Introduction for Economics.org.au readers
— Know the mots justes (the perfectly fitting descriptive terms): “latte lefties”, “champagne/chardonnay socialists”, “focaccia fondlers”, “parlour Bolsheviks”, “the chattering classes”, “the commentariat”, “conventional wisdom”, “the New Class”, “nimbys”, “bobos” (bourgeois bohemians), “NIMBY 2.0s”, “drawbridge syndrome”, “regulatory capture”, “featherbedding” and “guilty capitalists”; and then easily recognise as hollow the holier-than-thou politics of financially wealthy anti-capitalists.
— “Hey Benjamin, you name-caller, you’re just chucking names at us.” Yes, and accurately. Until your response resembles, “I’m not a champagne socialist because …,” then it’s as though you admit you are, but you’d prefer to be known only for your positive attributes. You’re insulted to hear yourself called a sham and a pain. Your disagreement appears to be with both your own behaviour and being called on it. Cheers.
— This distinct group (who, according to themselves, ought not to be described critically by others) are very confused. They confuse wanting to share a passionate opinion with demanding it be imposed by official edict and funded by conscription. They confuse morals with moralising and moralising with politicising. They confuse virtues with entitlements and vices with crimes. When they deem that a specific vice should not be a crime, they then deduce that it must be a virtue. They think everything important impels government to penalise or subsidise, and unintended consequences be damned.
— This plays into the underreported overriding tension between single-issue groups and the more balanced working-class; between motivated organised winners and innocent scattered losers; between beneficiaries of government intervention and those who pay for it.
— Those are the themes of the following eight articles, consisting of: two Robert Haupt articles prompted by Mick Young’s passing (1996); two Paddy McGuinness columns on New Class hypocriticism of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation (1997-98); two more McGuinness essays, and a Frank Devine one, marking the launch of Michael Thompson’s Labor Without Class: The Gentrification of the ALP (1999), which in turn marked the 50th anniversary of Ben Chifley’s “Light on the Hill” speech; and another McGuinness salvo triggered by another book, David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (2000).
1. & 2. Robert Haupt, “Labor pains,” The Australian Financial Review: Weekend Review, April 12, 1996, p. 2; and “In search of a vision,” The Australian Financial Review: Weekend Review, April 19, 1996, p. 4.
3. & 4. Padraic P. McGuinness, “The truth about the rise of the New Class,” The Sydney Morning Herald, May 3, 1997, p. 42; and “It’s time to admit Hanson sometimes gets things right,” The Sydney Morning Herald, July 2, 1998, p. 17.
5., 6. & 7. Padraic P. McGuinness, “Labor’s true voice should rise above chardonnay chatter,” The Sydney Morning Herald, June 10, 1999, p. 15; “Labor’s ‘chardonnay socialists’ definitely not a premier crew,” The Sydney Morning Herald, June 17, 1999, p. 19; and Frank Devine, “Hail to the Chif, but the light on the hill’s gone out,” The Australian, June 17, 1999, p. 13.
8. Padraic P. McGuinness, “Yuppies now bobos, and the clowns want it all,” The Sydney Morning Herald, June 8, 2000, p. 19.

1.
Robert Haupt, “Labor pains,”
The Australian Financial Review: Weekend Review, April 12, 1996, p. 2.

Labor needs a capable organiser like the late Mick Young or a schemer like Clyde Cameron to guide its healing and rebirth, and prevent its slide into long-term opposition. ROBERT HAUPT writes.

The Mick Young era saw the modern Australian Labor movement germinate, take root, flourish and spread, then wither and shrink back to a sprig, a none-too-healthy one at that. Should Bob Carr’s government fall in NSW, Labor would be the party of opposition federally and in every State.

The last time such a dire state of affairs prevailed was in 1968, exactly when a young shearer-turned-union-organiser became party secretary in South Australia.

Labor had suffered a huge swing against it at the 1966 Federal elections, and for a period of just over a year in 1969-70 it was in opposition in every Parliament, State and Commonwealth.

Mick Young assisted at the birth of the modern Labor movement, and it is easily forgotten what an agony-filled, protracted and bloody birth it was. Labor in labor, you might call it, and the lessons are relevant to Labor today. They go to what Paul Keating tried to define as leadership but for which a more accurate, if old-fashioned, word exists: character.

