The Empty Toolbox

The tools to build a better world have been hidden from you. Here's where to find them.

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The Empty Toolbox

For years, I felt like I was trying to build a life with an empty toolbox. I knew what I wanted to construct—a stable life, a sense of purpose, a bit of security for my family—but the world kept telling me the tools were scarce and the materials were all spoken for. The economy was a house I wasn’t allowed to enter; I was just supposed to stand outside and hope for scraps.

I remember the gut-punch of it all. The Centrelink queues. The endless job applications that went into a black hole. The quiet, creeping shame that comes from being told your inability to find decent work is a personal failing, a lack of grit. And reinforcing it all was the national story, the one every politician and newsreader repeated like a prayer: the government, like a household, simply “couldn’t afford” to create real opportunities. We all had to tighten our belts.

I looked at my empty hands, and I believed them. What other choice was there? The story was everywhere. It felt as real as the eviction notices and the rising cost of groceries.

The discovery of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) wasn’t just an intellectual exercise for me; it was like finding a hidden door in the back of a locked-up, derelict shed. I pushed it open and found a fully stocked workshop, gleaming with tools I’d been told didn’t exist.

The central revelation—the master key that unlocked it all—was this: the Australian government is not like a household.

A household has to earn or borrow Australian dollars before it can spend them. It’s a currency user. However, the federal government, through its Treasury and the Reserve Bank, is the currency issuer. It can’t run out of the dollars it creates any more than a cricket umpire can run out of runs to award a batter. The constraint on its spending isn’t a lack of money; it’s the availability of real resources—the people, skills, raw materials, and machinery available to be purchased with that money.

That realisation changed everything. It felt like someone had finally turned the lights on.

The Tools They Hide from You

Suddenly, the toolbox wasn’t empty anymore. It was overflowing. The tools to build a better, more equitable society were right there, just locked away by that false, disempowering narrative of scarcity.

What’s in this workshop?

• A Federal Job Guarantee. Not welfare, not make-work, but a public option for a real, living-wage job for anyone who wants one but can’t find one in the private sector. It would create a powerful automatic stabiliser, ending involuntary unemployment for good and establishing a genuine wage floor that the private sector would have to compete with. We’re told we “can’t afford” it, but the real cost is the one we’re already paying: the wasted human potential, the poverty, and the social decay that comes from mass unemployment and underemployment. The reality is, when resources are idle, there are free lunches everywhere.

• Public Investment for Public Purpose. We could fully fund the green energy transition, build millions of social and affordable homes, and properly staff our healthcare and aged care systems. The question isn’t “Where will the money come from?” The government can and does create money by spending it into existence. The real, operational question is: “Do we have the available labour, skills, and materials to do the work without causing an inflationary problem?” That’s the actual economic debate, not the phony one about the government’s bank balance.

• Real Price Stability. For decades, the only tool we’ve been offered to fight inflation is the blunt hammer of interest rate hikes—a tool that deliberately creates unemployment and crushes households with mortgages to discipline the economy. But a currency-issuing government has a whole suite of precision instruments. It can use targeted fiscal policy, buffer stocks of essential goods, and strategic regulation to address supply-side bottlenecks—the actual source of much of our recent inflation—without wrecking people’s lives.

Who Locked the Door?

Why were these tools hidden? Because the myth of scarcity is incredibly useful for the powerful.

If you believe the government is like a household, you’ll accept austerity. You’ll believe that public services must be cut to “balance the budget.” You’ll accept that unemployment is a natural, inevitable tragedy rather than a political choice. You’ll see workers asking for a pay rise as a threat to the national finances. This narrative disciplines the population into accepting a smaller public sphere and a larger share of economic output for capital, as we saw with the recent ‘Critical Minerals’ plan.

The powerful don’t want you to know that these tools exist. They don’t want you to ask why we choose to have unemployed people and an urgent need for aged care workers, instead of funding the latter to solve the former. They want you to keep your eyes on the government’s meaningless deficit figure, not on the very real deficits in our housing, healthcare, and climate action.

My journey from feeling like a pariah to becoming an advocate was born from this discovery. It’s a simple mission, really: to show people the workshop, explain how the tools work, and put them in their hands. The world they told us was impossible is just waiting for us to build it.

P.S. If you’re finding this useful, I’m putting the final touches on a new set of eBooks—the MMT “Starter Pack” and Policy Guide—that go even deeper. They’re designed to take you from beginner to expert. Launching this November.

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