Australian billionaires make $67,000 an hour and are “Takers, not Makers” according to new Oxfam report

Australia’s 47 billionaires (calculated in US dollars) take home an average of A$67,000 an hour, over 1,300 times more than the average Australian, according to a new international Oxfam report, “Takers, not Makers” and Australian research.

“Because billionaire wealth is often rooted in unearned privilege, much of it tied to intergenerational advantage and colonial powers,” Oxfam Australia’s CEO Lyn Morgain said, and “much of it goes untaxed,” she said.

Oxfam is calling for a “relatively modest” wealth tax, where Australian billionaires are taxed between 2-5% of their overall wreath in line with other nations internationally who use these funds for public infrastructure and social services. The anti-poverty organisation is also calling on Australia’s major political parties to tax the fortunes of the super-rich specifically to tackle inequality.

“The ultra-wealthy aren’t even going to notice it, but the effect would be to bring literally billions back into the public coffers,” Morgain said. “And that would enable everything from schools to hospitals to adequate housing.”

Using data from Forbes’ real-time billionaires list, Oxfam researchers identified and reported on global and Australian billionaires in their report “Takers Not Makers.” They calculated that in 2024, Australian billionaire wealth rose by more than 8% (A$28bn) at a staggering rate of A$3.2m an hour. When calculated in Australian dollars, the number of billionaires nationally sits at 150, according to the Australian Financial Review’s 2024 rich list.

Oxfam Australia’s Morgain, said billionaire wealth in Australia was largely driven by “inheritance and ongoing impacts of colonialism.”

Billionaire wealth has risen three times faster in 2024 than in 2023. At least five trillionaires are now expected globally within a decade. Meanwhile, the number of people living in poverty has barely changed since 1990. Countries around the world still extract wealth from the Global South to the super-rich 1% in the Global North at the alarming rate of $30million an hour.

And it’s not just the failure of the rich to pay tax that is driving global inequity. An opinion piece by the Guardian this week cites World Bank calculations that wealthy nations earned more than US$1.4tn in loan repayments from the developing world in 2023, with the sums likely to top $2tn a year by 2030. Rich countries have become the world’s bankers, squeezing debtors in the global south. Poorer nations are forced to borrow in rich-world currencies to pay for their energy and food, while their exports consist mainly of low-value goods compared with their imports. All of this means that the world’s most disadvantaged are carrying the burden of both debt to wealthy nations and the profits made in their countries by billionaires.

Poor nations are now starting to call out these gross inequalities. The finance minister of climate-vulnerable Fiji, a nation of 300 islands, recently warned that it’s becoming impossible to run the country’s economy with global heating driving catastrophic weather events.

Biman Prasad told an international conference that “at no time outside of war have economies faced a 30-70% contraction” – but Fiji, Vanuatu and Tonga have faced this within the decade from a single cyclone. He said that “most development resources for capacity building are spent on building donor capacities – not our own”. It’s time to “decolonise international development,” he said.

Read the Oxfam report or watch the Oxfam report video for more information.