Dita De Boni: The yawning rich-poor Oz divide

One of Melbourne's best streets is Clendon Rd, Toorak. Picture / Herald Sun

Both Australia and New Zealand have a growing poverty gap but at least we can talk about inequality

This week I have been in Australia visiting family. Just a few days in Melbourne, during which time a friend took me on a drive through Toorak, the city's most wealthy suburb.

Mansion after mansion, in leafy rows of streets that made Paritai Drive in Auckland look like one of those streets in Glen Innes the Prime Minister likes to visit as a pre-election stunt. At a cost of about $10 million apiece, they house the financiers, managers and wealthy foreign investors that make up the privileged elite of any such city.

My friend's daughter attends the local private school, charging as much as $30,000 a year, before incidentals. I have no idea if the education is better than anywhere else but the dimensions of its gymnasium and performance centre, the beauty of its sporting facilities and glossy top coat of its gleaming buildings suggest, at least, luxurious surroundings in which to enrich the mind. There are just a handful of brown-skinned children, she says, attending the school.

It seems that Australia has become a society in which being rich means you can live an entire life without encountering a different socio-economic strata of person. You can live in leafy, gated suburbs; walk clean streets, holiday abroad or in exclusive enclaves. If you have the money, you are almost compelled to send your children to the most pricey educational institution you can buy; that education will often be part government-funded anyhow, and, ironically, teach students things like "compassion for the poor" and "empathy" in air-conditioned comfort. The only time worlds will collide, it seems, are when they sidestep a homeless person slumped outside a luxury brand retailer in the central city.

Australian newspapers carry only limited comment about inequities of any type. While I was there it was announced the head of the ANZ bank, the parent company of New Zealand's ANZ, was to be paid almost $10 million a year, higher than any other bank head in the country and several multiples more than his staff, who make an average of $47,000 a year. This despite the fact the bank is the weakest performer of the country's four big banks with a lacklustre share price.

ANZ Australia's Mike Smith is belligerent. Any attempt to regulate the industry from the Government is met with his protests and a promise to make his customers pay. He has declared he does not like "any formal market constraints" and accused Australian treasurer Joe Hockey, hardly a pinko commie, of "taking economic lessons from Hugo Chavez".

There seems to be an indulgence of this kind of complete, unabashed obscenity of thought by the vast mass of Australians, but whether this is part of the aspirational national character or just the result of many years of reprogramming against a 'fair go for all' I'm not sure. It certainly has changed the egalitarian character of the country, though.

As weak government regulation and an inequitable tax system help create terrible inequality, the results are obvious. It was reported this week that the life expectancy of men in rural and central Australia is lower than that of North Koreans; largely because indigenous Australians, the bulk of this demographic, have only a skeletal healthcare system to rely on to fight the many diseases of hopelessness including obesity, diabetes, kidney disease and alcoholism. A recent study suggested one in seven Australians live below the poverty line - though you'd never know it from the glossy lifestyle enjoyed by many.

Certainly New Zealand offers a lot less than Australia in many ways, but at least we can still have the conversation about inequality; we can still decry the lack of ethnic diversity creeping into our education system as a result of policies that seek to weaken the system as a whole. Our Prime Minister, late as always as he waited to consult his pollsters, has at least broached the subject of child poverty and promised to do something about it (even while he promotes ideas that worsen it).

But as for Australia? The country is about to host the G20 in Brisbane, where world leaders will meet to discuss many things, including how to tackle growing inequality around the world. Unchecked, massive inequality will, at the least, weaken consumer demand over time, and at the most, trigger societal breakdown. How far Australia will go before suffering those potential side effects of inequality is unknown, but a danger nonetheless.

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