this post was submitted on 10 May 2026

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Top-earning Australians make money very differently from typical workers (www.abc.net.au)

submitted 3 days ago by Gorgritch_umie_killa@aussie.zone to c/australia@aussie.zone

23 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I find it very hard not to feel angry about the unfairness, and intransigence of the wealthy in this country.

Why should I work so hard, to get so little, when these people have a leg up on everything. And I don't count myself as that bad off, in fact I'm, overall, goin pretty well.

top 23 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] nonentity@sh.itjust.works 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.

Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.

[–] eureka@aussie.zone 2 points 3 days ago

Corporations are the only ‘persons’

Huh, I didn't realise Australia also had some legal concept of corporate personhood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#Australia

[–] eureka@aussie.zone 1 points 3 days ago

I love a good interactive article.

intransigence

That's a new word for me.

[+] DavidDoesLemmy@aussie.zone -8 points 3 days ago (2 children)

This is very misleading. The CGT discount is there to account for inflation. If I buy shares today and sell them in a year for 6% more (a normal yearly gain) I have not actually gained 6% in buying power. There might have been 3% inflation in that time, so I've really made 3% profit (in terms of increased buying power)

The CGT discount is not some gift to rich people, it's an attempt to make the system fair when we have inflation every year.

[–] potatoattack@lemmy.world 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Wrong, the real reason the CGT discount exists is because it's a tax on wealth. My uncle, who makes 100k+ a week through owning houses 'earns' almost all of it as capital gains. Me as a worker pleb get almost all of my income via wages. I pay income tax, he pays CGT. Further, as a regular worker, a large percentage what I make is spent on goods and services which is subject to GST. He spends more than me on goods and services for sure but as an overall percentage of what he 'makes', it's very small. Most of his wealth gets reinvested into properties, not subject to GST.

Both of these policies were introduced in 1999 by the Howard government and the intent is clear. To regress our tax system and shift the tax burden away from the wealthy.

[–] DavidDoesLemmy@aussie.zone -1 points 3 days ago

Your uncle who makes 100k per week through properties would mostly receive that as income from rent. Unless he's selling a property every week. Income from rent is taxed the same as your income from your job. There is no CGT discount on income.

[+] DavidDoesLemmy@aussie.zone -6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Employees work a couple of weeks, the then get paid. Inflation doesn't affect this. It's the time period of investments (years) that means inflation is a big part of the nominal growth.

[–] eureka@aussie.zone 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Employees work a couple of weeks, the then get paid. Inflation doesn’t affect this.

Sure, but I don't work for just a couple of weeks. My salary doesn't increase with inflation or even with the business prices which may rise with inflation - our industry union is trying to get our annual pay to adjust to CPI at minimum, and good bloody luck to us (I'm doing my part). My coworkers and I are still losing buying power with inflation.

[–] DavidDoesLemmy@aussie.zone 0 points 3 days ago (1 children)

That's an argument for tax brackets to be indexed with inflation, and for your company to pay more fairly. It has nothing to do with the CGT discount.

[–] eureka@aussie.zone 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

That’s an argument for tax brackets to be indexed with inflation, and for your company to pay more fairly

True, and I'll also say that the vested shares not going to workers if they leave or are fired is terrible, companies doing that is absurd. They're effectively doing the first few years on 2/3 or 1/2 pay, in an industry where I wouldn't trust them to employ certain roles for more than a few years.

[–] fizzle@quokk.au -5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Sooo... I suspect that this is dramatically misleading.

Suppose you earn $90k a year, you haven't been able to save very much because hey... its tough out there.

Grandma passes away and leaves you $200k in shares, maybe she bought them for $100k 10 years ago.

You sell them so you can have a deposit for your first house.

Boom, the sale of the shares makes your taxable income in the top 10%, but you're still not particularly wealthy.

Yes the CGT discount is shit but this graph just says water is wet.

[–] eureka@aussie.zone 2 points 3 days ago

The subtitle to that graph, from the article:

While this may be partly explained by a large capital gain pushing taxpayers up into the top bracket in a given year, the government has also been making a case to change CGT as a measure to improve “intergenerational equity” in the housing market.

[+] ryannathans@aussie.zone -6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

How incredibly misleading, removing CGT discounts in general will fuck hard workers so bad.

