BRW Rich 200: 'perseverance' or parasites?
There are a record 49 billionaires in Australia, 10 more than last year according to Business Review Weekly’s annual 200 Rich list. These sponges hold a collective fortune of about $126 billion.
The objects
The first thing noticeable when reading the magazine is the advertisements. There are three for private jets. There also is one for the Maserati Ghibli sports car. The watches are evidence of the old adage “time is money”: Hublot, IWC Schaffhausen and Breitling.
The latter is recommended by actor/director John Travolta. “Welcome to my world”, reads the ad. And there is John with the watch. And another jet, the X-15, which for almost 50 years has held the speed record (more than 7,000km/h) for a piloted aircraft.
It is unclear which is more expensive. There are no prices listed, presumably because if price were an obstacle, then you wouldn’t need to know it. A quick internet search suggests you can obtain a Hublot for anything between $14,000 and $500,000.
Rolex, a household name, also features. This must be for the lesser-moneyed punters who want to be sure that they don’t accidentally buy the Port of Hamburg rather than a timepiece.
It’s like perusing a crime scene. The products themselves aren’t wrong or immoral. Indeed, they are among the most elegant creations of human labour; monuments to the feats of design, technology and craftsmanship that modern industry has made possible.
The criminality lies in their social character. They are products of centuries of collective intellectual advance and thousands of hours of social labour performed today by workers and engineers across the globe. Yet only an exclusive few who have contributed almost nothing to the process of their creation can obtain them. If you are searching for a better illustration of the economics of parasitism, you will need to look to feudal societies to find it.
It is a marked difference to the everyday newspaper catalogues marketing goods to the labouring classes. In these, value for money is signified by a reduction of the regular price – the bargain, the saving. After creating the world’s commodities, workers have to scrimp to be in a position to use and consume them. And then, the “special” is often of the poorest quality, at least in comparison to BRW’s items.
By contrast, the rich don’t need discounts. In fact, they usually don’t want them. They want the ostentatious displays of wealth to be as exclusive as possible; a guarantee that there was never a saving to be had.
The rich
The billionaires on the list at times are more familiar than the products advertised in the magazine.
Gina Rinehart, number one on the list, needs no introduction. She spent the better part of the last year fighting two of her children over the family fortune. “I feel parents everywhere cringe at this scene,” she said via a spokesperson last November, “watching extremely privileged children suing to get even more money unearned by them”.
Yes, Gina Rinehart, daughter of Lang Hancock and inheritor of his fortune, believes herself to be the antithesis of the privileged undeserving child. She worked hard for the money, all $14.02 billion of it. “But if the fight with [the children] goes the wrong way she could fall out of the billionaire ranks altogether”, BRW warns.
It truly would make for a heart-wrenching story: “Gina speaks: The children left me only with several hundred million and the government refused me dollar a day African labourers for the mines. Yet, against all odds, I turned adversity into poetry.”
More than one-quarter of the list has made all or part of their fortune through the bubbling property market. Harry Triguboff, head of the Meriton Apartments property empire and third on the list, has an estimated $10.23 billion fortune. “As well as selling apartments,” BRW says, “Triguboff holds more than 4,000 units”. Lesser-known are Bob Ell, another property mogul and 31 on the list, who “now controls more than 15,000 housing lots in Queensland and NSW” and Tony Perich and family (worth $1.16 billion and number 40), who control “more than 12,500 housing lots”.
These entries in the Rich 200 feel particularly obscene, given the degradation of public housing and the mortgage and rental stress felt by millions due to speculators bidding up the price of residential property.
How on earth can it be a marker of success that desperately-needed resources such as housing stock can be concentrated in this way, while the number of homeless is more than 100,000? If you assume that on average each unit can fit two people, Triguboff’s holding of apartments alone could house about 8 percent of the country’s total homeless population.
Equality
BRW of course lauds these richest of the rich. It quotes favourably Patrick Grove, who this year makes his first appearance in the Rich 200: “The key common trait among those that make it is not where they are from, or how much money they have or don’t have. The key common trait is perseverance. That innate ability to keep going when the end seems near”.
It’s a cute story: give everyone equality of opportunity and the cream will rise to the top. Hard work and biological or at least psychological superiority are the only things that matter, they say. The implication is that those on the bottom of the pile are lazy or inferior, and generally both. Calls for wealth redistribution are actually regressive. Equality of outcome is motivated only by poor people’s envy of and want to cut down the most productive in society. And we all know how petty and destructive envy is.
This is all rubbish. First, none of the necessary labour performed throughout society is done by the people on this list. They don’t plough fields, they don’t dig in the mines, they don’t sweat building houses, they don’t transport goods, they don’t construct or maintain the electricity and telecommunications grids etc. Perhaps some of them did in the past, but no longer.
Second, the unequal distribution of society’s productive resources means that the rich, both those born into it and those who climbed their way into it, reap the rewards of the work of others. Their entrepreneurship is nothing but the exploitation of labour.
Finally, the “envy narrative” is a ruse to make the working class defensive about demanding more.
Economic equality certainly would involve stripping the riches from the privileged few. After all, their club is a hive of petty justifications for unfettered accumulation in the face of mass poverty. But the demand for equality actually grew out of a positive vision: recognition that human beings are born equal and only become unequal as a result of social divisions, and that universal human fulfilment is possible in a world of plenty.
The aspiration to equality on this basis predates the colonisation of Australia. It is striking that in the 21st century we are not advancing toward it, but seem in constant retreat from it. That’s what the BRW Rich 200 celebrates.
