The amount of cash you have and your tastes in music don’t necessarily determine whether you are rich or poor.
Nor is it the size of your house, whether you went to university or the kind of car you drive.
Labor’s shadow assistant treasurer Dr Andrew Leigh, a former professor of economics, said the real way to measure wealth is by the number of teeth you have.
The amount of cash you have and your tastes in music don’t necessarily determine whether you are rich or poor (Sydney’s millionaire eastern suburbs enclave of Point Piper pictured)
A wealthy adult was likely to have closer to 32 teeth than a battler with tooth decay, after the removal of wisdom teeth was taken into account.
‘One that strikes me very starkly is that the number of teeth that affluent Australians have is seven more than low-income Australians,’ Dr Leigh, who has written books on inequality, told the ABC’s Q&A program on Monday night.
The Canberra-based member for Fenner said a teenage university student contacted him a few weeks ago after he had posted a social media video on inequality.
‘When we talked about this in a recent social media video a couple of weeks ago a 19-year-old contacted my office and said, “Yes, both my parents are missing a lot of their teeth”,’ he said.
Nor is it the size of your house, whether you went to university or the kind of car you drive (outer suburban Melbourne pictured)
Labor’s shadow assistant treasurer Dr Andrew Leigh (pictured) said the difference between rich and poor was determined by a number of a different kind
‘”I’m working full-time and studying full-time and I can’t afford to get my teeth fixed”.’
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare estimates that people from households on an income of less than $30,000 a year are likely to be missing seven teeth, compared with three teeth from those in a home earning more than $60,000 annually.
However, those in households earning less than $20,000 a year are more likely to be missing at least 10 teeth.
Dr Leigh said wealth inequality had worsened in Australia, despite the nation’s 27-year run of avoiding a recession.
‘We’ve got an Australia that has doubled the number of private planes and helicopters, where Maserati and Porsche sales are through the roof,’ he said.
‘Some streets, the typical house sells for eight figures but yet we’ve got one in 20 Australians who’ve can’t afford Christmas presents.’
Millionaire entrepreneur Dick Smith, an opponent of corporate and personal-income tax cuts, has blamed Australia’s high immigration rate for exacerbating inequality
Millionaire entrepreneur Dick Smith, an opponent of corporate and personal-income tax cuts, has blamed Australia’s high immigration rate for exacerbating inequality.
‘I am concerned about the huge difference between the wealthy and the poor,’ the 74-year-old businessman told Daily Mail Australia on Monday.
‘One per cent of Australians now have the same wealth as the bottom 70 per cent.
‘It’s never been so extreme.’
Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz (pictured) said the Howard Government’s dismantling of industrial arbitration in 1996 had widened the gap between the rich and poor
Mr Smith highlighted how property mogul Harry Triguboff, the 85-year-old founder of apartment builder Meriton, had seen his wealth more than double from $5 billion to $11 billion in only a few years.
Nobel-prize winning American economist Joseph Stiglitz, who predicted the global financial crisis more than a decade ago, said the Howard Government’s dismantling of industrial arbitration in 1996 had widened the gap between the rich and poor.
‘The Australian system of arbitration was a system we would study but you dismantled that, and you are now of model of what not to do,’ he told Fairfax Media’s Good Weekend magazine.
‘They didn’t go as far in bank deregulation but in labour market policy, they actually went further than the U.S..’