If you found 2020 a tough year, you’re obviously not rich enough.
It’s been a good pandemic for Australia’s richest people, and The Weekend Australian (of all places) has now revealed just how good: the total wealth of the richest 250 Australians is up about 25%. That’s a jump from $377 billion to $470 billion.
This fact was buried deep on page 82 of the paper’s glossy magazine insert, The List. I’m sure you didn’t expect the Murdoch media to go all Thomas Piketty with their rich list, but here we are.
Rich lists in Australia’s media (the AFR has one too) are a 1980s hangover designed to draw in luxury advertisers in a celebration of wealth and the cult of the entrepreneur. Born in a gaudier time, they’re now a sharp reminder of the policy slogan popularised by US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: every billionaire is a policy failure.
They’re the failures of tax and regulatory policy made manifest in deepening economic inequality.
Gina Rinehart ($36.28 billion) and Andrew Forrest ($29.61 billion) — the top two on Australia’s list — both more than doubled their wealth off the back of digging up Australian resources and shipping them to China. Rinehart’s four children also make the cut-off at numbers 32 to 35 with US$2.73 billion each, along with three of the heirs of her father’s business partner Peter Wright.
The boost in Disney shares has entrenched seven members of the Murdoch clan in the US-level billionaire class, between Rupert and his six children. In the family’s own paper, only two count as Australians: eldest son Lachlan (number 21 with $3.62 billion) who’s visiting the colony this week, and eldest daughter Prudence McLeod (number 49 at $2.33 billion).
The 250 are not the wealthiest 1%, they’re the richest 0.001%. The collective $470 billion they own is equivalent to about a quarter of Australia’s total GDP, up from about one-fifth a year ago.
The List identifies 122 billionaires in Australian dollars. About 87 are billionaires in US dollars. And the increased money is spread around that group, with more than 60 of the 87 US-level billionaires wealthier than they were a year ago.
It’s hard — just about impossible — to lose money when you’re that rich. Even after his horror year with Crown, James Packer sits at number 18 with $4 billion — a lazy $250 million down on the previous year.
Others in the list who’ve dropped the old $100 million or so over the past year will almost certainly bounce back as property and other assets are revalued after the recession.
This is the inequality formula of French economist Thomas Picketty in action: because the return on wealth is greater than the growth of the economy, the take of the rich grows, leaving less for everyone else.
Few on the rich list seem to have made their money out of actually making things (although a handful of Australia’s own tech unicorn billionaires make the cut). It seems very Australian to see that the largest group (60 of the 250) make their wealth out of property ownership and speculation.
There’s another 52 who make their money out of investment and financial services (a sector that itself covers a multitude of policy failures). Only 13 make their money out of manufacturing.
The List is discreet about where much of the money really came from: rich parents. Even rich-listers like James Packer and Lachlan Murdoch seem, on the basis of the write-up in The List, to have got a go by having a go.
But the names make it impossible to hide. No wonder Clive Palmer (number 8 with $9.76 billion) campaigned so actively against the wholly imaginary but conceptually threatening estate tax in the 2019 election.
The List also highlights the tax-deductible philanthropic generosity of the wealthy (US writer Anand Giridharadas calls this “the elite charade of changing the world”), but their wealth has grown so quickly that it’s not actually costing them money. All but the most generous are wealthier than they were a few years ago.
Here’s an idea: maybe Australia would be better off taxing wealth rather than relying on the kindness of the billionaire rich-listers.
I would like to kill them all. These are the
Bastards who deny citizenship to a kid who was born here – because he was born with cerebral palsy AND MIGHT BE A BURDEN ON…. ON THE PUBLIC PURSE CONTINUALLY RORTED AND ROBBED FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE OBSCENELY RICH AND THEIR FLUNKIES POLITICIANS.
Couldn’t agree more.It’s very very sad and bloody disgusting.Bastards indeed.
Just reading The Scarlet Pimpernel… will we ever have a revolution to match? Off with their heads!
Australians are too apathetic for that. And too few actually care about the poor and weak amongst us.
