More than 3.7 million people currently live in poverty in Australia. That’s more than 13 percent of everyone that lives in the fifteenth richest nation on earth. Meanwhile the richest 200 households have increased their share of national wealth from 8 percent to 25 percent of Australia’s GDP.

The crisis of inequality in Australia is the result of a deliberate political project to transfer wealth from everyday people to the ultra-rich.

For decades, the laws regulating Australia’s economy have been rewritten to create a system where democracy is subordinate to ultra-rich plutocrats.

Last year, Joseph Stiglitz warned that that the extreme concentration of wealth is a direct threat to our freedom and to democracy. This inequality is the primary driver of social conflict and far-right extremism.

The facts expose the reality of Australia’s rigged economy. Billionaires increased their wealth by almost $600,000 each and every day on average over 2025. This amounts to another $10.5 billion of unearned wealth while half of Australians earn less than $80,000 per year and 3 million people earn the minimum wage or less.

The architects of this system create and perpetuate the myth that wealth is the reward for hard work.

There are many reasons that the economic system is rigged and one of the main ones is our tax system, which taxes work much higher than idle wealth.

Between 1990 and 2023, 90 percent of the increase in Australian household net worth came purely from passive capital gains, not from active saving out of income — almost all of this has benefited the richest people in the richest suburbs. This is a rentier economy. The system punishes the tradie and the nurse while subsidising the ultra-rich speculator.

Let’s be clear, billionaires and the ultra-rich do not “work hard” for their massive fortunes. The vast majority of wealth increases comes from capital gains, not through wages from work. In Australia especially, most billionaires get their wealth from mineral extraction — iron ore and nickel mined by other people and through generations of public investments in roads, railroads and ports.

In Australia, wages are taxed at an average of 24 percent, while capital gains are taxed at an irrelevant 1.9 percent.

This is not just abstract economics; the consequences are real.

The amount that the Commonwealth gives to the ultra-rich landlord class in tax breaks is more than we spend on social housing, homelessness and rent assistance combined. This form of austerity enforced by the state to protect the ultra-rich and the neoliberal system is one of the two pillars used to protect the rigged system (more here).

When the public demands wealth taxes, the ultra-rich and their allies on the mainstream media deploy scare campaigns. They threaten us with lies of capital flight and economic ruin.

These stories and threats are blackmail and political thuggery.

The truth is that billionaires rely on the societies they exploit. The ultra-rich billionaire oligarchs with exorbitant power in Australia depend on our national resources like iron ore for their wealth. They depend on our public infrastructure. They need educated and skilled workers. They rely on our legal systems.

The ultra-rich cannot simply pack this unearned wealth into a briefcase and leave. The factories, the houses, the minerals are fixed here.

The billionaires and their media allies also claim a wealth tax is too complex to administer, using the preposterous argument that their assets are impossible to value. This is a deeply unserious excuse.

We already force banks to report the interest they pay to ordinary citizens. We could easily require insurance companies to disclose the value of the assets the ultra wealthy insure, providing a simple proxy for their true net worth. The Commonwealth has intricate algorithms to monitor and track every dollar going to welfare recipients.

Valuing wealth is only “impossible” when the state deliberately chooses to pretend that it is too difficult.

A 2 percent annual tax on Australians with over $50 million in net wealth could raise billions each year for essential services, housing, health care and education. But the revenue is secondary.

The true purpose of a wealth tax is to break the power of a tiny elite that treats our government and our society like a personal piggy bank.

We must tax the ultra wealthy not only to fund our crumbling public services, but also to reclaim our democracy and our sovereignty.