For the practitioners of politics, opposition isn’t hardship, it is hell. Its only morphine is optimism, a medicine available in those days at Dr Young’s surgery morning, noon and night.

The obituaries correctly described Mr Young’s knock-about ways and earthy humour, but left them as a sort of sideline to the politician, a suit of slightly disreputable clothes that he wore, something that was at best an addendum to his career.

The idea is that there could have been a Mick Young without the banter and the beer. Here speaks the spirit of our sermons-and-soda-water age, which holds that management is better than instinct, that systems should rule over people and that professionalism will beat the amateur every time.

Leave aside that the Duke of Wellington was only an each-way bet on a fair day and that Marshal Kutluzov was a one-eyed, corpulent, gout-stricken old man when pressed into service at an advanced age in 1812. They both beat Napoleon.

Mick Young represented the principle that an ounce of wit, correctly applied, can in politics do the work of 15 policy committees.

Now that Mr Keating has driven the party off the track and into the fence, it is worth remembering what had to be done last time Labor found itself in such travail.

The revival of the party then had nothing to do with the 1972 It’s Time campaign, except that it made that campaign possible. It had everything to do with healing, and learning.

To appreciate it, you must go back to the state the Labor Party was in after the landslide victory to Harold Holt in 1966. Nineteen sixty-six marked the 17th year of Labor’s occupation of the opposition benches in Canberra. If you think the swing against Paul Keating was big, it was as nothing in its psychological impact to the swing against Arthur Calwell then.

Like Paul Keating last time, Arthur Calwell had actually persuaded himself against all the evidence that he was going to win.

The electoral pendulum still awaited a Mackerras to perfect it, but the weight of the swing was clear: after going within a hair’s breadth of victory in 1961, Labor was by 1966 out of power for two terms at least. Parties far from power are prone to malignancy.

Their leadership can become infected by the culture of defeat, while of their rank-and-file Yeats’s words apply: The worst are full of a passionate intensity While the best lack all conviction.

In strode Whitlam.

He had a plan, or more accurately a vision, but his program of urban improvement at home and re-adjustment of diplomacy abroad was a destination without a map. John Menadue wrote three words on a piece of paper: party, policy, people.

You can go a long way with three words written down, if they are the right ones. These words acknowledged that there was no use in taking policies to the people until the party had been reformed.

The centre of passionate intensity was Victoria, where the party had after the Split of 1955 fallen into the hands of the VCE, the Victorian Central Executive, precursor to the Socialist Left (an endangered species, later to be seen in the company of deep Greens, radical feminists and professional multiculturalists).

Incredible as it may seem in today’s age of non-belief, the VCE had carved out a political niche as the hater of Rome: power achieved via concessions to the Catholic Church was tainted; better the chaste deserts of opposition than government attained through pandering to the priests.

To say that the attitude of the VCE towards the question of State Aid for church schools was unreasonable would not be correct. The attitude of the VCE towards State Aid for church schools was rabid.

The architect of victory against the VCE wasn’t Whitlam, it was Clyde Cameron, that master hater from Adelaide.

Set a shearer to catch a sectarian, you might say. Like Mick Young an AWU organiser, Mr Cameron brought to politics a tongue sharpened in the shearing-shed, as rough-and-tumble a debating society as existed in Australia at that time: talk-back without the radio.

Gough Whitlam acknowledged that in building the case against the VCE, he, the lawyer, acted as junior to Cameron, the shearer.

After tumultuous scenes, unimaginable on either side of politics today (since they involved ideology), the VCE overreached itself and fell. It was in this important respect Whitlam’s finest hour: by confronting Victoria’s socialist sectarians head-on, and defeating them, he made Labor electable.

By making Labor electable, he restored two-party politics to Australia, a contribution that transcends the flawed record of the Whitlam government itself.

But after the routing, the healing. Cameron the schemer couldn’t have done it, nor — after taunting his Melbourne Labor audience over their impotence — could Whitlam.

Mick Young did. Before long, as the Federally imposed receiver to the intellectually-bankrupt Victorian branch, Young had diluted the gall of defeat and sweetened the bitter medicine of intervention. It was the diplomacy he excelled at: the short-sleeves-and-beer type.

Bob Hawke could do it, when he chose to, while to Paul Keating it was like asking a tone-deaf person to sing an aria.

