Club Australia

The national (net) wealth is the total sum value of monetary assets minus liabilities of a given nation.

Wealth includes (1) natural assets such as land, forests, fossil fuels and minerals, (2) human capital – the population’s education and skills, and (3) physical capital includes such things as machinery, buildings, and infrastructure.

According to a 2013 Credit Suisse report Australia was second in the OECD behind Switzerland in national wealth per adult

Most of the Swiss wealth is in banks, watches, engineering and chocolate. They have probably dropped a little since then due to losses in their now less attractive banking sector and aggressive currency depreciation.

The net worth per Australian adult in 2013 was US$402,578, of which US$503,070 was in assets and US$100,492 was debt.

Just yesterday I noted that the value of all residential dwellings in Australia is $5.4 trillion – info usefully provided by the TV in the gym.

I checked and the market cap of all ASX companies is $1.6 trillion.

Assuming that non-residential dwellings and land are worth another $5.4 trillion, and that private companies are worth at least as much as the listed companies, that gets us to $14 trillion.

Superannuation totals around $1.5 trillion.

To this has to be added human and other physical resources, including all those mineral resources – I get a total of at least $20 trillion.

Even subtracting for the impact of Tony Abbott, that leaves us with assets of around 800,000 mostly illiquid dollars per person. Much more than calculated by the Swiss.

And there is a little debt here and there – I am not sure how much of this debt is offshore and I am not sure how much this matters. But it does manage to suck up most of the liquidity that we do have.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could renounce our citizenship and get a $800k payout cheque when we leave the partnership of the criminally insane? Criminally insane because, despite this high inherent wealth, a large fraction of the buggers think they are hard off and would do just about anything to change that.

Or, on the flipside anyone seeking asylum here would have to buy into the partnership – $800k thanks, or at least a debt to that tune.

The Chinese have until recently been able to buy a ‘Golden’ visa to Australia for $5m – it seems this was well priced for Australia.

So it seems Australia’s problem is not assets, it’s cashflow. Which is why we have a habit of selling assets to generate cashflow.

Maybe we would be better off putting ALL the crown assets into a huge publicly listed vehicle (say $10 trillion market cap) and slowly sell all the stock in this company to overseas buyers.

As the money flows in we could all get an annual cheque for being part of the tribe, just like various indigenous communities I have visited around the world.

And then when the stock is all sold we could re-nationalise the business and maybe compensate the shareholders – actually, probably not. The trick would be to wait until some huge natural or human disaster (say a big war) when everyone’s eye is off the ball.

Then 18 months later, the apparent period for total global financial amnesia, do it all again.

Hang on, that’s sort of what we are doing….