2026-09-03
The Greens Tax the 1% Campaign targets the dangerous levels of wealth concentration that are at the heart of all our major economic, social and environmental crises. This article offers several strategies for engaging people in productive conversations on this campaign.
By Rob Delves, a member of the Green Issue Editorial team
Background
A few months ago my excitement levels soared as the Australian Greens launched a major campaign: Tax the 1%. I have believed for a long time that extreme inequality, or wealth concentration, is the absolute priority issue. It has such a huge impact on just about every other major policy area: the strength of our economy, democracy and social cohesion, the housing and cost of living crises, climate change and other environmental problems, and our lack of progress in improving health and education outcomes. I believe that it is impossible to address any of these problems unless inequality is significantly reduced – and so I’m excited that The Greens are campaigning for that.
At university in the 1960s I came across the book Equality, written in 1931 by the Christian Socialist RH Tawney. Its core message is that the good society is the equal society. He showed that equality of opportunity is an inadequate goal: "It is only the presence of a high degree of practical equality which can diffuse and generalise opportunities to rise.” He was scathing in his attack on the old argument that a focus on equality would destroy freedom: “When liberty is construed realistically, not merely a minimum of civil and political rights but securities that the economically weak will not be at the mercy of the economically strong … a large measure of equality, so far from being inimical to liberty, is essential to it.”
I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but I was reading Tawney right in the middle of the period from 1945 to 1980 when, probably for the first time, extreme inequality was being reduced to deliver a more shared prosperity across the western world. Tawney was a leading thinker behind the amazing reforms of the 1945 UK Labour government that taxed wealth heavily, nationalised key industries and implemented free universal education and healthcare and rapidly expanded the provision of affordable state housing.
During my 13 years in England (1973-85) there was one friend whose story brought home exactly what these postwar reforms meant. Mike was a teacher who grew up in Nottingham in the 1950s. His dad (a semi-skilled railway repairman), mum (housewife) and the four children lived in a classic three-up-three-down semi-detached home on a huge council house estate. It was comfortable in a basic way, very affordable and like most other council estates carefully planned to include people from all walks of life. They benefited from free healthcare and free education from pre-school to university or technical college. Mike and his three siblings thrived.
So it’s clear that governments can make a huge difference to people’s lives if they focus on reducing inequality. It was government reforms that enabled the postwar shared prosperity ‒ the decent life that Mike’s working-class family enjoyed would have been impossible in any period before then. But government can also choose to increase inequality, and since 1980 they have done just that, enabling obscene levels of wealth amongst the top 1% at the expense of growing levels of deprivation amongst at least the bottom 40%. The UK is much further down this disastrous path than Australia, but it is inevitable we will go the same way unless we choose to reduce inequality, primarily by taxing the wealthy.
The Greens campaign is aggressively redistributive: “More For You, Less For Billionaires and Big Corporations.” So it will be attacked relentlessly by the wealthy, the big corporations and their mouthpieces in much of the media. We will need to work hard to support the campaign and address the criticisms that will be made of it. One important strategy is through our conversations.
Let’s start with some Monty Python fun
I like to start in a light-hearted way and one favourite is to riff on everyone’s favourite gag from the movie Monty Python’s Life of Brian about the useless group of revolutionaries trying to whip up opposition to the Romans: What have the billionaires ever done for us? Turns out the Romans actually did a long list of positive things (amongst their many nasties). I can usually get a fun conversation going by asking: “when it comes to extreme wealth concentration, are there any equivalent benefits like the great Roman roads or water works?” There is a mass of evidence to show clearly that the answer is NOTHING OF ANY GOOD AT ALL.
There is common ground in pointing out that from 1945 Australians were promised that if we were working in any of the jobs that contributed to the wellbeing of this country, we would be rewarded with a nice life, a decent standard of living. Above all, that meant an affordable home built to a fair standard. Governments mostly delivered on that promise – until the neoliberal era, starting in the 1980s. Now there is widespread discontent and disillusion with the major parties because they have trashed that postwar deal. Now it’s a case of “work hard, get nowhere.”
