Has Australia become poorer in recent decades? That is the implication of the so-called debate between the parliamentary parties about what the country can “afford”.

This is a debate about which public benefits – Medicare, Newstart payments, disability assistance, single parent support – should be cut or abolished before the others. We’ve had all these things for quite a while. But this year we have to get rid of some of them, or Australia will be on the slippery slope to becoming a banana monarchy.

How could that be true unless Australia had become significantly poorer?

If we look back 30 years, Australia seemed to be even wealthier. In 1984, there was still free tertiary education. People who reached retirement age were able to live, if not in abundance, at least reasonably, without having private superannuation. The Medibank system created by the Whitlam government had just been re-established under the name Medicare, providing general access to medical treatment at no or low cost for patients. Now these are luxuries we’re told we can’t afford.

Yet, Australia, taken as a whole, is considerably richer than it was 30 years ago. The International Monetary Fund maintains a publicly accessible database going back to 1980, which contains year-by-year per capita real GDP figures for all countries for which they are available. These figures are presented in purchasing power parity (PPP) US dollars. PPP figures are better than other comparisons at showing what residents of a country can actually purchase.

According to the IMF, in 1984 the real per capita GDP of Australia was US$12,969. In 2014, the IMF estimates the figure to be US$44,346. That is, the real income of Australia as a whole, or of all Australians on average, is today nearly three and a half times what it was 30 years ago. How can we be poorer now than we were then?

The answer is that there is no “we”. Australia is not some kind of big family, where everyone divides up what’s available according to who needs what. It is a racket in which the rich rip off the rest of us.

“Australia” can’t afford a lot of necessary things for the simple reason that the people who own the productive resources – the factories, the mines, the office buildings, the large farms, the telecommunications and transport infrastructure etc. – use them not to improve the lives of the majority, but to enrich themselves.

Figures from the Bureau of Statistics show that, on average, each worker in Australia generates almost $34,000 in profits for business owners. As a result, “we” – lucky us – have more multi-millionaires and billionaires than ever before. At the same time, the corporate income tax rate has dropped from 46 percent in 1984 to 30 percent today – not that any company actually pays the official rate.

But the people at the top still cry poor and tell us the government is going broke. In case you haven’t been following the Canberra shadow play, they say something similar every year. They will say it again next year, even if – rather, especially if – they get their way this year. And yes, “Australia” will somehow be poorer again next May.

We need to end this racket. We need a system in which working people get the full value of their work, either directly or as social programs. No corporate control of the resources and infrastructure we need to keep society running; no value siphoned off for profit. Instead, we need a system of democratic control of the economy in which workers get to decide how, where and to what end production takes place.

That’s what socialism is about.