Politics is about perception and that's becoming all-pervasive around the globe.

It should come as no surprise that Donald Trump appeals to middle America just as Bernie Sanders has sold the sizzle to the young.

Trump's Let's Make America Great Again appeals to the anti-elite who feel the country's gone off the rails and they've been forgotten at the side of the track. Sanders has moved the Democrats policy debate, putting raising the minimum wage, breaking up big banks and abolishing the death penalty squarely on the agenda.

Then look across the Atlantic at the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom. It was an anti-elite vote by the populous sick of feeling they've lost control of their country.

Then bring the debate home to this country and listen to the rhetoric, fermented by the foreign trust perception that mountains of money is being hidden through a complex web of legal loopholes here.

Labour's Andrew Little frothed at the mouth in Parliament's bear pit accusing the Beehive of being shackled to the world's rich and powerful, leaving most of us behind. And his groomsman, The Greens' James Shaw, bounding off the back of what appeared to be the growing gap between the rich and the poor with new Statistics New Zealand figures.

The stats show that around half of our wealth is held by the top ten percent while the bottom 40 percent owns just three percent. Shaw says they've been banging on about the inequality story for years but the Government refuses to listen. His solution is to have an economy that works for everybody but how that's achieved is anybody's guess.

But to the ears of the underprivileged, it sounds good, just as Little's rant does about our political lever pullers snuggling up to the privileged, powerful and the elite. 

Truth is the statistics haven't changed much in the past ten years and much of the change is of course stoked by rising house prices. And even though the perception is the rich are getting richer the figures actually show that New Zealand is pretty average when measured against other western countries with the United States leading the way with fewer owning more.

One of those fewer is of course Trump but he's seen as thumping the tub for the battlers while painting his rival Hillary Clinton as being in the pockets of Wall Street.

It's all about political perception and just watch that battleground becoming more fertile in this country over the next 12 months.