Chapter: Mitigating Child Poverty in Australia

Australia is one of the world’s richer countries.

World Bank figures for 2022 put Australia’s GDP per capita expressed in US dollars at $65,000, giving it a country ranking of 15th by this measure.

Australia also prides itself on being relatively egalitarian, a land of the ‘fair go’, with a national identity of a country built on working the land—the farmers, stockpersons, miners, and iconic ‘tradies’ (tradespersons)—setting itself apart from the class consciousness of the United Kingdom and conspicuous displays of wealth associated with the United States.

The most recently available World Bank estimates of Gini coefficients across countries based on income distribution show a coefficient of 0.34 for Australia in 2018.

This is substantially lower than for the US in the same year (0.41), indicating substantially lower income inequality in Australia than in the US, but similar to coefficients for the UK (also 0.34) and other major European economies, and significantly higher income inequality than observed in the Nordic countries (with Gini coefficients of around 0.28).