Statistical Group Three are the most diverse group. They are scattered all over Sydney except in the areas of very high incomes on the North Shore and in the northern Eastern suburbs. They include such people as clerical workers, proprietors and workers in small retail businesses, bank workers, computer workers, call centre workers and finance industry workers. They also include many self-employed tradesmen.
They range from low incomes to quite high incomes and are of very diverse ethnicity, Anglo, Irish Catholic, European migrant and even including self-employed recent migrants. A significant part of this group votes Labor, but many also vote Liberal and the biggest number of swinging voters is concentrated in this group. The ruling class attempts to exercise ideological hegemony over this group, particularly through television and the tabloid press, and a lot of the current reactionary populism of the right is an attempt to influence this group electorally.
Statistical Group Four includes the blue-collar section of the working class and the unemployed. Although manufacturing industry has declined somewhat, the blue-collar section of the working class is still a very decisive section of the population. This group is now composed overwhelmingly of recent non-English-speaking (NESB) migrants. This section of society is concentrated in the Western suburbs, which are also the areas of recent migrant concentration and relatively high unemployment. This group overwhelmingly votes Labor in elections.
Even a cursory overview of the correlation between the information provided in the census publications and electoral results confirms the general thrust of the above break-up and analysis. This four-level description of Australian society is realistic and useful for a variety of purposes.
In my view the decisive class division in Australian society is between the ruling class, with enormous economic and political power, which exercises very great ideological influence and hegemony over the "high-income earner" and "managers and administrators" Statistical Group One, and the rest of the population. This four-level division of Australian society holds for all the major capital cities and for the Illawarra, Newcastle, Whyalla, Launceston and Geelong, with the qualification that the smaller capitals and the provincial towns have a much lower NESB component in Statistical Group Four, the blue-collar section of the working class.
Rural and provincial Australia contains some elements of this division, but a concrete analysis of rural and provincial Australia has to incorporate a number of other factors, and I will deal with rural and provincial Australia in another chapter.
The alternative intelligentsia "new class" thesis is really ideologically loaded nonsense, belted out from time to time by different conservative pundits for a variety of purposes. In the P.P. McGuiness and Michael Thompson version, which is reproduced at its crudest in the unspeakable Murdoch tabloid, The Telegraph, in Sydney, the obvious aim is to whip up the hatred of the most underprivileged Australians against more educated Australians, as scapegoats, and it is an attempt to persuade the most underprivileged Australians that their interests lie with the free market and the ruling class.
This construction is episodically useful to the ruling class electorally. Michael Thompson's unpleasant humbug about non-manual employees' "core values of family, hard work, independence and patriotism" counterposed to the almost unmentionable alternative values of his "new class" is the clearest expression I've seen anywhere of this kind of pitch to backwardness.
In the McGuiness-Thompson version it is associated with a ferocious misogynism directed against "femocrats" and the "obscenity" of the Whitlam-period free education, when so many women made the great initial leap into further education. This curiously vehement anti-feminist rhetoric from the McGuiness-Thompson coterie has a delightfully personal quality, suggesting many years of grievances on their part against the feminist phenomenon.
The Katharine Betts-Robert Birrell bunch's anti-migration version of the "new class" theory
The most sustained and developed recent version of the "new class" theory is the Betts version. In The Great Divide Betts repeats, from her old book, the chapter headed, The Case for Growth. This chapter heading is rather deceptive. It would be more correctly titled, "Betts' arguments against growth". She nowhere states, in a clear or developed way, the arguments in favour of migration, to then go on to refute them.
Rather, she just mentions cursorily a few sentences of some arguments, and the whole of the chapter is a sustained polemic against migration, with her arguments overwhelming the rudimentary "straw men" she constructs on the first couple of pages. This enables her, to her own satisfaction at least, to start her next chapter, called The Social Location of Intellectuals, with the following imperishable paragraph:
"The new class cannot have supported the idea of high immigration because expert opinion told them that it was a good idea. Disinterested experts refute most of the arguments for immigration and are equivocal on nearly all the others. Consequently if we want to explain new-class attitudes we must look at the ideological role which support for immigration plays for them, which means exploring its role as a status symbol. But before the evidence for this theory can be investigate there are some background questions to be explored. What is this entity termed the "new class", what role does it play, and why should educated people want to demonstrate that they belong to it?"