Most people I talk with share this understanding, but the conversation gets interesting when we turn to reasons and solutions. Some are attracted to the One Nation solution that blames migrants and lazy workers. Even those people accept that inequality has got worse, but aren’t aware of how extreme it has become and how it is this inequality that has destroyed everything that makes life secure and worthwhile. That’s our conversation challenge.
How can we communicate what inequality and billionaires really mean?
It is hard to get your head around what a billion means. One way is to ask how long it would take to amass $1 billion if you built up at the rate of $1 every second. So, $1 per second = $60 per minute = $3600 per hour. Do you know even one worker who is paid that much per hour? I remember earning less than $36 per hour doing some extra teaching work in 2009 and was satisfied with my lot. Of course that was only working 40 hours a week. For this exercise we are talking $1 for every single second of every day. So, come on, have a guess – how far would you have to go back to start the process of amassing $1 billion by 2026 at this mind-boggling rate of $1 every second?? I fancy myself at mental maths so my first stab was I’d need to have started in 2000 (what is it about the attraction of big round numbers?). Not very close – the answer is way back to 1994.
By the way, when would Elon Musk have needed to start his dollar-a-second savings plan to become a trillionaire by today? I guessed end of the Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago ‒ again, laughably wrong. On reflection, if you know that the start date to amass a billion is 1994, the trillion is fairly easy to calculate. Answer at the end of this article!
Here are a few other quirky ways of showing what being a billionaire means, especially in contrast with the working world the rest of us inhabit:
Exhibit A: Donald Trump and the deeply troubling fact that his wealth rose by $2.2 billion in 2025. How big is that? It means $1.1 million an hour. That’s right, $1.1 million an hour based on a 40-hour work week over one year. Compare that enormous sum per hour with Trump’s opposition to increasing the federal minimum wage, frozen at $7.25 per hour. Extreme inequality, anyone?
Exhibit B: The median net worth of humanity is roughly US$8,000. That means even the world’s poorest billionaire is approximately 125,000 times wealthier than the median person. Numbers this large quickly lose meaning. So let’s look at them another way. If the average person weighed 70 kilograms, the billionaire would weigh the equivalent of 58 blue whales, the largest animal ever to have lived. And if the average person stood 170 centimetres tall, the billionaire would tower 220 kilometres into the sky.
Our conversations should also clarify the almost unbelievable extent to which the top 1% are increasing their wealth ‒ and doing this at the expense of everyone else. Forbes notes that in 1987 the world had 140 billionaires (in US dollars) and their total wealth was $295 billion. Today there are 3428 in the billionaire class and their total wealth has exploded to $20.1 trillion.
Oxfam has done excellent research on inequality. With regard to Australia their latest report highlights the extreme gap that has opened up between the billionaires and ordinary Australians: the 20 richest Australians now hold more wealth combined than the entire bottom three million households. The collective wealth of Australia’s billionaires increased by $25.67 billion over the past year — equivalent to almost $50,000 per minute. This bumper year for Australia’s richest comes at a time of an ongoing cost-of-living crisis, with millions of households continuing to struggle with rising rents, grocery prices and energy bills. Oxfam’s analysis shows that just this $25.67 billion increase alone would have been enough to lift almost one million Australians out of poverty.
So, back to riffing off The Life of Brian and the question of “What have the billionaires ever done for us?” The answer is “Nothing good at all, only bads.” Here’s how I’d talk about a few of those bads.
Why are billionaires bad for the economy?
If a capitalist economy is functioning as intended, no-one could ever become a billionaire because healthy competition prevents price gouging and keeps profits modest – the gospel according to Adam Smith. In fact the great Adam did indeed warn that the efficient functioning of the market to deliver fair outcomes for all could easily be compromised if wealthy business people get together to reduce effective competition and make themselves excessively rich in the process.
So the very existence of a billionaire means the capitalist system is failing.
