Earlier this year, Australia was rated by wealth research firm New World Wealth as the top destination for millionaire migrants in 2016, for the second year in a row. The number increased to 11,000, from 8000 in 2015.
The popularity of Australia as a destination for the rich is a vector of the country's structural preference for the very wealthy. To be sure, as the Evatt Foundation reported last year, the share of Australia's household wealth owned by the richest 20 per cent has increased by at least 1.3 per cent since 2012 — a rise that comprises more than the entire share of the nation's wealth owned by the poorest households.
The top one per cent of household wealth in Australia is moving towards being 20 per cent of total wealth, while, as their Wealth of the Nation report put it, 'at the other end of the range, the poorest 40 per cent of households have virtually no share in the nation's wealth' and 'the bottom 20 per cent have negative net worth'. Further, 'for 40 per cent of households, inequality is increasing absolutely'.
This inequality twists around other social categories of disadvantage, including race, gender, sexuality and disability. Within this, there are few markers of social inequality as stark as incarceration rates. The latest Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reveal high correlations between prison entrance and indicators of entrenched poverty and discrimination.
These include school completion (two in three prison entrants have not studied past year 10 and only 16 per cent have completed Year 12), unemployment (one in two prison entrants were unemployed in the 30 days before prison entry), and poor physical health (one in three prison entrants have a chronic health condition and one in three had a long-term health condition or disability).
Most shocking is the rate of Indigenous incarceration, which has gotten worse in recent years, with Indigenous people making up 27 per cent of the national prison population despite comprising only about three per cent of the overall population. Indigenous people are among the poorest people in Australia, with a poverty rate of 19.3 per cent.
If we want our system for justice to amount to something better than a mirror of our inability to distribute wealth and opportunity evenly, we need to address the undeniable role wealth inequality has in putting people in prison. Within this we need to explore alternatives to imprisonment. As abolitionists from Angela Davis to