The 2020s have been “a good decade for billionaires”, according to Oxfam’s annual report on global wealth inequality. It’s somewhat of an understatement. In the first half of the decade, the number of billionaires passed 3,000 for the first time. According to Forbes magazine, 3,028 “entrepreneurs, investors and heirs” (otherwise known as parasites) own a record US$16.1 trillion. In the past year alone, they increased their wealth by 16 percent.
As the Oxfam report makes clear, the billionaires aren’t content simply ruling over the economy—they almost completely control our political systems as well. Billionaires are estimated to be 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than ordinary citizens and spend substantial sums financing major parties, increasingly including far-right parties.
“Oligarchy” is a fitting term not only for Russian billionaires but also for the wealthy elite worldwide. As US Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis once said: “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both”. In other words, capitalism and democracy don’t mix.
The 12 richest billionaires now have the same wealth as the bottom half of humanity—4 billion people. That billionaires with more money than they could ever spend can cohabit the Earth with billions who struggle to afford food and shelter is the ultimate indictment of modern capitalism. These two facts are rarely mentioned in the same sentence, but they are actually two sides of capitalism’s inequality problem: wealth at the top has always come at the expense of those at the bottom.
For many years, defenders of the system could point to slowly rising living standards as evidence that so-called trickle-down economics was working. This trend has reversed over the past decade. The number of people experiencing food insecurity, for example, has risen by 42 percent, from 1.6 billion in 2015 to 2.4 billion in 2024. And 3.83 billion people were living below the poverty line in 2022.
Inequality is increasing in Australia as well. We have our very own class of billionaires who are just as ruthless as their better-known American counterparts, if a little less wealthy. According to Oxfam, Australian billionaires increased their wealth by an average of $600,000 per day in 2025; the richest 48 control as much wealth as the poorest 11 million Australians.
National Geographic claims that the largest parasite in the world is Western Australia’s giant Christmas tree, “whose greedy roots stab victims up to 110m away”. It appears they failed to consider another specimen from our western state: Gina Rinehart, whose net worth tops $38 billion.
Rinehart is a regular at US President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, and has used her considerable wealth to support far-right groups Advance Australia and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, who promote the idea that migrants, rather than Gina Rinehart and her rich list buddies, are to blame for society’s problems.
Number two on Australia’s rich list is Harry Trugiboff, the country’s largest landlord and property developer. Another recent Oxfam report found that the growth in his $29 billion hoard in the last year alone would be enough to fund the construction of 10,600 homes.
The rich in Australia, along with their paid mouthpieces, like to claim we live in the “lucky country”. But 3.7 million Australians, or one in seven people, now live in poverty—the highest rate in 25 years, and worse than the UK, France, Germany, Canada or New Zealand. Food insecurity was higher in Australia in 2022 than in the US and Europe. Homelessness has increased massively as rents surge, and our poverty-level welfare rates are well below those of most other wealthy countries. All of this has been overseen recently by the Labor Party, which claims to be creating a fairer Australia. What a load of rubbish.
Meanwhile, Melbourne’s Age reports a boom in the hiring of drivers, private chefs, gardeners, art curators, assistants and butlers by “high-net-worth Australians” to service their Toorak and Vaucluse mansions. The billionaires in Australia, helped by their servants in the Labor, Liberal and far-right parties, have simply had it too good for too long.
How did it come to this? Oxfam and most other critics of wealth inequality, including the Greens, attribute the problem to specific government policies. In response, they propose a range of reforms such as wealth taxes and changes to the capital gains tax and negative gearing. These would be welcome—Oxfam found that a 5 percent wealth tax on Australia’s billionaires last year would have raised $17.4 billion, “enough to deliver cheap childcare for all families, extend energy bill relief for another two years, and increase the humanitarian budget almost seven times over”.
But such reforms don’t get to the heart of the problem, because they treat inequality as an aberration that can be managed. Under capitalism, inequality is baked in. A minority of capitalists own all the companies, mines, factories and shops, and they get all the profits from them, while the rest of us own nothing and have to work for the capitalists for a wage.
Billionaire wealth comes, ultimately, not from tax avoidance, but from exploitation—robbing the mass of the population of the value they produce. If you want to know what that looks like, you only need to know the figure “93 percent”. That’s the proportion of wealth produced in Australia between 2008 and 2019 that went directly into the pockets of the top tenth of wealthiest households, according to the Australia Institute, a think tank. Think of all the shelves stacked, the iron ore dug up, the code written, the food produced—all the value produced by millions of workers, only for the parasites at the top to take 93 percent of it. It’s no wonder inequality is increasing.
When we have a system that is so radically unequal and undemocratic, the only real solution is a radical one. Nothing short of ending capitalism will ever end the blight of inequality and poverty.
