How does Australian society match up against these goals? For a start, there is an ongoing problem with poverty in Australia, with recent research suggesting that the relative poverty rate has been between 10% and 14% of households since 2000 (where the poverty rate is set at 50% of median income).
Around 5% of households were suffering from what is known as “deep exclusion”. Australians with a long-term medical condition or disability were particularly vulnerable, as were indigenous people. People lacking a year 12 qualification and those in public housing also had higher levels of deep exclusion. [...]
However, a 2007 study by Andrew Leigh found that Australia had a higher level of mobility than the US. As he put it in his 2013 book, “in the United States, the heritability of income is similar to the heritability of height. But in Australia, income is only about half as heritable as height”. A 2016 study reached broadly similar conclusions to Leigh, finding that Australia has “a relatively large amount of income mobility”. [...]
In 2011, the OECD reported that according to 2008 figures, “the average income of the top 10% of Australians was … nearly 10 times higher than that of the bottom 10%”. Australia is once again more equal than the US, but more unequal than the OECD average.
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