimacy. Often it is simply survival dressed up as civic virtue.

That concern sits at the heart of my novel, The Quiet Below. In that world, society is divided between the Untethered and the Grounded. The Untethered are insulated from consequence. The Grounded carry it. The system sustains itself not only through force, but through managed hope, administered reassurance, and the constant suggestion that one day, if you remain compliant enough, you too might be lifted clear of the burden.

That is fiction.

But not everything in fiction is false.

Manufactured dependence in practice

One of the most effective ways to build manufactured dependence is to hollow out the productive independence that once allowed people to stand on their own feet. Welfare is one mechanism. Subsidies are another. Public-sector expansion is another again. But strategic fragility is another, and it is one Australia has embraced for decades.

When a country offshores productive capacity, outsources resilience, and becomes dependent on international just-in-time supply chains for essentials, it does not merely become economically exposed. It becomes politically easier to govern through emergency management, subsidy, rationed relief, and blame-shifting. It becomes easier to centralise the terms of survival.

Fuel is the obvious example.

Australia’s fuel vulnerability is no longer theoretical. The federal government has moved to make available up to 20 per cent of Australia’s minimum stockholding obligation, citing supply pressures linked to the Iran war. Australia still imports about 90 per cent of its fuel and remains well short of the International Energy Agency’s 90-day reserve benchmark. At the same time, the ACCC has opened an investigation into alleged anti-competitive conduct affecting diesel availability to independent regional and rural distributors. ([2])

The issue is not whether Canberra says the system is stable. The issue is that official reassurance now sits beside emergency reserve releases, regional delivery stress, panic buying, and rising prices. That is what a fragile system looks like when it comes under pressure. ([2])

Nor is the fragility confined to Australia’s borders. China has either urged refiners to suspend new export contracts or moved to halt refined fuel exports in March, including diesel, petrol and aviation fuel, in order to protect domestic supply first. In plain terms, countries are looking after their own reserves before ours. Australia, having hollowed out much of its domestic refining base, is left exposed to decisions made elsewhere. ([3])

And when scarcity bites, what do we hear? That businesses are behaving badly. That consumers are hoarding. That someone lower down the chain is to blame. Maybe sometimes they are. But those are downstream behaviours. The deeper cause sits higher up. If a nation dismantles domestic resilience, relies on fragile external supply, and leaves itself exposed to systems it does not control, scarcity is not some random act of fate. It is a foreseeable consequence of policy.

The same pattern applies beyond fuel. A country that weakens domestic production does not just lose capability. It also changes the shape of its society. More people drift toward political dependence instead. Work for the government. Service a government-funded program. Build a business model around subsidy. Attach your income to regulation-created demand. Or, failing that, vote for the continuation of the system that still promises relief.

This is how a nation slowly builds an insulated class.

Not all members of that class are wealthy. Not all are malicious. Not all are even conscious of their position. But they become structurally protected from direct economic consequence in a way the productive base is not. Their security is mediated by the state. Their demand is underwritten by policy. Their future depends less on open productive exposure and more on the continuation of administrative power.

That is why the categories in The Quiet Below matter.

The Untethered are not simply the rich. They are the insulated. The Grounded are not simply the poor. They are the consequence-bearing base. They are the people, firms, families and sectors that still have to produce, repair, risk, save, transport, grow, fish, build, and absorb shocks in the real economy. The novel’s social architecture turns on exactly that split: one class buffered from pain, the other left to carry it.

Once you see that distinction, a great deal of modern Australia looks different.

Sticky price inflation and manufactured dependence

It also changes how we should think about inflation.

Australia’s CPI rose 3.8 per cent in the year to January 2026, while trimmed mean inflation rose 3.4 per cent. On 17 March, the Reserve Bank raised the cash rate to 4.10 per cent. That matters because it shows inflation pressure was already present before the latest fuel shock intensified. ([4]; [5])

This is why I reject the habit of talking about persistent inflation as though it were some dark mystery floating through the economy.

Sticky price inflation is the Voldemort of modern economics. It is treated as a dark mystery, when in reality the source of the pressure is often sitting in plain sight, protected from correction because the political costs of touching it are too high.

Voldemort as the truth that shall not be named. Sticky Price inflation. — Sticky Price Inflation

Programs that create a standing bid for labour and services, transfer streams that cannot easily be politically reduced, public demand that keeps expanding while supply remains constrained, and a wider economic model that punishes resilience while rewarding attachment to the state all leave a residue. The pressure remains because its source remains. And because that source is politically protected, we are told to speak instead in euphemisms: shocks, stickiness, expectations, complexity.

In The Quiet Below, the system behaves in exactly this way. When pressure rises, it does not correct the burden problem. It manages perception. It manufactures hope. It offers reassurance. It keeps the burdened emotionally invested in the very structure that is wearing them down. The novel’s language of assurance and compliance makes that logic explicit.

That, to me, is the deepest similarity between the novel and modern Australia.

We are becoming a country in which manufactured dependence is increasingly normalised, productive capacity is increasingly hollowed out, and political loyalty is increasingly built on access to managed relief rather than real economic independence.

And when the cost of that arrangement shows up in strained households, fragile supply chains, regional shortages, rising food costs, or persistent inflation, the burden is rarely traced back to the architecture that created it. It is pushed downward instead. Onto the consumer. Onto the independent business. Onto the farmer. Onto the person filling a tank, paying a power bill, or wondering why every shock now seems to hit harder than the last.

The ratio problem beneath modern Australia

In the novel, the system’s problem is not merely moral. It is arithmetic. The Untethered keep growing. The Grounded keep carrying. And eventually the ratio fails. The text repeatedly returns to burden being rerouted downward until too few remain to absorb it.

That is the warning here too.

A society cannot endlessly expand the insulated class while weakening the productive base that feeds it, fuels it, moves it, and pays for it. That is not just a fiscal problem. It is not just a political problem. It is a ratio problem.

And ratio problems do not disappear because the language around them becomes more sophisticated.

That is why I wrote The Quiet Below. Not as a policy paper, but as a warning. Its world is fictional, but its moral architecture is not. The Untethered rise. The Grounded erode. The system speaks in calm tones while the burden deepens underneath.

Sooner or later, every society discovers that the weight it thought it had hidden has been accumulating below the floorboards.