This is surely not a world I would want to live in. However, history tells us revolution is often the natural progression of inequality. To some, a society where four or five hundred families control the majority of a country’s wealth might be equally as repugnant as the above barbarism, yet it’s actually far more likely.

As of 2013, the 200 individuals on the BRW rich list were worth almost $200 billion, which is about 8 per cent of Australia’s gross domestic product, the value of every good and service produced in this country in one year by the other 23.486 million of us.

Despite cautionary tales of booms and busts, fortunes of hundreds of millions, of billions, are rarely squandered. They do not disappear. They compound at an astonishing rate and by the time Packer’s children are his age, the “1 per cent” which he and Gina swing with, so to speak, will probably own as much of the country as the entire population of Sydney.

Gallows, guillotines and the mobs which man them have given the rich sleepless nights for thousands of years for the simple reason they appear time and again as a correction to this sort of vulgar disparity.

Thankfully there are now more civilised ways of tackling the problem, like cleaning up and strengthening our labour movement to give workers power over employment conditions and wages and, of course, taxation reform.