Mick Young was steeped in the Australian vernacular of mateship, in his ministerial days, it might be argued, contaminated by it. But it was inherent: it wasn’t a suit of clothes, it was him.

In his last duty for the Labor Party, Mick Young compiled a report on the federal implications of the swing against the Goss Government in Queensland. Addressing the problem of whether Labor voters of long standing might desert the party, he said in characteristic Young language that the true believers weren’t wavering at all in their support for the party. They weren’t thinking about leaving Labor, they’d left it.

A starting point for the party from its nadir might be this: did Paul Keating read the Young report? If not, why not? If so, to what effect?

***
2.
Robert Haupt, “In search of a vision,”
The Australian Financial Review: Weekend Review, April 19, 1996, p. 4.

In power, Labor offered answers with policies on the environment, land rights and feminism, but now Opposition Leader Kim Beazley has to develop an appetite for new ideas and ideals for mainstream Australia. ROBERT HAUPT believes the ALP has to turn off single issues to furrow broader strategies.

What if the following ideas are true? That the deep Greens have gone too far in their obstruction of projects of national importance. That radical feminism no longer has a following among young women. That Aboriginal policy based on white guilt is as misguided as were its predecessors based on white arrogance.

It is not wrong for one of the major political parties in a democracy to embrace ideas that are out of fashion, so long as it is convinced that the ideas will become legitimised by public opinion before long. Thus stood Gough Whitlam towards sewerage, a prophet millions of us honour in our suburbs today every time we press the button. The test is: do the party’s thinkers believe these are ideas whose time will come, or do they merely hope they are ideas whose time has not run out?

When it buried Mick Young, Labor gathered in conclave in the upstairs room at Sydney’s Bellevue Hotel in Paddington to the memory of that unique Australian identity, the shearer-statesman. Graham Richardson attended the funeral, but missed the wake, darting out of St Mary’s Cathedral to make a call on his mobile phone.

That was a shame, for Graham Richardson might have been able to answer some of the questions left hanging by Labor’s shocking defeat at the Federal elections. Having profited from Richardsonism and the so-called Green strategy, Labor is left high and dry now that the bills are falling due.

The party paid for these cancelled mines and deferred sawmills in the most precious currency it has: the votes of its true-blue supporters. Witness, next election, the vote against Bob Carr in the Labor strongholds of NSW.

Those ballot boxes will reveal rejection on the scale dealt to the aspirant of White’s who was incautious enough to inquire of the club steward just how many black balls had been cast: “Oh, Sir, it was horrible. Just like caviar.” To see how far Australian public opinion is being sheltered from the opinions Australians actually hold, consider the divergence between what the Canberra pundits thought would be the Federal election outcome and how the Australian electorate voted.

It is not that the interpreters of politics should be advocates of the new power — as many of our generation of reporters were for Whitlam’s ideas. It is, rather, that they must go out of their way to understand it. John Howard didn’t become Prime Minister by accident.

Sawmills and mines are Australia’s past — ask me, who hails from A.1. Mine Settlement, Victoria, the easiest town to find in the postcode directory. The A.1. gold and the logging at Matlock kept a valley alive in my youth. Now the upper valley is dead, while the lower entertains those who enjoy camping beneath the pillars of dust generated by their four-wheel-drive vehicles.

In that sense, Richardson was right when he tripped through the rainforests in his Italian shoes: pictures of the thing can be more potent than the thing itself, so long as you can represent it as beautiful and endangered.

But Green isn’t a strategy. If we were to enforce the Green doctrine, a first step would be to impose a punitive four-wheel-drive vehicle tax, to make valleys like A.1. Mine Settlement’s quiet and useful again. Who would that harm most? Why, the Greens, of course, the hypocrites of our age who rape the virgin they have sworn to protect. An environmental impact statement on the effect of the Greens on the Australian wilderness would be an interesting text indeed.

If not Green, then feminist? How illuminating it is to reflect on the Green-feminist nexus, each having been generated from America at the same time in two books of massive influence — Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and Betty Friedan’s The Female Mystique (1963). Nineteen sixty-two and 1963 are the years in which we who were born just after World War II reached an impressionable age. That there is no accident in this timing testifies to Keynes’s aphorism about the obscure philosophers to whom men of practical affairs are held in thrall.

Feminism, and Labor’s fascination with it, testifies to a similar truth: what goes around, comes around. Feminism might not be a virus, but it acts like one.

