Perth, June 2: Australia’s billionaires grew their collective wealth by $25.67 billion over the past year — nearly $50,000 every minute — even as millions of households continued to struggle with rising rents, groceries and energy bills, according to new Oxfam Australia analysis of the 2026 AFR Rich List.
The surge marks the third consecutive year of gains for the country’s wealthiest, pushing total billionaire wealth above $686 billion and lifting the number of billionaires to a record 178 — up 17 from last year.
The figures land just as the Fair Work Commission handed down a 4.75% minimum wage increase for roughly three million low-paid workers, deepening the optics of a two-speed economy. Oxfam noted the 20 richest Australians now hold more wealth than the bottom three million households combined.
The anti-poverty organisation calculated that the past year’s billionaire wealth increase alone could have lifted nearly one million Australians out of poverty, covered every household’s electricity bills for more than a year, funded Australia’s entire foreign aid budget almost five times over, or paid grocery bills for close to three million households for a year.
Oxfam Australia chief executive Jennifer Tierney said the figures exposed a deepening divide between the ultra-wealthy and ordinary Australians still feeling pressure at the checkout, petrol pump and in the rental market. She argued there was something fundamentally wrong with a system that allowed extreme wealth to keep climbing while governments insisted there was insufficient funding for housing, healthcare and essential services.
While the 2026 federal budget included modest reforms to capital gains tax and negative gearing — moves Tierney acknowledged as steps toward a fairer tax system — Oxfam said the measures fell well short of the structural overhaul needed to address runaway wealth inequality. Tierney warned that without bolder reform, the divide would only deepen, and called on the government to introduce a tax on the super-rich to fund investment in housing, healthcare and climate action.
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