Millionaires, billionaires, who else?

How many millionaires in Australia? You don't know? Okay, I'll make it easier. How many billionaires in Australia?

There are 32, according to the Forbes 2017 list. 32 billionaires in Australia. Do you know what 'billionaire' means? I looked up the online dictionary for a definite definition: a person who has assets of finance at least 1,000 million dollars. That is $1,000,000,000 – one thousand million. Any idea how this sort of assets or finance competes to your own? I can't even work that out.

Gina Rinehart has $15 billion. She's 69th richest person in the globe. The richest person is Bill Gates, from Microsoft, with $86 billion. This year there are 2,043 billionaires around the world – 233 more than last year: the first time more than 2,000.

This year there are 559 billionaires in the USA (Donald Trump is one of them). There are 317 in China; 108 in Germany; 101 in India; 93 in Russia; 66 in Hong Kong; 53 in the UK; 41 in Brazil; 38 in Canada; 36 in France and South Korea; 34 in Italy and Switzerland; 32 in Japan (and Australia); 30 in Sweden and Taiwan; and many other countries which have less than 30 billionaires.

The youngest billionaires this year are from Norway - Alexandra Andresen, age 20, and Katharina Andresen, age 22, both making money from their investments. The oldest this year is David Rockefeller Snr, from USA – he's 102 and makes his money from real estate and investments.

So why do people save a billion dollars, and why do they keep that money instead of helping other people – who, like in Australia, live in poverty?

• Algeria has one billionaire who made his money from food.... yes, food! Al Jazeera wrote about Algeria in 2014 saying that 23% of that population lives under poverty! 
• Chile has 12 billionaires who made most of their money from mining, paper and banking, but according to Contact Chile there is 14.4% of poverty in this country.
• Colombia has a severe poverty of 29%, but it also has 3 billionaires who made their money from banking... and soft drinks. It has been reported by the Borgen Project that Colombia's poverty has cut quite a lot, but there has still been a lot of violence as rural land is stolen from the owners. 
• Georgia has one billionaire but Georgia has 17.1% population in poverty. 
• Guernsey has one billionaire but Guernsey had 22.3% population in poverty (2014 reported in their 2017 pdf).
• Iceland has one billionaire but Iceland had 9% in poverty. 
• Romania had one billionaire and yet it had the “highest relative poverty rate in the EU”, according to Romania Inside. 25.1% of the population.
• Slovakia has one billionaire who got his money from real estate, but Slovakia has a poverty of 13%.

Nigeria has 3 billionaires with their funds made from cement, sugar, flour, telecom and oil, and yet it is the only country I found which has increased its poverty between 1990 and 2013. Why on earth would billionaires live there if they would never give to their countrymen?? 

The Philippines is one of the worst – 14 billionaires live there, while around 26% live below poverty. That would be around 26 million people with their population at 103 million. The Philippines is rated as 13^th populated on the globe – yet it is far behind many western countries for poverty. 

So how does Australia fare? ACOSS (Australian Council of Security Services) wrote a report in 2016 titled Poverty in Australia 2016. Australia is considered against OECD countries, and ACOSS found that 13.3% of the Australia population is “living below the internationally accepted poverty line”. There are, on the DSS spreadsheet workpage titled 'Payment by Rate', 2,497,468 beneficiaries not counting aged pensioners. Forbes said there are 32 Australian billionaires. There are, undoubtedly, many, many millionaires, but Forbes didn't count them in the report I looked at. There are, this year, somewhere around $89.7 billion dollars in Australia belonging to just the billionaires. I used to think I'd be angry when I found out this sort of stuff. Now, I'm just sad.

The DSS spreadsheet is very interesting – I can use that in the future. But for now I am looking at the Australian billionaires, thinking of the Australian millionaires (I even know some of them) and thinking of where I am living now. I'm pretty sure no rich people live here.

The quote I've printed here says what I feel – not just for children, but for anyone who does need it. I hope a millionaire – or a billionaire - will listen to me.