In our era, its virulent stages have coincided with periods of optimism that sprang from rapid economic advance. It takes an economic shock to create the idea of women as a class defined and oppressed by childbearing when, if the world were a fairer place, women would have been equipped from birth with the high shoulders, the aggression, the heart attack rates and the wives of men. Labor’s feminist strategy fails in this essential respect: there aren’t many new women who want to live like these pioneers.

The truth hasn’t yet got through, but today’s young women regard the heroines of feminism pretty much as the sons of Tobruk veterans regarded their fathers on Anzac Day: proud of the achievements, but impatient at the length of the recollection.

Nor does land rights an Aboriginal policy make. Realism requires us to define the limits of Mabo, and at a point that preserves the stake in Australia built up by white Australians. Guilt is not the starting-point for such a process, and will never be if only for this reason: that it requires an education industry to inculcate it, across the generations. White Australians aren’t going to vacate the continent: where would they go? The language of rape and invasion, so beloved of the radical feminists and the deep Greens, cannot convey the Aboriginal policy debate; by impoverishing that debate, it harms Aboriginal interests. In that way, most of the cries of racism are — more deeply — racist.

There have been only two ideas that the Western party of change has had in the past hundred years, two weapons with which to beat about the ears of the party of no change.

The first idea was work, and its entailed demands of the right to organise among toilers dehumanised by the Industrial Revolution; the second idea was the quality of life, and fair shares in the division of the spoils that the Industrial Revolution created. First the pie, then the slices.

Labor has won its great chances at office this century by offering an answer to those questions. Under Hawke, adherence to the strategy began to wobble, and under Keating it was forgotten. Instead of a strategy, Labor was left with a pose. Called leadership, this was essentially a claim by Labor to be the natural party of government, to wear the conservative mantle, to put on Robert Menzies’ shoes. But Labor is condemned by history not to be the natural party of government; it is the party of change.

To change, you must see. The imperfections of your current state are one half of “the vision thing”; the other, the audacious part, is to imagine how you might put those imperfections behind you. To define and articulate such a vision is the role of the party of change.

Kim Beazley is a voracious man, but today his appetite for ideas should be outrunning even his appetite for food. Australians generally look abroad for political inspiration, but the success of Hawke in 1983 put Australia ahead of the cycle of political ideas in America and Britain.

The US has its Hawke today in Bill Clinton; the UK is about to elect its Hawke in Tony Blair. Not much fodder for rumination there. Where lies the next big idea? Solutions depend on how well questions are defined. Mr Beazley’s answer cannot be to “How do we get re-elected?” but to the prior question, “Why should we be re-elected?”

That takes Labor to the crux of the matter: who is it, precisely, who does the electing? In this, Mr Beazley could fruitfully employ one of Lenin’s slogans: Kto? Kovo?

Employing a declension now almost lost to English, this translates as, Who? Whom? Who a great party in a democracy is depends on whom it seeks to represent. Bolshevik means one of the big, Menshevik one of the small. Translated into democratic terms (a language Lenin never used), that tells Mr Beazley one thing: get with the strength. Correctly defined, Labor has to become bolshie.

The task of rebuilding is huge, not just because of the enormousness of the defeat, but of the enormity of the damage to the party that preceded the defeat, and caused it. Labor became the captive of single-issue groups, its ranks infected by careerists whose credo was, “Ask not what I can do for the party, ask what the party can do for me.”

Disaffection spreads quickly in parties of idealism. Conservatives have this advantage: they are expected to break their promises.

To rebuild Labor as the party of trust, Mr Beazley will have to divide the people and the proposals that come before him into two rigid groups: mainstream, and single issue.

To the single-issue people, he must turn his ample back. There is no other way. Who are the Greens, anyway, or the feminist and multicultural lobbies? Whom can they petition, beyond the abject Democrats? The National Party? Their claim to Labor’s attention should be no greater than their claim to national attention.

By letting them drown in their own dust, Kim Beazley would be turning Labor away from Richardsonism. And embracing Youngism. Mick was rightly questioned for failing to keep a proper ministerial distance from his mates. We name the usual suspects: Eric Walsh, Brian Johns, John Menadue, Susie Carleton, Ed Campion, Alex Mitchell and (from time to time) me. But the fact that we turned up wasn’t the astounding lesson of Mick Young’s funeral.

