The annual Rich List: 200 ugly faces of Australian capitalism
While most of us stress about soaring rents and energy bills, petrol back over $2 a litre and the lack of bulk-billing doctors, spare a thought for the filthy rich. The latest annual “Rich List” published by the Australian Financial Review, featuring the country’s 200 wealthiest citizens, gives us some idea of their preoccupations.
Headlines include “How to buy an island” and “Investing in Lamborghinis”. The fashion pages feature a Chanel cotton and wool tweed skirt priced at $23,220, a Tom Ford wool suit from Harrolds at $6,590 and a Bulgari Serpenti diamond, onyx and rose gold necklace costing $111,000. The matching ring is a snip at $25,100.
Fawning profiles of the ludicrously rich jostle for space with a dozen pages of ads for luxury watches, a dozen more for luxury travel and more for luxury cars, luxury jewellery, luxury private jets. We’re treated to glossy spreads featuring the Point Piper harbourside mansion of property tycoon Richard Magid, and “crypto king” Fred Schebesta’s cliff-top home in Coogee—a castle-like structure featuring a swimming pool as a moat.
But none of this quite gets to the real obscenity of the Rich List.
This year’s list is historic: it’s 40 years since this annual celebration of sickening wealth was first assembled. And as the AFR documents, for the super-rich, the four decades of the neoliberal era have been champagne years (or, more accurately, champagne-caviar-private-jet-and-private-island-just-to-start-with years).
For us mere mortals, the Reserve Bank’s inflation calculator tells us that a basket of goods and services worth $100 in 1983 would cost $360 today. So, multiply your 1983 money by 3.6 and you’ve got the equivalent purchasing power today.
The average wealth of the 100 people on the rich list back in 1983 was $32 million. The average wealth of the richest 100 today is, not 3.6 times greater than that, but 145 times greater, at $4.6 billion each. And this is only the average—many have done much better. Property tycoon Harry Triguboff, one of ten people to feature in every one of the 40 Rich Lists, was worth a mere $23 million back in 1983. Today he owns more than 1,000 times that: $23.8 billion.
The spiralling wealth of the super-rich during this period is no accident. The deregulation of every market including the labour market; the cooption of most of the union movement’s leaders and the repression of the rest; the privatisations and outsourcings and imposition of “user pays”—in other words, the neoliberal revolution, introduced to Australia by the Hawke/Keating Labor government first elected in 1983 and continued by every government since—was always going to increase the wealth and power of the richest, regardless of the cost to the rest of us. It’s not a mistake, it’s a design feature.
But this doesn’t quite get to the heart of the matter.
There’s the sheer waste of it. What could we do with the wealth piling up in mansions from Point Piper to Toorak to Peppermint Grove?
At least a million poor and working-class households struggle to keep an internet connection. Providing the million poorest households with free internet has been costed by the Greens at $800 million per year over the next decade. This would be chump change for the 23 Rich Listers in the tech industries, who have a combined wealth of $91 billion.
On any given day, an extraordinary 300,000 people in Australia rely on food assistance, according to the charity Food Bank. Around 2 million households—20 percent of all households in the country—have experienced severe food insecurity in the past year.
According to this year’s pre-budget submission from the three main food charities, $45 million per year would put their operations on a sustainable footing (mainly to provide the infrastructure to stop food from going to landfill and give it to hungry people instead). Australia’s wealthiest person, Gina Rinehart, increased her fortune by more than this amount every week in the past year—raising her wealth by $3.4 billion to $37.4 billion.
We’re in the middle of a housing crisis. Homelessness is spiralling, maybe almost as quickly as the wealth of the richest. What would it cost to end homelessness? According to one estimate from non-profit Pro Bono Australia in March this year, to cover the gap between what rental properties cost and what people can afford would cost $17 billion over 30 years.
More chump change. The combined wealth of the 49 Rich Listers who made their money from property is $115 billion.
If we wanted to include the cost of building the new properties required to end homelessness, and not just cover the difference in rent, the Pro Bono study says this would lift the cost to $127 billion. In other words, we’d get close to ending homelessness with just the wealth piled up by the property tycoons of the nation.
We could continue this list endlessly, of urgent human needs that could be met with the privately held wealth of Australia’s richest. The $100 billion needed for a new renewable energy grid could be easily met by the $143 billion in personal wealth held by the 22 Rich Listers who made their money from mining.
We could expand the picture to include the enormous, unelected political power of the super-rich. We get a glimpse of this in an article describing Andrew Forrest (no. 2 on the Rich List at $33 billion) in high-vis alongside Gina Rinehart wearing her pearls at a Perth rally against former Labor PM Kevin Rudd’s proposed resources super-profits tax. Of course, it wasn’t their presence at a rally but the unelected power of their capital that killed the tax—and ended Rudd’s first term as prime minister.
But even this gets to only part of the picture.
Obscene as it is, the wealth of the richest individuals is only a fraction of the wealth owned or controlled by the capitalist class in this country. The top 200 companies on the Australian Securities Exchange have a market capitalisation of more than $2 trillion. And you can add endless private trusts, held onshore or offshore, to this amount.
The other crucial missing part of the picture is the obvious one, barely mentioned in the 120 pages of the AFR Rich List: the workers who produce all this wealth. The ones who assemble, transport and operate the machinery at Gina Rinehart’s mines; who build and maintain the extraordinary global IT networks that the tech billionaires make their money from; who lay every stone of every Point Piper mansion.
I’ve only ever met one of the Rich 200. This was an encounter a couple of months ago with Sam Tarascio Senior, who treats the much-loved Preston Market in Melbourne’s north as his little toy, to be bulldozed in the name of profit anytime he wants. It’s the exact same attitude that the rich and powerful take to our entire planet. During this exchange, Tarascio told me he’d “been in construction for 40 years”.
A younger comrade reminded me of a famous quote on this theme from the wonderful film Finally Got The News, which documents the struggles of Black workers in Detroit in the early 1970s—one of the high points of the upsurge of that era. Rather than leave the final word to Twiggy, Gina, Sam or any of the other filth celebrated in the Rich List, I think this quote sums them all up perfectly:
“There’s a cat who will stand up and say to you he’s in ‘mining’. And he sits in an office, man, on the 199th floor in some motherfucking building on Wall Street, and he’s in ‘mining’.
“And he has papers, certificates, which are embroidered and shit, you know, stocks, bonds, debentures, obligations, you know. He’s in ‘mining’. And he’s sitting up on Wall Street and his fingernails ain’t been dirty in his life ... A stock certificate is evidence of ownership in something that’s real.
“Ownership. He owns and controls and therefore receives, you know, the ‘benefit from’. That’s what they call profit. He fucking with stuff in Bolivia, he fucking with shit in Chile. He’s Kennecott. He’s Anaconda. He’s United Fruit. He’s in ‘mining’.
“He’s in what? He ain’t never in his life produced shit ... We see that this whole society, man, exists and rests upon workers.”
We don’t need the rich. That’s the crucial weakness they can never get around. It’s the source of our strength, our hope and our power.
They can keep their Bulgari jewellery and their flash suits and their vicious reactionary politics. We only want the Earth.
