In the thick of a cost of living crisis, a “profitless boom”, stagnant wages, and an impending global recession, some of Australia’s richest men think life could soon become “hell” if interest rates rise as they’re expected to.

The call was made by Chris Richardson, an economist and partner at the Big Four consulting firm Deloitte, at the Australian Financial Review’s Banking Summit this week. At the conference, a throng of Australia’s well to-do reptilian executives gathered to proselytize on the risks faced by banks in today’s economy, as Australians gear up for what are expected to be some of the most violent economic conditions seen in modern times. 

The thesis goes: If interest rates rise above 3 percent, as is the running bet made by financial markets, banks could earn themselves much-unwanted political attention after they’re forced to twist the knife in the back of borrowers who have taken out colossal loans at extremely low rates over the last few years. 

“If that happens, most models would suggest you’d lose 15 percent to 20 percent out of housing prices in Australia—there goes $2 trillion,” Richardson said. “Markets are saying your life is about to be hell.”

Others at the event urged caution, saying the scenario is more worst case than “inevitable”. 

One of them was Anna Bligh, the chief executive of Australia’s peak banking body (which is often described as a “joke” so “half-hearted” it may as well not bother), who essentially said such a thing would indeed suck because banks have worked so hard to reclaim the trust of their customers after a recent royal commission found that each of them were little more than rogue vehicles of arrant greed.

“I think [banks’] ability to hang on to [newly positive community perceptions] is going to very much depend on how they deal with those individuals, those families and those businesses who will find the next 12 to 18 months very, very stressful,” she said.

Australian households, on average, carry some of the heaviest debt burdens in the world. Earlier this month, experts flocked to warn just how serious an impact ongoing interest rate rises would have on them. One batch of analysis suggested that close to 1 million more households could find themselves in “serious” financial stress if that 3 percent rate hike pans out as it’s expected to.

Others said Australia’s housing-induced debt situation is alarming enough as it is. 

One of them is Chris Martin, a senior research fellow at the University of New South Wales’s City Futures Research Centre. In early May, he pointed to data from the Bank of International Settlements, which showed credit taken out by Australian households amounts to about 120 percent of annual GDP (a lot). 

“We have a big potential problem courtesy of the way we have run our housing system, for not just the last decade but for the last at least three decades,” Martin told the Guardian, referring to policies that encouraged people to take on more debt, particularly to purchase investment properties.

“Our housing system is only weakly governed by real housing policy objectives, that is, ensuring everyone can own or rent a decent affordable home. Instead, it is governed by objectives of wealth creation, and sometimes by concerns about financial system stability.”

By comparison, Australia’s household debt load is second only to the ratio seen in Switzerland, which is 130 percent of GDP, and soars well above the 75 percent average seen across other advanced economies.

Earlier this month, Australia’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of Australia, lifted the cash rate—for the first time since 2010—to 0.35 percent. 

Through most of the pandemic, former prime minister Scott Morrison postured nauseatingly about how lucky Australians were to have found themselves shielded from the inflationary pressures—and Ukraine invasion-induced energy price hike—faced by much of the rest of the world. 

But inflation eventually rose, without the wage increase to match, and now Australians are being warned to brace themselves for a tough shift. On Tuesday, even the banking regulator issued a warning. 

“The next few years will be far from plain sailing,” said Wayne Byres, chair of the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority. “Housing loans have been, as they say, as safe as houses. That may not be the pattern in the future”.

The impacts will likely be immeasurable, and Australia’s newly-elected Labor government will be left holding the bag.

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Read more from VICE Australia.

Australians like to think of Medicare as a bulletproof on-ramp to world-leading medical treatment for anyone, regardless of their income, or where they’re from. And the nation’s leaders like to think of it as the world’s best. But for years, according to research from the Grattan Institute, it has been making poor people sicker and those living with chronic illness poor.

The Grattan Institute, one of a small number of Australian think-tanks, found in a new report that Australians are currently spending about $7 billion a year out of their own pockets on out-of-hospital medical services and medications. This is the case even if they’re listed on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), which was established to shield patients of vulnerable backgrounds from the expense of costly treatments. 

As a result of Medicare’s coverage holes, nearly half a million Australians missed out on seeing a specialist because of cost, and more than half a million either put off or skipped out on getting a prescription filled altogether during the 2020-21 financial year.

The report’s author, health economist Stephen Duckett, suggested on Monday that all Australian taxpayers will wear the cost, as those who can’t afford the care they need only get sicker. 

Of course, when the sick get sicker, they only place more strain on a public health system that’s already letting them down.

“Bulk-billing rates are too low and out-of-pocket payments are too high for some services. It’s a catch-22: the people who need the most healthcare – the poor and the chronically ill – miss out on care the most,” Duckett said. 

“That’s bad for those people, but it’s also bad for taxpayers, because when people skip or defer recommended treatment they often get sicker and end up in hospital,” they said. 

