The gap between Australia's wealthy and poor remains high according to newly released data on the wealth of households.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics' Household Wealth and Wealth Distribution Australia report came out on Wednesday. Although some publications, such as The Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald, have jumped on the numbers as evidence that Australia's wealth has gone backwards for the first time since the survey began in 2003, the Bureau says there is no statistical difference between the mean household net worth in 2011-12, the most recent year for which data is available, and 2009-10, the previous time the survey was run.

The mean net worth in 2011-12 of $728,139 appears lower than the 2009-10 figure of $759,030, but the results cannot be distinguished with any confidence due to sampling error (see appendix 2 of the report for a detailed explanation).



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However, this is the first time wealth has remained flat – in other years it increased. This may reflect the lasting effects of the global financial crisis.

The report also highlights the uneven distribution of household wealth. To analyse this, the Bureau sorts the surveyed households by a measurement such as net household worth, and then divides them into five equal-sized segments, called quintiles. So the lowest quintile would contain the poorest households, and the highest quintile would contain the richest.

Most recently, the mean household net worth of the highest quintile was $2,215,032, and the mean for the lowest was $31,205.

Here's the proportion of total wealth for each quintile, click the years to compare:



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The richest quintile has 60.8% of total household net worth, whereas the poorest quintile has only 0.9%. Again, there has been no statistically significant change in these proportions from 2009-10 to 2011-12. However, between 2003-04 and 2011-12 the second and third quintiles have decreased their share of overall wealth, whereas that of the richest quintile has increased.

It's not strictly true to say the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, but the gap between them certainly is not closing.