An easy to read, and more importantly easy to follow, overview of the history of equality in Australia and our attitude towards it. A great starting point for anyone interested in learning more about equality, or inequality.

Arguing for Australia to remain (or perhaps return to) an egalitarian society, Andrew Leigh uses excellent comparisons, for example how different sports codes treat equality and how the competition is affected accordingly. 

While these arguments are very broad, it makes the content accessible to basically anyone and would hopefully spark internal debate of how the reader really feels about equality.

I particularly found the discussion around “relatives” in equality interesting – especially in a time where I see more and more examples of people who don’t believe privilege exists, argue that equality of outcomes is not important. If systems and policies are in place which don’t result in any change to outcomes, and potentially even broaden the gap, is this not by definition the opposite of equal opportunity? 

“We must improve our education system, as a society we need to recognise that there’s nothing equal about a race in which people start from different points. Equality of opportunity doesn’t mean making some competitors run with lead shoes, but it might mean buying a pair of runners for someone who can’t afford them.”

Despite the fact that this book is written by a politician who is also an economist, I think I trust it. The sheer number and detail of the endnotes (all 418 of them taking up almost a quarter of the book's pages) suggest that the author is writing from a position of knowledge. (But then everyone who knows me knows that I have a footnote fetish.) I was impressed that only the last part of the last chapter and the conclusion could be read as at all partisan; the other six and a half chapters read to me as party-politics free. This book doesn't seem to make extreme claims, and indeed critiques some of the claims about the results of inequality in The Spirit Level, but does make a solid argument that Australia has got more unequal in recent decades and that this is a problem.

I'm not sure that this book makes me feel at all optimistic that rates of inequality in Australia are going to change, though. Surveys do seem to find that Australians are in favour of economic equality, and prefer wealth to be distributed more equally than it is now - but that might be because the rich don't actually know that they're rich and the poor don't know that they're poor. Everyone in Australia thinks that they're in the middle and that most other Australians are at about the same level of income as themselves. Tell the upper 20% of Australians that they actually have 62% of the wealth and that a fairer distribution would mean that they have a smaller proportion and see whether they're still interested in a more equal distribution! But maybe I'm overly cynical.

Some great lines in here, of which I think my favourite was the argument that Gina Rinehart is NOT 190 times more ingenious than her father, Lang Hancock, who was worth $150 million at the time of his death, and so can't be argued to have 'earned' her $29 billion by her own ingenuity.

As a member of the Uniting Church, which for better or worse has private schools, I also appreciate the suggestions of ways in which such schools can avoid perpetuating existing hierarchies in the chapter on 'Mobility'.

So, to sum up, a short book, a quick and interesting read, that I recommend to anyone interested in equality in Australia - despite the profession(s) of the author!