How the wealthy give: comparisons between Australia and comparable countries (USA, Britain and Canada)

Australia has little tradition of significant philanthropic giving. Compared with the United States, private donated wealth has played a minor part in the building of Australia's major civic, welfare, and cultural institutions. Australia still has no real counterparts to the Carnegies, Rockefellers, Fords, or their more recent manifestations: Bill Gates, George Soros or the Packard family. Australia's wealthy families have neither their mythic quality, their power, their reputation for beneficence, nor, perhaps, their notoriety. Nor are the small number of philanthropic foundations established by some of Australia's philanthropic families perceived as fundamental to the fabric of Australian society, and even to its international identity, as is the case, for example, with the USA's Ford Foundation, which since its creation in 1936 has made more than US$10 billion in grants.