No, that lay in the hundreds who weren’t on the published lists of Mick’s Mates, those who weren’t us. They were the repudiation of Richardsonism, the vindication of Youngism. It’s going to be a tricky business, restoring the Labor Party as a broad church, but in carrying it out Mr Beazley could do worse than ask himself, every time he is being urged to embrace some cause, whether the urger is the sort of person who would have fitted in at Mick Young’s funeral. Or, for that matter, at his own.

If the criticisms of the deep Greens, radical feminism and Aboriginal policy that began this article were wrong, the Labor Party would be in a fine state, able and ready to carry out the important duty of running the opposition in our two-party democracy.

The party would be in the state Gough Whitlam and his lieutenants had brought it to by 1969, after rescuing it from the zealots of an earlier era. Labor would, in short, be ready not just to gain power, but to deserve it. It isn’t, is it?

***
3.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “The truth about the rise of the New Class,” The Sydney Morning Herald, May 3, 1997, p. 42.

The Hanson phenomenon may or may not be a flash in the pan. But it has already shown signs of influence from elements far more sinister than Ms Hanson, with the publication of what purports to be “The Truth” about the situation in which Australia finds itself, much of which is familiar to students of the more unsavoury ranges of paranoid political thinking.

However, there is always a tendency among those who denounce the misuse of political ideas by the lunatic Right to forget that often enough these are just a rehash of far more interesting ideas which originated on the radical Left, and which are still useful in interpreting the nature of our society, especially today. One of these is the concept of the New Class.

It is accurate and useful to describe the social and political structure of Australia as being dominated by a “New Class” which is roughly identified with the educated white-collar middle class and professionals who constitute the political elite of our society. As Marx once put it, every rising class identifies its own interests and morality as universal.

Just as the bourgeoisie and subsequently the proletariat in the Marxist analysis successively identified themselves as the last word in freedom and social morality, so does the New Class which has some to power over the past 50 years, and especially the past 25 years, now attempt to express its interests as universal and morally good.

This has nothing to do with conspiracy theories and it is mischievous of those who try to identify the theory of the New Class with the lunatic Right to suggest that it has. It is clear enough that the whole complex of demands for more and more public expenditure on the free provision of arts, literature, culture and education, a large State employing more and more middle-class people on high salaries, a health system which will provide free the care which the prosperous middle classes demand as they grow older, and an ideology which denigrates the demands of the blue-collar and uneducated white-collar workers can be put together to form a category which can indeed by defined as a social class. This class is now hysterically defending its conquests of recent years against challenge.

The high moral tone which it takes on issues of race, immigration and Aboriginal policy is seductive, since few people in our society are in fact racist or anti-Aboriginal (though the critics of the New Class are denigrated as if they were); but the policies advanced on all these issues are such as never to hurt the interests of the New Class, whether they help their supposed targets or not. ATSIC is a typical product of the New Class, since it generates jobs directly and indirectly for them and their ilk, while doing the genuinely disadvantaged Aborigines little or no good at all.

It is easy to see why such concepts are rejected by those who, whether they describe themselves as conservative or progressive, are the intellectual members of and apologists for the New Class. However, they are not being intellectually honest when they equate the concept of the New Class with conspiracy theories of the ignorant and unsophisticated. The concept of the New Class has a long history, nearly all emerging from the radical Left. It has been discussed in Australia mainly by Professor Martin Krygier, and can be traced back to the pre-World War I Polish revolutionary Machajski (known in Russian as Makhaev).

Essentially it points to the fact that any regime tends to come under the control of the educated political elites who govern in their own interest rather than in that of the working class or the people.

In modern usage it originates with the dissident Yugoslav Marxist thinker Milovan Djilas, who identified the way in which communist societies, far from being a “dictatorship of the proletariat”, very rapidly evolved from their origins in coups effected by tiny minorities in the name of mass movements to a tightly controlled dictatorship of a privileged elite; the concept is reflected in the Russian term nomenklatura — “a privileged and largely hereditary caste” as Robert Manne puts it in his book, The Shadow of 1917.

It certainly seems that over the past 20 years Australia has been producing its own nomenklatura of bureaucrats, arts administrators, media gurus, official artists and writers, and so on. But the New Class is a wider concept, more essentially Marxist in its analytical underpinnings, which is not so easily defined and which extends into the managerial elites of the private sector just as much as those of the public sector.

