I wonder if in 10 year’s time we will look back to 2016-2017 and wonder what all the fuss was about or if we will see this as a pivotal point in history? There are a number of trends that I find worrying and engender in me feelings of pessimism.

The first is burgeoning global inequity. A number of writers argue that market fundamentalism is growing and there do not appear to be any checks on its growth.

Managers, CEOs and the like take an increasingly larger share of organisational profits and workers have less and less choices.

Thomas Piketty talks about the increasing deliberate attacks on trade unions around the western world accompanied by increasing benefits for the wealthy to the point where, he argues, vested interests can buy governments.

John Menadue points out that while we had a Royal Commission in Australia investigating alleged trade union corruption, we did not have the same investigation into banking.

We see this happening even in the higher education sector. For example, in December last year, Murdoch University management applied to the Fair Work Commission to end the enterprise agreement that protects its employees. This is something that has never before happened in the university sector and means, if successful, conditions of employment for Murdoch employees would be regulated by the safety-net modern award, not the union-negotiated enterprise agreement.

Wages under this safety-net award are up to 39 per cent lower and, in a range of areas, conditions are substantially poorer: there are no rights to academic and intellectual freedom in the safety-net award, no employer provided parental leave, and no workload regulation.

Along with growing inequity is a worrying decline in personal liberty.

In previous columns I have talked about attacks on academic freedom and limitations imposed on free speech. Again, we see such an attempt at the end of last year in Australia where management of Murdoch University lodged a personal civil liability action in the Federal Court against union employees for public statements made in good faith about Murdoch management's bargaining position.

This case has yet to be heard and is positioned by the union as an attack on the ability of university employees to engage in civic debate.

Where is this leading us? A recent article in The Conversation by Warwick Smith and Mitchell Eddy suggests that Australia benefited from the Industrial Revolution because in the early years of settlement there was a large focus on equity and social mobility.

Convicts transported from Britain, if they survived and served their term, were able to gain access to land and build wealth. At the same time, the government created an education system that offered opportunities for as many children as possible so that by 1901 literacy rates were around 80 per cent.

Countries characterised by the opposite, poor social mobility and poor educational outcomes, did not fare so well in the Industrial Revolution and were left behind as the world economy reorganised and these countries have never caught up.

We are potentially moving into a new industrial revolution: one in which robotics, automation and artificial intelligence may create as big, or bigger changes in how we live and in the world economy.

Smith and Eddy suggest that Australia is poised to be left behind in this new industrial revolution because of our growing inequity, and the inability of our education system to shape citizens who are capable of critical thinking and willing to engage in civic debate.

The Governor of the Bank of England warned us last year: “Unchecked market fundamentalism can devour the social capital essential to the long term dynamism of capitalism itself.”

Chomsky wonders if civilisation can survive capitalism. The very characteristics that our neoliberal society values may be the very characteristics that destroy Australia’s position in the world economy and relegate us to third world status. Who better to lead resistance than educators?