Dianna Edwards and Writing
  • About me
  • Short stories
    • Death in the Desert
    • Secrets
    • Airport Drama
    • Acacia
    • Two Chooks in December
    • A Darned Surprise
    • The Sunset Mermaid
    • Friend or Foe?
    • At Rainbow's End
    • Sisterly Love
    • Good Times to Come
    • Being Famous
    • Something Special for Dinner
    • Walter's Secret
    • The Visitor
  • Children's stories
    • The Red Silk Kite
    • The Singing Tree
    • Beatrice Barnfeather
    • Garth's bath
    • Little Dog Tambo
    • Flowers For a Special Day
  • Non Fiction
    • Letter to a Soldier
    • The Body
    • Autumn Saturday
    • A Year With Billy
    • Lunch
    • Harry's Story
    • 2007 bushfires
    • My Father's Kite
    • Death of a Chook
    • Gentle Heartache
    • Shopping with Sisters
    • When I am Old
    • Matilda
    • Fragments
  • Blog

BLOG

INEQUALITY - There's a huge gap!

13/5/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
I’m becoming sort of obsessed with inequality!
It’s the money thing.
An ordinary working ‘Joe Blow’ or ‘Josie Blow’ spends most – or all - of their income on the necessities of life – week after week. They pay their share of taxes and accept that that is the way society works.
Their more wealthy counterparts usually only spend a portion of their weekly earnings, as they are able to save some of it, even after buying more luxurious goods that our Joe and Josie cannot afford, but that’s okay. They pay their taxes as well.
 
Nowadays there are over a million millionaires in Australia, so being a millionaire is not uncommon. And we hope that they all spend well and also pay their taxes.

Then we have the VERY, VERY, EXTREMELY wealthy – the
billionaires.
There are a few.
According to, Forbes Billionaires List as of March 2019, (in $US), there are 2153 billionaires in the world.
 
Let’s think about it. Read this slowly…
If you had a billion dollars (that’s ONE billion dollars) and you had to spend it all on ‘ordinary things’ and not buy such a thing as a holiday island, you would have to spend $5000 a day for 500 years before you ran out of money. And, that’s just ONE billion.
It is very hard to even imagine.

Graeme Norton, who is NOT a billionaire, had this to say,(UK, 2017):
“You see people who are worth a billion and they’re still doing tax dodges and you think how can you be bothered?
These people who go to incredible lengths to dodge tax would be just as rich if they paid the tax - and would be living in a much nicer country.
One where people were looked after, where crime was less, where housing was better and people were better educated.
So the money you’ve saved on tax, you’re probably having to use to pay for barbed wire around your property. It seems totally wrong-headed.”

 
Here’s a list of Australia's 10 richest and how much they have:

Gina Rinehart, $21b,  Australian mining magnate and heiress. (Said to be the world’s richest woman).
Harry Triguboff, $9.2b,  Chinese-born Australian billionaire real estate developer. 
Vivek Chaand Sehgal, $6b,  Indian-born Australian billionaire businessman. 
Frank Lowy, $5.9b,  Australian-Israeli businessman. Chairman of 
Westfield Corporation‎.
Anthony Pratt, $5.5b,  Executive Chairman of Visy Industries and Pratt Industries in America.
Andrew Forrest, $4.4b,  former CEO (and current non-executive chairman) of Fortescue Metals Group (FMG), with interests in the mining industry and  cattle stations.
John Gandel, $4.1b,  Australian businessman, property developer and philanthropist, made his fortune in the development of commercial real estate.
James Packer, $4.1b,  Australian billionaire businessman and investor.
Mike Cannon-Brookes, $3.4b,  the co-founder and co-CEO of the software company Atlassian.
 & Scott Farquhar $3.4b,  co-founder and co-CEO of the software company Atlassian. 
Lindsay Fox, $3.4b,  founded the Australian logistics company Linfox., Australia's largest privately held logistics company.
 
THINK WHAT COULD BE DONE WITH ALL THOSE BILLIONS, MUCH OF WHICH ‘SITS AROUND’, DOING NOTHING. NOT MAKING THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE (AS IT COULD DO) BUT MOSTLY JUST ACCUMULATING.
 

I’m not accusing any of the above billionaires, but it is interesting to note that, there were 732 companies (many overseas based)  who paid no tax in Australia in the 2015-16 financial year. Collectively, their income was more than $500 billion. 

And of 321 companies on the list of Australian-owned private companies with an income of over $200m,
98 paid no tax.
 
 What a massive difference it would make to the country if we had no tax avoidance!
  
I feel I must repeat something I have quoted before, but it’s an important explanation to help us understand the hugeness of BILLIONS of $$$$ and the astounding awfulness of inequality.
 
 
Repeated:
From the book, “Battlers & Billionaires, The story of inequality in Australia”, written by Dr Andrew Leigh (an Australian politician and former professor of economics at the Australian National University). 

 READ THIS S-L-O-W-L-Y….. 
‘…imagine a ladder on which each rung represents a million dollars of wealth. Now imagine Australian population spread out along this ladder, with distance from the ground reflecting household wealth.
On this ladder, most of us are just a few centimetres off the ground. Half of all households are closer to the ground than they are to the first rung. The typical Australian household has a wealth of about half a million dollars, placing it halfway to the first rung. A household in the top 10 percent is one and a half rungs up, at about knee height.
A household in the top 1 percent is five rungs up, about neck level.
The mining billionaire Gina Rinehart is nearly ten kilometres off the ground’

Something to mull over?
 

Did you know that one billion* = 1,000,000,000. It is the number that follows 999,999,999 .
(ONE Trillion is a THOUSAND times that!)
*Incidentally, it is now accepted that a billion is a thousand million.
In British & Australian speak, a billion USED to be a million million. We might one day have to revert to the old version to describe the amount of money our richest people have, because we will run out of $$ vocabulary.

 
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Author notes

    I choose to comment on social issues and write creatively on a variety of subjects -  for a variety of audiences.

    Archives

    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    March 2012

    Categories

    All
    Childhood
    House
    Kindness
    On Death
    Social Comment
    Writing

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • About me
  • Short stories
    • Death in the Desert
    • Secrets
    • Airport Drama
    • Acacia
    • Two Chooks in December
    • A Darned Surprise
    • The Sunset Mermaid
    • Friend or Foe?
    • At Rainbow's End
    • Sisterly Love
    • Good Times to Come
    • Being Famous
    • Something Special for Dinner
    • Walter's Secret
    • The Visitor
  • Children's stories
    • The Red Silk Kite
    • The Singing Tree
    • Beatrice Barnfeather
    • Garth's bath
    • Little Dog Tambo
    • Flowers For a Special Day
  • Non Fiction
    • Letter to a Soldier
    • The Body
    • Autumn Saturday
    • A Year With Billy
    • Lunch
    • Harry's Story
    • 2007 bushfires
    • My Father's Kite
    • Death of a Chook
    • Gentle Heartache
    • Shopping with Sisters
    • When I am Old
    • Matilda
    • Fragments
  • Blog