The question is not whether Australians are okay. The question is why a society organised around insecurity expects people to be okay.
For fifty years, Australian workers have been told the same lie in different language. When factories closed, they were told to retrain. When jobs went offshore, they were told to adapt. When housing became unaffordable, they were told to budget better. When casualisation became normal, they were told flexibility was freedom. Now artificial intelligence arrives, not as liberation from labour, but as another weapon in the hands of capital, and once again the working class is told to be resilient.
This is the central contradiction. Under capitalism, technology does not belong to humanity. It belongs to those who own the means of production. Artificial intelligence could shorten the working week, reduce useless labour, improve public services, and free people from the drudgery of repetitive administrative work. But in the hands of banks, insurers, logistics firms, media companies, universities, consultancies and government departments shaped by the same market logic, AI becomes a machine for labour discipline. It is used to cut jobs, intensify work, suppress wages, deskill professions, eliminate entry-level pathways, and transfer more wealth upward.
That is not a technological problem. It is a class problem.
The ruling class always presents its offensive as progress. Deindustrialisation was called modernisation. Offshoring was called efficiency. Casualisation was called flexibility. Wage suppression was called fighting inflation. The housing crisis was called investment. Now mass automation is called innovation. The language changes, but the material relationship remains the same: capital moves, workers absorb the shock.
This is why the mental-health framing is so dishonest. The system produces anxiety, then sells awareness. It destroys secure work, then hands out wellness posters. It turns homes into speculative assets, then tells renters to practise mindfulness. It ships jobs offshore, imports labour under conditions designed to weaken collective bargaining, automates the remaining office work, and then asks, once a year, “R U OK?”
A Marxist-Leninist analysis has to begin from the material base. Mental distress is not simply an individual illness floating above society. It is shaped by the conditions of life: work, housing, income, family stability, social connection, debt, time, dignity, and power. When millions live one rent rise, one redundancy, one injury, one algorithmic restructuring, or one failed job application away from collapse, widespread anxiety is not a mystery. It is the predictable emotional life of a precarious class.
R U OK? Day is not the cause of this crisis. But it is part of the ideological management of it.
Its function is not merely to encourage care. It also narrows the field of acceptable questions. It asks whether the individual is coping. It does not ask why the workplace is organised in a way that makes people break. It asks whether workers are talking. It does not ask whether they have power. It encourages managers to perform concern while leaving untouched the economic relations that make workers disposable.
This is liberalism at its most polished: compassion without confrontation, awareness without class struggle, conversation without redistribution, kindness without power.
The corporate sponsor loves this model because it costs almost nothing. A yellow cupcake is cheaper than permanent employment. A morning tea is cheaper than a wage rise. A poster is cheaper than reducing workloads. A hashtag is cheaper than stopping redundancies. The employer can appear humane while continuing to do exactly what capital demands: reduce labour costs, maximise productivity, protect profit, and discipline the workforce.
The immigration debate serves a similar ideological function. Workers are encouraged to blame other workers. Australian-born workers are told migrants are the threat. Migrant workers are brought in under insecure conditions and made vulnerable to exploitation. Both groups are then forced into competition for jobs, rentals, services and wages, while the employer class and property-owning class escape scrutiny.
This is not accidental. It is the oldest trick in capitalist politics: horizontal anger to prevent vertical anger.
The issue is not migrant workers. The issue is the class that uses migration policy, labour hire, offshoring, automation, anti-union laws, housing speculation and debt to discipline the entire working class. The Australian worker and the migrant worker have the same enemy when wages are suppressed, rents rise, jobs disappear, and every part of life is subordinated to profit.
The political parties will not seriously confront this because they are managers of the same system. Labor and the Coalition differ in language, tempo and social base, but both accept the rule of capital. Both accept the market as the organising principle of society. Both accept housing as an asset class. Both accept corporate power over production. Both accept that workers must be flexible while capital must be free. Both accept the logic that technology belongs first to owners, not to the people.
That is why the crisis cannot be solved by awareness campaigns or better messaging. The issue is power.
If AI increases productivity, then the working class should receive the benefit through shorter hours, higher wages, stronger public services and guaranteed employment protections. If technology makes certain labour unnecessary, then society should reduce necessary labour for everyone, not throw sections of the population into poverty. If companies use automation developed through publicly funded research, public infrastructure and collective human knowledge, then the gains should be socialised, not privatised.
The demand should not be “manage the transition” while workers are sacrificed again. The demand should be worker control over the transition.
No AI-driven redundancy without union approval. No public subsidies for firms that offshore jobs. No automation windfalls without taxation and redistribution. No corporate sponsorship of mental-health campaigns while companies casualise, automate and sack workers. No housing policy that treats shelter as a casino chip. No labour system that pits local and migrant workers against each other. No wellness theatre in workplaces where the basic conditions of life are being stripped away.
The working class does not need more lectures about resilience. It needs power.
It needs unions willing to organise around AI, housing, casualisation and offshoring as one connected class struggle. It needs political education that names capitalism, not just “cost of living pressures.” It needs public ownership in strategic industries. It needs industrial policy that rebuilds productive capacity. It needs housing treated as a social right. It needs migrant and local workers organised together against the employers who exploit both. It needs a shorter working week without loss of pay. It needs democratic control over technology.
Above all, it needs to reject the lie that this is natural.
There is nothing natural about a society where homes sit empty while workers sleep in cars. There is nothing natural about billion-dollar companies cutting staff while sponsoring mental-health campaigns. There is nothing natural about young people being trained for professions whose entry-level jobs are then automated. There is nothing natural about a worker being told to talk about their feelings while the economic foundation of their life is removed beneath them.
These are not accidents. They are policy choices. They are class choices. They are the consequences of a society built to protect profit before people.
So yes, ask people if they are okay. But do not stop there. Ask why they are exhausted. Ask why their rent consumes their wage. Ask why their job is insecure. Ask why their workplace is understaffed. Ask why the company has money for consultants and sponsorships but not for permanent jobs. Ask why technology that should liberate people is being used to discard them. Ask why the political class discusses migration endlessly but rarely names offshoring, profit, property speculation, union-busting or corporate power.
The real question is not “R U OK?”
The real question is: who made us live like this, who profits from it, and what are we prepared to organise to take back?
The Red Gum 