Out of Luck

The distribution of wealth is far more equal. To begin with, there is no poor class in the colonies. Comfortable incomes are in the majority, millionaires few and far between.' This opinion, voiced a century ago by a British journalist on a tour of the colonies, sums up the widely-held and long-lived view that Australia was a working man's paradise, an egalitarian society free of the poverty afflicting other countries. Such a view could only persist if the poor were ignored or treated as objects