Billionaires “earn” obscene amounts of money each year, not from paid work, but from their ownership of assets. It’s called passive income. When ordinary working people get wage increases they usually spend more and the local economy benefits from this stimulus. However, billionaires can’t spend their enormous amounts of passive income into any local economies because they already have far more than everything they need, so they just buy more assets and inequality grows relentlessly. In particular, ownership of housing becomes more and more concentrated in the top 1% who are very happy to pay (and cause) rising prices. Across the world, extreme inequality is the one factor shared by all countries struggling with the crisis of house prices rising to ever more unaffordable levels.
Of course, they pay very little tax ‒ last year Musk paid zero, Bezos zero ‒ because they choose to declare no income. They hate paying tax but are very happy to pay astronomical sums to their tax accountants and lawyers. One important reason why we need to tax the billionaires and corporations is that their tax avoidance is an important reason why we are forever complaining that we can’t afford the decent services people desperately need ‒ as in “tax the billionaires so I can get my teeth fixed for free.” It’s one of The Greens most popular policies.
Why are billionaires bad for our society?
They are bad news for everything that creates a decent society. Here are four examples amongst many possibles:
1. Social mobility collapses in countries riddled with inequality.
2. Levels of education attainment are significantly predicted by family income. In more unequal countries, higher proportions of young people lack basic skills in reading and maths at the age of 15. The correlation between levels of inequality and educational outcomes is very strong – more equal societies have better results.
3. Health outcomes such as infant mortality and life expectancy are worse in more unequal societies. In fact, for the first time in nearly a century, over the past decade, progress in increasing life expectancy has stalled across those wealthy nations where inequality has got worse.
4. Inequality is a threat to democracy. Significant economic inequality leads to an unequal distribution of political power. A major challenge to preserving democratic integrity is curbing the influence of large corporations and of the wealthy elite, who often use their growing wealth to influence and oppose democratic reforms that could increase their tax contributions or diminish their already disproportionate financial advantages. Countries with lower levels of income inequality score better on measures of good democratic governance.
Sources and Solutions
The four correlations presented in the previous section are the result of years of extensive research by the Equality Trust, which was established in 2009 as a result of detailed analyses of the impacts of inequality by British health demographers Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. Their book was called The Spirit Level. It compared the health, education and other outcomes of a range of countries, then correlated these with the level of inequality in each country. The resounding verdict – more equal countries always do it better. They have expanded this research since then and published their findings in a 2024 report: The Spirit Level at 15. In my opinion, it is the very best research we have on inequality.
People often ask whether the attempt to seriously tax wealth will have negative consequences – mostly that the rich will flee the country. I have a vision of Gina hiring a huge boat full of her iron ore and steaming off to Trumpland! It is a beautiful vision and actually demonstrates how foolish this scare-mongering is. The research shows that a very small number of ultra-wealthy do clear off to lower tax lands but they are nearly always the ones who had very low levels of attachment to their communities.
People also ask how can we ever agree on the most effective and fair way to tax the very wealthy. I like to argue that there are several possible ways of doing this, all with their pros and cons, but each one is much better than doing nothing. So let’s have a democratic discussion and choose a model. The first principle is that we should tax the annual passive income of the wealthy at least at the same rate as workers’ incomes. The second and more important principle is that their accrued wealth is where the real money is, so that must be our main focus. Maybe choose $10 million as our starting point and tax everything above that at 5%. The two aims are to reduce the harmful levels of inequality and to generate enough government income to support the living standards of the majority through universal services.
Finally, one current attempt to keep an eye on: in November, California will vote on a proposal to levy a one-off 5% tax on the wealth of all billionaires in the state. Advocates of the billionaire tax claim it would raise US$100 billion in revenue, to be allocated directly to state-funded healthcare, food assistance and public education. Of course, the wealthy and corporations are in full-scale attack mode, sparing no expense to preserve their privileges.
Answer to the Elon Musk question: he would have needed to start in 29,000 BC. However, the more important question is why would anyone with even half a functioning brain and moral compass want to become a trillionaire, or even a lowly multi-billionaire, when so many of their fellow citizens are struggling? And how could a decent society allow that to happen?
Header photo: No Kings Day Washington DC October 2025. Credit: Geoff Livingston, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
[Opinions expressed are those of the author and not official policy of Greens WA]