Winning life’s lottery: Australians are richer than many feel today

As living costs climb into the red zone, Australians feeling gloomy can consider comparing their wealth with the outside world.

It’s hard to imagine many Australians today feeling richer than they did this time last year.

The share market and superannuation funds went backwards in 2022, property values are still going backwards, grocery expenses and other household bills are spiralling higher much faster than wages growth, and mortgage costs are multiplying thanks to Reserve Bank interest rate rises.

We are collectively feeling poorer right now and pulling back on our spending, or at least planning to. That’s what the Reserve Bank wants Australians as a whole to do, so inflation will drop back to normal levels without smashing the nation into a recession.

But the reality is that Australians are far from poor, when our wealth – financial and otherwise – is put into perspective.

Whenever I’m feeling a little financially inferior, which usually happens when reading newspaper articles about executive salaries or Sydney property sales, there’s a website I visit to make it all better.

Simply type “how rich am I” into your search engine and you’ll find a site that compares your income with the rest of the world.

For example, a couple both earning the average Australian wage of $92,000 a year can punch in their post-tax income ($69,800 according to tax calculators) and discover they are among the richest 1.1 per cent of households on the planet.

We don’t all ride on super yachts, but as a whole Australians are extremely wealthy.

If they earn the median Aussie annual wage of $65,000, a more accurate income measure because it’s not skewed higher by high-earning CEOs, they still sit among the top 2.3 per cent of wealthy households globally.

We are also punching well above our weight when it comes to holding wealth. The Global Wealth Report 2022 by financial giant Credit Suisse ranked Australians as the world’s wealthiest – with median wealth per person sitting at $US273,900 ($400,000), three times as much as US median wealth despite the large number of US billionaires.

Per person, we are twice as rich as people in Britain, Japan, France, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Qatar. New Zealanders are the world number three, behind Belgium.

Median wealth per person in China is $US28,258 ($41,000), in India it’s $US3457 ($5200), and in Africa it’s $US1111 ($1600).

These global wealth and income comparisons are striking, but also seem unfair to the many Aussie battlers struggling on lower wages or equally-low welfare payments, and have been watching their groceries, utilities and other living costs climb just as much as higher-income earners.

We live in an expensive society that has become much more expensive. Fortunately there are welfare safety nets that rise in line with inflation, although there are always people who argue that welfare payments are way too low.

It’s not just money that makes us wealthy. There are no automatic weapons carried by citizens on our streets, and crime rates are relatively low.

Australia’s capital cities regularly rank highly in The Economist Intelligence Unit’s global liveability index, although Covid lockdowns knocked us down a few places recently.

We often complain about Australia’s struggling health system, but our skills, facilities, cleanliness, medicines and costs rank us among the 20 best healthcare systems globally. And there are plenty of financial safety nets available.

Australians are certainly winners in the lottery of life – it just doesn’t feel that way for many people at the moment.

Originally published as Winning life’s lottery: Australians are richer than many feel today