Elizabeth Humphrys is a political economist at the University of Technology Sydney. Her research examines work and workers in the context of economic crisis and change, including neoliberalism, climate change, and workplace disasters.
In the US and UK, conservative politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher kick-started neoliberalism. In Australia, however, it began in the 1980s with a fateful Accord introduced by Labor prime minister Bob Hawke and supported by Australia’s trade union leadership.
We need to see the state and capitalist production as aspects of the same set of social relations.