Warning: While I am not in any way fond of contemporary Marxists, especially Australian Marxists, nor am I fond of Marx’s theories generally, the article below makes heavy use of said theories. Please don’t take this the wrong way. This is not a contribution to the ongoing ‘class war’ or ‘struggle’. I use Marxist theory to highlight a problem that I think has more general ramifications for the harmoniousness of Australian society than class war. And let me emphasise that while I would like to see a harmonious Australia society, I certainly don’t see the path to that as quasi-militant ‘struggle’ or a grand socialist revolution, which is all hogwash. What we need is communication, cooperation and a bit of fraternity, which is much better achieved through peaceable means, rational argument, mutual respect and an acknowledgement that we are all fundamentally human. This is a humanistic piece, not a Marxist one.
You often hear that Australia is a classless society. We are very proud of the fact, especially because our cousins—the English—are very class oriented, and we’d like to see ourselves as just that little bit better than the English. Over there the entrenchment of class divisions has lead to centuries of conflict, often violent, such as the recent London Riots (hyperlink, The Conversation).
Some of the indicators that class does not exist in Australia are that everyone is your mate; nobody has table manners, including the extremely rich; and we don’t have two universities so exclusive that certain schools in the country tailor their advertising towards how many students they got in to those universities over the past decade. We generally don’t have the rigid systems of formalities (manners, titles, particular ways of dressing, things that you are and aren’t supposed to do at a dinner party etc) that classes use to distinguish themselves in British society, or any other heavily class based society for that matter. Besides wealth, most Australia’s are fairly similar. As much as a metropolitan accent is slightly different from a Bogan one, the two individuals in possession of them can probably get along fairly well. One isn’t going to call the other a foppish nonce nor is the other likely to consider the first ‘beastly’ or ‘a savage’.
But, and it is a very big but, we do have economic classes. Insert statistics here.
I don’t want to suggest that these class divisions are an abhorrent injustice that must be rectified post haste. I firmly believe that economic classes are not an unmitigated disaster provided the members of the lower classes possess enough relative wealth to be able to exercise agency and autonomy in their life and society and on their state. In places where certain individual’s control all campaign funding as well as the media (e.g. the Berlusconi machine), economic inequality can get out of hand. But in Australia a plumber can earn $70K straight off their apprenticeship, and marginal seats populated by ignoramuses appear to hold political sway, so there doesn’t seem to be an issue here.
But there is a more subtle and far more toxic way that the class system is operating in Australia, one which was entrenched by the Howard government and continues to form a core aspect of Abbot’s policy. A crucial part of a classless society would be some degree of co-mingling between individuals from across the classes. They might not actively seek out each other’s company but they are aware of what individuals in other classes are like and what their needs might be. The educational policies of the Howard era severely undermined Australia’s ability to co-mingle its classes.
Howard encouraged a traditional British Tory style class system by underfunding public schools so they would have difficulty producing top students, and then implementing a (very smart, sensible and quite well organised) apprenticeship system so that nearly all public school grads would enter trades. Simultaneously private schools were funded to the hilt and any parent who was a little bit more ‘aspirational’ (the most toxic word in the Howard vocabulary) was encouraged to take out a second mortgage to send their child to such an establishment for proper bourgeois conditioning. This system paid economic dividends: the government saved money, which made it look like a good economic manager, lots of people got well paid jobs and the skill shortage was alleviated (I said the apprenticeship system was good), and a whole generation of middle class children were educated by performance based institutions preaching a culture of competition and materialism (hello consumption).
What these initiatives also did was begin the process of segregating the upper and lower class in Australia. If everyone went to the same school, then while some individuals may undertake apprenticeships and begin trades while others go to universities and enter professions, the two classes would at least know of each other—they may even have been and remained friends in and after school. There would also be fewer cultural barriers to individual’s choosing trades/professions based on what they enjoyed/were good at, rather than because that was what their particular class typically did.[1]
Instead, individual who went to private schools have no understanding of what public school individuals are like—their wants, needs, attitudes, opinions, intelligence etc; and vice versa. This wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that the top universities in this country—the group of eight—are increasingly populated with nothing but private school graduates. When I first arrived in Canberra my residential college was more than half populated by public school graduates. In my final year half a decade later there was less than a dozen public school kids—they had been squeezed out by the better grades of various private school kids who appealed to the head’s vision of an academically high achieving hall (can’t blame him). This is a problem because it is the graduates of these universities who go on to occupy the highest civil positions in our society. They are ones who populate the public service and dominant the major political parties. They are the managers in the corporations that contribute to electoral campaigns, the employees of media enterprises, the journalists, the authors, the cultural gatekeepers and the academics. If the vast majority of the people who occupy these crucially influential positions find lower class individuals alien how are they to create policy that is sensitive to the needs of that lower class?
[1] Class consciousness is a powerful thing. I play tennis on a weekly basis with a 17 year old boy who is currently studying the highest level of mathematics available in the ACT. When I asked him what his post-school plans were he replied that he was going to do a building apprenticeships because that’s what his dad did and he liked it. This is fair enough, but I can’t help thinking that maybe civil engineering would be a bit more stimulating and potentially higher paying. It would also allow him to go to a US college and play tennis, which would be f’n awesome. My friend’s motivation seems to be largely derived from his class affiliation.
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