Battlers and Billionaires by Andrew Leigh

Author:Andrew Leigh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty. Ltd
Published: 2013-05-28T00:00:00+00:00

Other surveys point in the same direction. Asked whether they agree that ‘It is the responsibility of the government to reduce the differences in income between people with high incomes and those with low incomes,’ 47 per cent agree and 38 per cent disagree (with 15 per cent neither agreeing or disagreeing).367

Australians don’t tend to think that the rich are undeserving, but as a practical matter almost half think that they pay too little tax.368 Asked specifically about taxes for those with high incomes, only 21 per cent said they are too high – while 33 per cent said they are about right, and 47 per cent said they are too low.369

Views about inequality have a political dimension. Indeed, the political philosopher Norberto Bobbio famously argued that if you want one principle to divide left from right, it is inequality. Those on the conservative/libertarian side of politics, he argued, are heirs to Friedrich Nietzsche, who believed that all were born unequal and that this was a good thing. By contrast, those on the progressive/social democratic side are heirs to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed that all were born equal and that many of the inequalities we observe come from social institutions. In other words, the left condemns social inequality because of a belief in natural equality, while the right condemns social equality because of a belief in natural inequality.370

In saying this, Bobbio isn’t arguing that people on the right of politics will always defend inequality, or that people on the left will always strive for perfect equality. In Australia, his point simply translates into saying that your attitudes to inequality are a pretty good predictor of whether you’ll vote for Labor or the Coalition.

The statistical evidence supports this point.371 In the broader electorate, 65 per cent of Labor voters said they believe that income and wealth should be redistributed, in contrast to only 38 per cent of Coalition voters.372 The difference is even greater among politicians. An anonymous survey of federal parliamentary candidates found that 67 per cent of Labor candidates agreed that income and wealth should be redistributed, compared with just 16 per cent of Coalition candidates.373

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