Like tech workers getting paid 1/3 to 1/2 of their ~150k package in shares. Any investments made by the middle class, like ETFs you've been holding? Now double taxed

Dividends are a cancer, go after them? Negative gearing sure. Trusts? Maybe, a lot of genuine use that's going to get screwed.

[–] eureka@aussie.zone 4 points 3 days ago

Like tech workers getting paid 1/3 to 1/2 of their ~150k package in shares.

Won't it just tax their capital gains? If the share prices don't even go up by the time before the CGT event, they get taxed $0 CGT. The "getting fucked so hard" is a few percent at most (inflation), which at that pay band and in the kind of tech jobs that offer them, has almost no chance of threatening their financial security. Would they prefer to work a typical job instead?

[–] EvenOdds@lemmy.zip 9 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The data shows that it won't though, that's the point of the article. Those genuine use cases are really uncommon.

[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 0 points 3 days ago

A doubling on tax of 2% income (using the data, not real tech workers) is more tax alone than the "tax cuts"

[–] kingofras@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

their ~150k package

Mate, that’s twice what the average Australian makes. The LLM-replaceables can take a minor hit so the Rheinharts give a bit more to hopefully the most needy. None of the people who will be hit by this will eat less or go less on holiday.

[–] Cypher@aussie.zone 2 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Mate, that’s twice what the average Australian makes.

It's 50% more than what the average full time employee makes and these jobs often involve significant hours, personal sacrifices and have high skill requirements.

The LLM-replaceables can take a minor hit

Take that line to an election and lose. Go on.

There is a way to structure taxation so that the ultra wealthy, and multi-national corporations pay a fair share, without needing to fuck over working class Australians solely because they're an insignificant amount ahead in income.

[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Not to mention due to vesting requirements, you can lose years of shares when you're fired or quit, effectively reducing your pay by like a third for the last few years

And those shares have huge tax implications too

[–] kingofras@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

There is a way

In theory yes. But seeing how that’s the guys who own the guys who are coming up with the legislation, those are also the guys who made is so that a percentage of the working class is included, just so that we would not all be in agreement and the bill has a good chance of either failing or being repealed later. This is what any head bully does, make sure you have strong lieutenants in the community who protect your interests for them. Playbook as old as time.

And why would I take that to an election? https://lemmy.world/comment/23658769

[–] Cypher@aussie.zone -3 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Nah you're anti-worker, ready to pull down anyone else like a crab in the bucket if they get ahead even slightly.

That and your both sides are the same trash.

I genuinely hope you find yourself replaced by an AI, robot, or other form of automation.

[–] eureka@aussie.zone 2 points 3 days ago

That and your both sides are the same trash.

If you're referring to the post they linked, they differentiate Labor and Liberal - the bottom line is still that both those parties (and many others) have plenty of common overlap, and these parties are both highly vulnerable to manipulation by the ruling class that backs them financially, institutionally, socially, etc. etc. . This is structural, not a false equivalence. If Labor were definitively a pro-worker party, and ruled governments for the workers, we would not be in this situation we're in today where workers are struggling to budget while a few owners each collect the wealth of 50,000 workers.

The class of people with absurd amounts of capital want to keep as much of their capital as possible, so they continue to use that capital to influence society and its political systems. Those ultrawealthy (and to be absolutely clear, no, that does not include people making a mere 300k or so), are not crabs in our bucket. They are the people who bought the bucket.

And yes, you're right that there are ways to reform our society to remove ultrawealth without knocking down high-income workers. But these methods, generally speaking, cannot be implemented by politicians without facing an overwhelming attack from mass media, funding withdrawal and other institutional pressure. Look at historical examples, both local and abroad, of politicians who've proposed such measures attacking the ultrawealthy - unless you have a serious mass activist contingent and outstanding messaging like Mamdani's NY campaign, it's electoral suicide.

And, frankly, as long as most people are still voting for Labor or to the right of them, it's a clear signal that working people aren't yet ready to give the support needed to challenge the ultrawealthy. Voting in our system takes the least amount of time, effort and knowledge, so if we can't even vote for a pro-worker party, we aren't going to band together as workers and protect any politician who stands up for us.

[–] kingofras@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago

Anyone else, including myself you mean.

One day you will discover that being this addicted to “working”, “productivity”, and “endless growth” wasn’t all the fairy tale we imagined it would be.

We’re all grand and great grandchildren of generations who have been replaced by some form of automation, we will survive this too.