MONEY, MONEY MONEY
THOSE of you who dip into this column from time to time will be aware that I like numbers – a weakness that was recently given free rein when I had a bit of work done by a major accounting firm. It turned out their charge-out rate was $635 per hour. The sort of number that does tend to focus the mind.
While this estimable gentleman was doing his sums I was doing my own. I figured that at that rate, minus a few costs and GST, this bozo was on $4000 a day, or around twenty thousand a week. You might recall that was approximately what we at the Hanrahan property were hoping to clear from our 300 head of cattle, after costs, for the year.
Anyway, the number got me thinking. Even with all that coming in, this bloke is only earning a bit over a million a year. How much would you have to earn to get, you know, Sol Trujillo’s wage, or Alan Moss’s?
Well, to get $10m a year, you need about $200,000 a week, or $5000 an hour. Good money if you can get it, but even that’s not going to make you a billionaire, is it? I mean, if you want to make a billion and you only earn $10m a year it’s going to take a hundred years, isn’t it? You’d want to do it in ten, I figure. That means $100m a year, or $2m a week, or $50 000 an hour. There’s not much room for looking out the window at that rate, I reckon. Certainly not while the client’s watching.
Don’t get me wrong. These calculations have nothing to do with envy, (or only a little) they’re just a glimpse into the wonderful and complex world of inequality.
You see, when I did the sums I discovered that these unimaginably rich people have a relationship to me that isn’t disimilar to my relationship to a large number of people on the other side of the equation. It seems that with my annual income of $50 000 (considered fairly average in Australia) I’m sitting somewhere in the middle.
Take the poor beleaguered people in Haiti. When the going’s good – I mean when they aren’t under rubble or suffering four cyclones in a year – they’re on $2 a day, or 25 cents/hour. That’s more than a 100 times less than me. On the basis of that ratio it seems that compared to them I’m up there with the Sols and the Alans. I don’t get billionaire status, but after the first five or ten million who’s counting?
What do we do with this sort of knowledge? (apart from stopping whingeing about our own problems) I have, really, no idea. Except, perhaps, and it’s only a suggestion, we could consider becoming a little more generous in the way we think. A little kinder. Possibly even a little closer to how we’d want the big money men and women to be if we could make them so.
I bring this up because it’s an election year. Between now and the poll I figure there’s a good chance we’re going to see the subject of asylum seekers and immigration raised as a way of garnering votes. An inherent suggestion that they – whoever they are: Sri Lankans, Burmese, Sudanese; those cast out by whatever man-made disaster happens to be flaring up this year – are going to take away from us what is rightfully ours. We’re also going to hear all sorts of arguments put forward by extremely well-educated and intelligent people as to why we can’t afford to take care of the environment, and how people who want to do this belong to anti-everything elites.
I suspect the only successful way to counter these arguments – and we need to counter them – is by presenting simple, humble truths: a recognition, for example, that we are, indeed, the blesséd of the earth. If we cannot show generosity then who can?
Hanrahan
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