It’s Time We Taxed Australian Billionaires

Australia’s billionaires have raked in an obscene amount of cash over recent years, but their increase in wealth over the last 12 months has been truly staggering.

While most of the rest of the country was dealing with job losses, having working hours cut and being further priced out of the housing market, billionaires increased their wealth by around a third.

That’s an extra $90 billion into the pockets of Australia’s hundred richest people.

90. Billion. Dollars. In one year, in the middle of a global pandemic.

That money could have funded a proper increase to JobSeeker, real action on climate change, and ensured that no Australian has to be without a home.

But instead it will sit in a staggeringly large and rapidly growing pile for people who cannot possibly spend it in a single lifetime.

To put a billion dollars into perspective, it would take someone with an income of $50,000 a year 20,000 years to earn.

To earn as much as Gina Rinehart’s $36.1 billion, that same person would have to work for 720,000 years.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that no one can *earn* a billion dollars.

Billionaires are not a natural phenomenon or a result of some happy accident for a lucky few. They are the result of a political and economic framework that has been set up and run to benefit the super rich.

The government forced young people to raid their superannuation during the pandemic to survive, while they gave billions in tax breaks to the wealthiest and billions more in handouts to big corporations.

At the same time young people were less likely to be able to access government support through JobKeeper, because they worked in casual or short term contracts, and in industries which were not covered.

Young women were hit harder than young men, with more young women losing their job and more support to male dominated occupations like construction and mining.

There is always a choice in politics, and the Liberals and Labor have picked the millionaires over the millions.

And they’ve picked the big corporations over ordinary people.

The gross concentration of wealth has so often flowed to the people at the heads of corporations that have destroyed nature, blown up irreplaceable cultural heritage, and made the climate crisis worse.

Are you angry about this? You should be.

Because through dirty political donations, the billionaires and big corporations buy massive influence and power. It’s institutionalised corruption.

It means that the major parties would much rather do the billionaires’ bidding than take them on, let alone start asking them to pay their fair share of tax

The Greens have had enough of this crap, and we want to make billionaires and big corporations pay their fair share.

On top of existing taxes, we will apply an annual 6% tax on the net wealth of billionaires.

This is a tax on just 100 Australian people that would raise over $40 billion over the next decade.

We’ll also put a tax on the super profits of major corporations.

With the money raised, we can help get dental care into Medicare, ensure our public schools are genuinely free and give a job to everyone who wants one.

Because just like inequality, unemployment is a policy choice. There’s no shortage of work to be done across Australia to bring down emissions, restore nature and improve public services.

We’re ready for a full blooded attack against our plan.

We fully expect to be accused of the “politics of envy” or of “starting a class war”.

But the truth is there has been a class war for many years, and the billionaire class is winning comfortably.

It’s time we fought back.

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Senator Nick McKim is the Australian Greens’ Economic Justice spokesperson.