What fantastic chutzpah the woman has! Some of her fellow anti-immigrationists become "disinterested experts", yet she nowhere seriously addresses the case for migration, and constructs a value-loaded "sociological" explanation for the viewpoint of university graduates, which she continually asserts from her reading of very old opinion polls, mainly from the 1970s and 1980s, favours immigration and multiculturalism, when, according to her, the ordinary Australian volk are against these things!
As I've outlined above, her merging of different segments of the university-educated section of the population as some sort of global "new class" is intrinsically absurd, given the many conflicts of interest and opinion within these social layers. Nevertheless, she's probably right that a significant majority of university graduates, both the Labor-oriented and poorer health workers, teachers, public servants, etc, and the Liberal-voting, more free-market "managers and administrators" etc, do have in common generally civilised attitudes supportive of migration and multiculturalism.
From where I stand, the fact that my political opponents on the Liberal right include a significant group who are at least civilised in relation to race, migration and multiculturalism, seems to me quite a good thing, and I will form a united front with them on those questions, although we will war against each other on other very important matters.
The populism of Katharine Betts' attack on employers in the building industry for favouring migration is typical of her frequently expressed concern for the interests of poorer Australians. Nevertheless, the entrepreneurs in the building industry are absolutely right. Migration is obviously good for generating work, commercial activity and prosperity.
Throughout Betts' two chapters expounding the "new class" theory, she desperately tries to paint a picture that hostility to multiculturalism and migration is the natural condition of ordinary Australians, and that the more civilised views of university-educated people are an aberration from this so-called "norm", which she tries to imply is general in Australian society.
She even gets in a sharp attack on the Catholic Church in her introduction. That hoary old Anglo bogey, international Papism, supports migration because the birth rate is dropping and it wants more Catholics! Ms Betts will dredge up the most ancient ativisms in her attempt to mobilise the population against migration and multiculturalism.
Racism is not innate in "human nature"
If you step back a little from Betts' ugly narrative, the flaws in it become reasonably obvious. Racism and opposition to migration and multiculturalism are not innate in human beings. They are usually learned behaviour. Kids in schools don't develop any hostility to people of a different appearance unless such hostilities are deliberately stirred up by adults.
The apparently endemic racism of "British Australia" was an ugly construction, built and whipped up over generations by tabloid newspapers, bourgeois politicians, the Protestant churches, and accepted as a line of least resistance by the backward leadership of the labour movement in past eras. It wasn't innate.
It was constructed in the context of the imperialist British conquest of Australia from its indigenous inhabitants, who often resisted quite vigorously. This racism was developed in the domestic conflict here with the Irish Catholic section of the population, who were in constant conflict with the racist pretensions of the ruling class of "British" Australia.
From this angle, rather than being some aberration, it is strikingly obvious that improved education organically undermines racism and hostility to migration and multiculturalism, by allowing the more civilised instincts, which are the ones really innate in human beings, to develop. Betts' and others' (including her ostensible opponent, Ghassan Hage) fancy post-modernist story that university graduates' opposition to racism is some kind of cultural badge of status is, like most post-modern rhetoric, a misreading of social reality or, at best, only a tiny part of a much more complex story.
Betts makes great play of the fact, pointed to by all of these reactionary populists, that the enormous upheaval in English speaking countries against the monstrous imperialist war in Vietnam, was one of the major commencement points in the enormous swing among educated people against all forms of racism and opposition to migration.
These populists associate this development also, in their propaganda, with the explosion in numbers of tertiary educated people, which commenced at approximately the same time. Well, the dates and times are more or less correct, but their interpretation of these developments is only valid if you presume a bigoted racism as the norm in human behaviour.
If you don't, other interpretations present themselves immediately. My interpretation, which I assert to be the valid one, is this: in Australia, with which I am most familiar, the Whitlam period of free education did coincide with the enormous popular mobilisation against the imperialist monstrosity in Vietnam, in which I personally was lucky enough to participate, with many thousands of others. It also coincided, indeed, with the avalanche into higher education of the first substantial generation, out of for instance, Catholic secondary schools, and of other working class and lower middle class Anglo-Australians, and of the first generation in universities of European migrant background.
The shift in attitudes to race among students and graduates coincided with their shift towards Labor in electoral politics
The dramatic shift in attitudes to race and migration that took place in this period among university graduates, also coincided with the swing of both university undergraduate populations and university graduates to the Labor side in electoral politics. Until about 1969 the overwhelming majority of tertiary students and university graduates, to the number of about 80 per cent, always favoured Liberal in every election in Australia since responsible government.
