Wealth in Australia now in five categories
An Australian’s wealth was determined by their employment status, the type of job they had, and how much money they made.
But in 2019, there’s a new five-tier measure of wealth based on how many assets you own, according to a team of University of Sydney researchers.
Social scientists Professor Lisa Adkins, Associate Professor Melinda Cooper and Professor Martijn Konings, argue that merely having a job and earning a salary are no longer adequate steps of determining status.
The top-ranking is the “investor” group, people who don’t necessarily have an ordinary working wage but live off the income generated by portfolios of resources through to non-asset owning classes.
It noted that in Sydney, just under 50 per cent of all apartments were owned by investors, as well as the statistic is often higher in central areas of the city.
The second highest group are those who own their house outright. The third highest are those who hold a mortgage.
The bottom two classes are called “churners” that don’t have any housing assets. The fourth category is renters, who don’t have any properties or have a mortgage. They can be wage renters or welfare renters.
The homeless sit at the bottom rung of the ladder, with no income from assets, salary or the state.
The researchers primarily focused on Sydney, the nation’s most expensive capital city for houses, where they found prosperity is increasingly denied by those who own property versus people who will forever be priced out of the housing industry.
