They say it takes money to make money, and Australia’s 2019 Rich List shows how accurate that cliche is.
Minimum-wage workers may be celebrating the Fair Work decision this week, but the wealthy have again left everyone else in their Bentleys’ dust.
While Australia’s lowest paid workers will see their pay packets grow 3 per cent from July 1, Australia’s richest increased their wealth by more than 20 per cent over the past year.
And it’s not a one-off. Australia’s well-to-do have consistently increased their wealth much faster than the rest of the nation.
Business Review Weekly started the Rich List back in 1983 with the top 100, but expanded it to 200 the next year.
Back in 1984, Australia’s 200 richest people had a combined wealth of $6.4 billion.
The Australian Financial Review has since taken over the list from the now-defunct BRW, and this year’s list reveals a combined wealth of $342 billion.
That is a staggering 53-fold increase in wealth for the top 200 in just 35 years.
In an article published earlier this month, Christopher Sheil and Frank Stilwell used OECD and ABS data to estimate that the Australia’s richest 10 per cent now hold more than 50 per cent of the nation’s wealth, a share that increased substantially over the four years to 2016.
Almost all of that increase went to the top 1 per cent, which increased their share of the nation’s wealth from 14.2 to 16.2 per cent.
In contrast, both the middle-class segments recorded a declining share of wealth — collectively, the majority of households between the 40th and 90th percentile own 47.1 per cent of the wealth, down from 49.1 per cent in 2012.
As for the poorest 40 per cent of households, they remain stuck with just 2.8 per cent of the nation’s wealth between them.
“Wealth inequality in Australia is evolving along two fault lines,” note Sheil and Stilwell.
“The bottom 40 per cent of Australian households have practically no share of the rising total.
“Meanwhile, the middle 50 per cent of households have a declining share relative to the top 10 per cent, and particularly relative to the top 1 per cent.”
And the AFR Rich List seems to confirm that everyone is falling behind relative to the top 0.001 per cent.
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