At a time when it’s getting tougher and tougher for workers to pay their bills or get into a house or apartment of their own, the wealth of Australia’s super rich has been growing in leaps and bounds.

The 2017 Financial Review (AFR) Rich List published last month lists 60 billionaires, up from 53 in 2016. The richest 10 of these fat cats are worth about $75 billion in total. For the first time, three of them now own more than $10 billion each, with cardboard box king Richard Pratt, property developer Harry Triguboff and mining tycoon Gina Rinehart together accounting for $34 billion.

All up, the fortunes of the Rich 200 have increased from $197 billion in 2016 to $233 billion today, nearly 20 percent. Simply to enter Australia’s exclusive Rich 200 club now requires the tidy sum of $342 million.

And what lives these people lead. The pages of the AFR Rich 200 magazine are full of advertisements targeted at those for whom money is no object. If you’re one of these hot shots, you could, for example, get away from the madding crowd at Mascot or Tullamarine by buying your own Gulfstream private jet. Maybe get to the airport in your half-million dollar Ferrari GTC4 sports car or perhaps a $430,000 Aston Martin DB11.

To impress your peers, what better than a jacket costing more than $8,000 or a leather skirt for $4,500, set off with a beautiful Art Nouveau gold necklace costing $12,000, an Argyle pink diamond ring or a Chanel handbag. And for those wanting to be spared the embarrassment of social occasions where everyone else is also wearing a $10,000 Rolex Submariner watch, you could always blow a cool $300,000 on a bespoke handmade watch from the Isle of Man.

For breaks from your deal-making, a holiday may be in order on the “Equatorial Exploration” private jet, taking in London, Bermuda, Antigua, the Amazon, the Atacama Desert and Tahiti, among other locations. If a cruise is more your style, you could put aside all the cares that come with owning a boat by chartering one. A mere $965,000 will buy you a week for yourself and a dozen friends on the Norwegian-built Silver Fast, where those on board can be fussed over by the 17-person crew.

Or, if home beckons, have the chores taken care of by your servants. Imelda Roche, co-founder of cosmetics pyramid selling empire Nutrimetics, advises women “to engage as much domestic help as they can afford”. Not only are you relieved of unpleasant tasks, but “it spreads wealth by providing paid work”. How noble.

As you can see, it’s nothing but the best for the cream of society.

Meritocracy?

There is a great myth that Australia is a meritocracy, that the rich have got where they are today because of hard work and ingenuity. But the hardest work some of them did was simply to be born to the right father.

Looking through the Rich 200, one fact jumps out time and again: family connections got them where they are today. The most well-known cases are Gina Rinehart, James Packer and Richard Pratt, all born with silver spoons in their mouths. But there are literally dozens of others whose parents, siblings or partners set them on the road to fabulous riches.

Far from fading away to make room for a society in which brains trump breeding, these family connections are responsible for many of the new names that appear. Just this year, the debutants to the Rich List include Gretel Packer, James’ sister, and Tim Roberts, son of the late Multiplex boss John Roberts.

The myth of hard work and genius as generators of riches is demonstrated even more sharply this year by the fact that many of the Rich 200 could have had their bank balances rise by tens of millions of dollars without even getting out of bed. Twiggy Forrest’s riches, for example, have doubled simply because of the rising price of iron ore extracted from his mines. Harry Triguboff got even more filthy rich because the property boom has increased the price of his Meriton apartments.

Beyond these factors, as Cameron Murray and Paul Frijters spell out in their recently published book Game of Mates: How Favours Bleed the Nation, the wealth of most of Australia’s fattest cats is boosted thanks to political favours: rezoning laws and planning exemptions that provide windfalls to property developers who then withhold the supply of housing to keep house prices high; mining licences, tax concessions, government infrastructure and other giveaways that fill the pockets of the mining houses; gambling and planning regulations that provide casino operators like James Packer with monopolies; and public-private partnerships that give transport and infrastructure companies billions from the public purse and rivers of gold from the pockets of car drivers for decades to come.

On top of all the laws and regulations that hand out money to specific sectors, there is a company tax regime that allows 40 percent of Australia’s big businesses to pay no tax at all in any given year. Together, these kinds of political favours are responsible for the transfer of tens of billions of dollars to Australia’s wealthy business class.

Exploitation

Where does all this wealth come from? Money doesn’t come from a tree, and it’s not produced from thin air. The basis of every fortune in Australia is the exploitation of the working class – the systematic theft from every worker of a significant part of the produce of their working day. Whether a worker’s pay is high or low, the boss creams off a portion of what they produce.

Some of this goes to paying the banks for loans the bosses have taken out; some goes to landlords who own the factory or office building; some goes to taxes; but the rest of it, a very handsome portion, goes straight into the pockets of the bosses. That’s why the richest 1 percent of Australians own more wealth than the poorest 60 percent.

These profits build the wealth of the capitalist class as a whole. In 2016-17, company profits are expected to top $100 billion. The bosses then fight each other for a bigger share of the spoils, all out for themselves. All the tax concessions and government giveaways are just the cream on the cake.

For the working class, this exploitation is the source of our misfortune. It is not just that it steals from us a share of what is rightfully ours but also that it destroys what could be the beauty of our lives by reducing us to mere cogs in the capitalist profit-making machine. We live to the extent that we can make money for others; to the extent that we don’t, we are cast aside like worthless rags.

The affluence of the few and the poverty of the many are simply two sides of the same coin. As Karl Marx wrote in Capital: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital”.

And if the capitalists put in the first boot, governments follow with the second. While governments cosset the fat cats, they penalise the working class and the poor. It’s enough just to look at the recent budget, which confirmed the government’s plans to press ahead with company tax cuts valued at $65 billion over the next decade while imposing ever more savage punishments and harassment of social security recipients and age pensioners, increased fees for university students and higher taxes on smokers.

On top of these, we have the cuts to penalty rates, ripping off thousands of dollars from workers, and tax concessions to landlords that help push property out of the reach of so many. In a world where the rich are coddled, the workers who produce all the wealth are abused and trodden into the dirt.