What’s the point of media rich lists these days? They reveal the hard truths of birth, gender, race — and COVID

While Russia’s oligarchs are rushing around hiding their superyachts in sanction-free ports, Australia’s 250 rich listers are quietly enjoying the lazy half-billion each they’ve added to take their average wealth up by one-third through the COVID pandemic.

Thanks to News Corp’s annual wealth-porn supplement — the Rich List inserted in The Australian last Friday — we can see just how well they’ve been doing.

Looks like Australia’s 1-in-100,000 billionaires and multibillionaires — the 0.001% — have seen their combined wealth climb to about 27% of GDP while most of us were busy trying to keep safe, working from home and getting vaccinated.

The list identifies 133 Australian dollar billionaires (or 99 in the more global US dollar measure).