Forget the revolution! I’d be happy if the unions stepped up and acted for their workers again instead of doing cozy deals with corporations. You know, like they used to in the 60s and 70s. And where’s labor been in the last few decades while all this inequity was developing? In bed with corporations just like the liberals.
Political donations have destroyed this country.
Not sure I’d kill anybody but drawing attention to the outrageous vulgarity of extreme wealth is needed now more than ever.
Power imbalance lies at the heart of our reckoning with personal abuse and economic power imbalance is abusive to all of society.
Where is the paparazzi?
Why aren’t they hounding these rich-listers at their front doors (or from the bow of their yachts) demanding to know how they sleep at night?
I get that they own the paparazzi to keep their cameras pointing the other way so maybe it’s time we all became citizen journalists and hound these Aussie-Global citizens out from under their sprawling estates and tax haven hideaways.
How do they sleep at night? As a Leunig cartoon memorably put it, between silken sheets beside a companion who would make you weep with desire…
Capitalism is a system of private ownership and distribution of goods that functions to grow capital for capitalists. The state’s job used to be to keep in place the laws needed to keep that functioning, sometimes that even meant building infrastructure or educating the workforce and keeping at least some of them healthy. These days it also steps in to protect or compensate when the market, including the labour market, treats capitalists roughly. More particular to Australia is the dependence of our capitalists to rely on growth via real estate, protected oligopolies, rent seeking, government contracts and the almost feudal level ability they have been given to pass wealth onto their children. Oh and being gifted (well at bargain prices anyway) the right to sell our resources to foreigners.
The growing inequality, like continued global warming, is very much what successful Coalition policy looks like.
“Where are the paparazzi?”
It seems that with very few exceptions indeed, the paparazzi has been purchased by like-thinkers of the Murdoch press. Our media has been taken over by a very few moguls.
The disturbing thing is many of them never seem to have enough. Therefore the mob eventually must demand limits are imposed through taxation, regulation or legislation. Their avarice is beyond reasoning and they are inclined to buy everyone off. Or maybe the first post is right; kill them all.
you will never get a wealth tax in Oz, the coalition driven by the Nats squattocracy would not countenance it and Labor won’t want to alienate tradies who are becoming wealthy..
The Rich will continue to get richer, while ScoMo and Co spread the lie of “having a go to get a go”
I reckon there’s a way… tradies weren’t given a billion bucks as a 21st birthday present which is why they became tradies in the first place.
Nothing wrong with wealth – have a billion, sure, just not a cent more. Every cent after a billion should go to a sovereign wealth fund.
We don’t need to leave it to government discretion either. We could channel it, like the Medicare levy, into a predefined common good that benefits everyone including and especially hard working tradies who like most of us got a pat on the back – or if we were ‘lucky’ a second hand car – for our 21st birthday.
A pat on the back for your 21st!!!!
Aye, you were lucky.
I used to dream of getting a pat on the back.
A billion $ is an unimaginable amount of money. No-one needs that much. The greedy might want it but I repeat – no-one needs that. The cut off point should be at a much lower level.
When growth on assets is growing more than GDP it is a no-brainer that Australia would be far better off taxing wealth. Perhaps then some relief on tax for working Australians could then be introduced and actually build the economy. The benefits would also flow into the health system (in crises) and social welfare programs, which also flow into the economy. Any government that can’t see that is not a government for the country, just a funding organisation for the rich and an enabler for the revolving door system to favour themselves.
So they got a 25% hike in wealth thanks to Jobkeeper. Phase 2 will be a tax cut so they will barely pay tax on any income derived, if they are unlucky enough not to have their assets tucked away safely in the Caymans.
And #ScottyFromMarketing’s response to this disgusting inequity is that he ‘does not engage in the politics of envy’. One wonders when the ‘politics of social and wealth equity’ become relevant. Is it when the top 10% own 90% of the wealth?
On this, Piketty has proven beyond all reasonable doubt that the only effective way to reverse increasing inequity is an annual tax on wealth; ie not something half-arsed and avoidable like the dreaded death tax. Yet the electorate, almost all victims of increasing inequity are so easily convinced that even a death tax is terrifying. Never underestimate the stupidity of the electorate.