The cause: Treatment waiting periods are so long that patients have no choice but to turn to private treatment providers, who are charging exorbitant fees way above Medicare’s scheduled rates. In practice, all of this means that living with a chronic health condition in Australia can cost a fortune. 

For those living with obstructive pulmonary disease and chronic kidney disease, for example, the out-of-pocket expense can set a patient back as much as $5,600 a year. 

And more than half of the nation’s cancer patients end up about $5,000 out of pocket each year – for both hospital and non-hospital care. 

When compared to other nations, out-of-pocket expenses in Australia are still quite low. In the US, cancer is a disease survived only by those who can afford to. For those without $150,000 a year to shell out on out-of-pocket treatment expenses, a cancer diagnosis might as well be a death sentence.

But Australian legislators have long held themselves to a higher standard. Or, at least they’ve promised one. 

What’s more is that people living with these chronic health conditions are less likely to have all of their services bulk-billed. Australia’s much-lauded public healthcare system only manages to fully serve 30 percent of people living with chronic conditions like these.

According to analysis of 2019 data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, half a million Australians spent about $450 on specialist services alone. Those who couldn’t afford to explore the option were, in some cases, left to wait up to two years for treatment in the public system. 

It’s a wide-reaching schism the Morrison government has been quick to deny. In one recent report, federal Health Minister, Greg Hunt, said the Coalition’s commitment to Medicare is “rock solid”, and the number of bulk-billed services across the public health system was, in fact, increasing.

Without surprise, Labor’s opposition health spokesman, Mark Butler, said the public wait times and rising fees have only worsened under the Morrison government, without addressing how, or even if, an Albanese would do any better. Opposition leader Anthony Albanese has yet to announce a single health policy ahead of May’s federal election. 

Until either party does, the Grattan Institute has called for state governments to expand outpatient services to reduce wait times so that fewer patients are put in a position where they need to seek private treatment, and for the federal government to bulk bill the instances when they do. 

To cut pharmaceutical costs, Duckett also suggested the government do away with charging fees altogether for services like scans and blood tests. Combined, their recommendations are estimated to save Australians about $1 billion every year – and countless lives. 

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Read more from VICE Australia.

'It's Extremely Hard': Inside Australia's TikTok Economy

In 2018, Caleb Finn created a TikTok account to join his friends in vying for a shot at virality. Some four years later, it’s a schtick that rakes in a six-figure annual income, supporting him, his partner, Lil Soup, and their newborn boy.

With 14.8 million followers, and a running average of about 10 million views per video, Finn is a creator that most would agree has the better end of the deal. Even still, he said, it’s a job like any other, and requires a lot more effort than the average person might assume, based on whatever they may project onto his “caricature”. It’s more than vaporwave and Fiji Water.

“I think a lot of people don't understand how many times you have to recreate yourself and refresh your content and keep things interesting on a daily basis,” Finn told VICE. “And I think, like, talking to other creators at ‘cons, and people asking me, like, ‘What's the hardest part?’ It's creating daily content, one hundred percent. It's got to be like, consistent, good quality content every day for years.”

“It's extremely hard,” he said.

Finn is a bit of an anomaly, though. Australia’s TikTok economy has grown extremely bloated over the last 12 months, and is on track to soon become a multi-billion dollar industry. Once you square that up with the market’s vast creator talent pool, the likelihood of earning a livable income withers away exponentially. Each creator is as committed to churning out an endless stream of content for even the faintest sliver of success as the next – all in the face of an incomprehensible algorithm. The odds are stacked.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t money to be made.

According to a new report from marketing platform, Hootsuite, and the creative agency, We Are Social, about $3.6 billion was tipped into Australian social media advertising last year. That’s a jump of more than $547 million compared to the year before, and the cash is increasingly going to creators on TikTok.

It’s a trend that becomes less surprising when you consider the app was the third-most downloaded app in Australia through 2021, beaten out only by the Service NSW and Service Victoria apps, which were legislated prerequisites for moving through life with any sense of normalcy for residents of their respective states during the worst of the pandemic.

As a result, last year emerged as a bumper year for Australia’s top-earning creators. In Finn’s case, it saw him bag ad spending from Adobe, Sony, and countless other multinational corporations. He wouldn’t be drawn on exactly how much, though. For others, like creator Sari Ella Thaiday, COVID-19 lockdowns and the captivated eyeballs that came with them drove her account through an explosive stage of growth.

“There’s been times I’ve had to just turn off my comments altogether just to settle things.”

A six-figure earning that could support an entire household, however, is still a ways off both for her, as well as the vast majority of creators on the platform competing for a foothold in the Australian market. Thaiday told VICE that even though she’s started making money on TikTok, there’s no way to get a read on what she could earn from any given brand. Rates are, for the most part, heavily mystified.

