Australian society in 2019

It seems when it comes to personal wealth only the poor admit the truth of their financial situation.

Those who are financially well-off in Australia apparently refuse to recognise their good fortune.

This rather strange state of affairs was very obvious during the 2019 federal election campaign.

Last month the national public broadcaster asked its online readers to guess where they stood on the income scale and this was the result.....

ABC News, 2 July 2019:

The interactive divided people into 13 income bands, corresponding to the bands in the Australian Bureau of Statistics' data.

People were asked to estimate which bracket they sat in, and were then asked to enter their weekly take-home pay.

After removing certain outliers with outlandish responses (we're looking at you, Mr or Ms $1 trillion a week) there was a marked difference between those in the top and bottom halves of the income distribution when it came to estimating their place.

Respondents in the top seven brackets (earning more than $800 per week) fared far worse at guessing their place than those in the bottom six brackets. In fact, our lower-earning respondents were 2.6 times better at estimating their place than their higher-earning counterparts…….

But it was those in the third-highest bracket — earning between $1,750 and $2,000 per week — who fared the worst at estimating their position.

Only 2.85 per cent of respondents in this bracket correctly identified their place and the average guess was 3.2 brackets lower than reality.