When we talk about inequality, we tend to focus on income. After all, if some people are raking in thousands of dollars a week while others get by on just a few hundred dollars, that would seem to be a key contributor to inequality.

Income inequality is certainly an issue, with the top one-fifth of Australian households taking home two-fifths of the country’s income. But it’s actually our distribution of wealth that’s the biggest driver of inequality between the “haves” and the “have-nots”. It’s also, crucially, holding us all back from economic growth.

The problem is not that young people pay too much income tax, but that wealthy Australians pay very little – or none at all.Credit: Matt Davidson

A report by the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) and the University of NSW last year found that in Australia, the top one-fifth of households hold nearly two-thirds of the country’s wealth.

With an average of $3.25 million locked away, these households have their hands on about 90 times the amount of wealth stocked up by those in the bottom one-fifth of households.

And if we look at the number of people with “ultra-high wealth” – more than $750 million – Australia ranks fifth in the world (probably not a ladder we want to be topping).

It’s little surprise that most of the inequality in wealth comes down to our distribution of housing: especially the big gaps in the value of the family homes people own, but also the wealth held in investment properties.

But the research found shares and investment properties were the most unequally distributed forms of wealth – the top 10 per cent holds nearly two-thirds of the total value of these assets.

Many young people –........

© The Sydney Morning Herald