Thaiday, in other words, occupies an extremely common position in the Australian creator economy: her audience thinks she’s far wealthier than she is, and for the most part doesn’t understand that TikTok isn’t her full-time job, even though she’d like it to be.

“I think it’s building towards being [full-time], but… I still need a job,” Thaiday told VICE. “I feel like the [income] is not as consistent, and each brand just has a different budget, so there’s no telling what you’ll get. It could just be anywhere from $500 to the thousands.”

It’s a sentiment that was shared by Finn, too. He said it’s the most misguided assumption most people make about their favourite personalities on TikTok, and others who might be watching the space from afar, thinking that it would only take meeting basic trend and aesthetic requirements – which are each in a constant state of flux – to sink their shot.

“I think that’s a huge misconception for people. It’s extremely hard to make money. If you aren’t brand-friendly, if you don’t have something that is easily marketable to people, like a type of content that’s marketable, it’s extremely hard to make money,” Finn said.

“There’s no telling what you’ll get. It could just be anywhere from $500 to the thousands.”

A lot of what drives that misconception, Finn said, was the amount of money they think is on the table by way of TikTok’s “gifts” and Creator Fund, which is said to pay users who have at least 10,000 followers and 100,000 views for their videos, every 30 days. TikTokers have broadly reported the payouts for videos, which are rarely based on views alone, to amount to mere pennies.

“I mean, they’ve got a pool of money, right. And it’s like, regardless of how many creators are in that pool, that amount of money stays the same. So, if you’re thinking that you’ll [try it], and rely on TikTok to create a fund to sustain yourself, you’ve got another thing coming.”

“It’s not something you can do and say it’s sustainable to do this full-time.”

Thaiday is still trying to figure out a way to scale her account as a business, while trying to manage her audience and encourage having healthier conversations about working as a creator. She said she will often cop flack for posting too much, even though “that’s what the job entails,” but will then be criticised by users on the platform for not taking time off to rest. The worst of it came when her hometown newspaper wrote up a quasi-profile on her.

“It was, y’know, ‘Up-and-coming content creators’ and stuff,” Thaiday said. “And because it’s such a regional, local place, the opinions weren’t that great, either. So, a lot of the comments under [the story] were like, ‘Oh, she’s just looking to get free stuff’, or, ‘She’s looking for this and she’s looking for that’,” she said. “‘Attention seeker’ – all that sort of stuff.”

“I didn’t really plan on doing this, it just kind of happened. It just kept growing and growing,” she said. “So, I don’t know. It is what it is. There’s kind of a negative stereotype around this whole type of job, because it’s also so new as well.”

On that same token, though, TikTok could be doing more to circumvent the venom its algorithm rewards, Thaiday said. That could include any number of improvements, like hardening the language in its safety guidelines, and enabling profiles to block others that might all be connected to the same person – a feature that’s available to Instagram users.

“You could just tell people to stay off social media, but that’s not really the reality,” she said.

“And it’s not really fair for them unless you actually get the platform itself to fix what they’re doing, because a lot of people are being attacked. There’s been times I’ve had to just turn off my comments altogether just to settle things. Even recently, I just deactivated [my account] at the beginning of the year to just chill out for a bit and then come back.”

Other creators have taken a more binary approach to the platform, implementing strategy and creative direction in the way that a regular creative agency would.

Among them are Sam, Jack and Isaac, who run the account @swag.on.the.beat. The trio told VICE that their account is more a “business”, similar to the way entertainers of all ilks – comedians, gamers, whoever else – used to approach YouTube. The fact they share the account, they said, also makes it easier to put space between them and their work, as well as their audience.

For the most part, their account was a happy accident that the three only started to take seriously once it started to show promise as a serious income stream.

“I think there has been gradual stages where we’ve posted videos and have then gone viral. For example, that RAT test video was recently viral and got about 11 million views,” Sam said. “And I think when we first realised we could sort of keep going, or develop into something more, was when we started posting more than just our ‘American-Australian’ videos. We started posting a few videos with, a dad character, or a lad character.”

“Then, about six months ago, that’s when we knew we should keep going and create something more.”

After that point, Jack said, the trio started thinking less in terms of what to make, content-wise, focusing on “bigger-picture” plans that could be folded into a broader business strategy. It’s a vastly different approach to those of Thaiday, and at face value, even Finn, whose businesses each osmosed their online personas, as opposed to approaching the platform with an explicit business strategy from the jump.

“I think it is definitely hard with social media, always looking at numbers. And that’s pretty much how we promote ourselves to companies,” Isaac said. “But I think, overall, we’d like to consider ourselves comedians, or be considered as comedians of the future, and hope that the quality of the videos we make, or the quality of the jokes in our videos, would outweigh the views.”

Sam, Jack and Isaac have come to TikTok with a perspective unlike most of their peers, but they will likely come out of it asking the same question: “How do we make money?”

They’re hoping the next six months will tell. Just like millions of others.