The New Class hates business, unless properly regulated by its members, it detests the market and any mechanism like pricing which exposes to the vulgar gaze the reality of who gets what in our society. If you want all your cultural and material luxuries to be supplied free, what better than to claim you are doing so on behalf of the poor (whether they want them or not)? Unlimited high-quality child care at no charge, delivered by suitably trained (that is, indoctrinated) carers, is a quintessentially New Class demand. Those who realise that these demands must be paid for somehow devote their time to dreaming up tax schemes which will fall on everyone but themselves.

Of course it is only a concept, however useful, and it suffers from the limitations of its Marxist theoretical underpinnings. But what better way of pretending that such a radical and subversive critique of power in our community has no validity than to claim that it is a theory of the extreme Right?

***
4.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “It’s time to admit Hanson sometimes gets things right,” The Sydney Morning Herald, July 2, 1998, p. 17.

The really disturbing thing about the One Nation party is that it does not matter whether it tears itself apart or not. It has already achieved its main aim of changing the direction of Australian policy-making, and not for the better.

Despite the crudeness and inarticulacy of Ms Hanson and many of her supporters, they are essentially in agreement with the mainstream thinking of the political class these days, that there is such a thing as “economic rationalism” which is essentially evil and which must be denounced and avoided. This is a view which has taken deep root not just in the fairies-at-the-bottom-of-the-garden parties such as the Democrats and the Greens, but also in all the major parties.

Stripped of some of the rhetoric, the Hansonite views are espoused by most articulate and educated people these days — except those who have some grasp of economics. And there are even some economists who espouse them, on the grand old economic principle of product differentiation.

The difference between the elite views and those of the Hansonites are supposed to be mainly in attitudes to Aborigines and immigration (and perhaps the environment). One Nation is attacked, and has been from the day of that now notorious maiden speech, as racist and redneck. Strange that such crude, prejudiced and unintelligent people should have views which overlap with those of the elitists on just about everything except in that regard. How can they be so right on so many issues and so wrong on racism?

But is there so much difference even on that? While the Hansonites are critical of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, and policies towards Aborigines generally, are they any less patronising or certain of what is good for Aboriginal welfare than the urban lobbyists for native title and greater differentiation between Aborigines and the rest of the community? There certainly is crude racism in some attitudes to Aborigines expressed by those who live in close proximity to them in country towns, but there is a sophisticated racism in the treatment of Aborigines as somehow purer and closer to the real Australia than any white, in the continual desire to argue that they have been subjected to genocide and are deserving of infinite and eternal compensation for their maltreatment and dispossession in the past. The putting forward of descendants of supposed former owners of Canberra or wherever as official greeters at events such as the Constitutional Convention is just window-dressing.

Troupes of Aboriginal dancers are praised and applauded when they perform what are merely bastardised versions of what some people think corroboree dancing to have been. Anyone who has seen some of the early footage filmed by anthropologists and others of genuine Aboriginal dancing, which is mysterious and entrancing, realises this.

And what about immigrants? The “rednecks” are unhappy about Asian immigrants, whom they perceive as flooding into Australia and threatening their jobs and welfare benefits. In fact much of the prejudice is expressed not by “old” Australians, the dreaded Anglos and Celts, but by later waves of immigrants and their children. In Cabramatta, for example, the Yugoslavs and others who built the area up in the ’50s and ’60s are the ones who resent the new incursions most. They are directly affected. But for sophisticated urbanites the benefits of “multiculturalism” are mainly culinary, while immigrants are not seen as an economic threat (except in some schools and universities).

However, when the enlightened anti-racists are themselves threatened it is a different matter. The horror with which the High Court decision on access of the New Zealand film and TV production industry to our TV screens under local content provisions, as is provided for in the Closer Economic Relationship (CER) agreement, hardly sounds like multiculturalism. Indeed, the xenophobia is positively Hansonite. Wild claims are made about all the other trade treaties we are signatories to, as if they all invite the inclusion of foreign TV productions in local quotas. In fact the CER is unique. All this hardly differs from the fears expressed, just as irrationally, by the “rednecks” who fear competition for jobs from new immigrants.

Nor is there much difference between the Hansonite position on immigration and that expressed by many enlightened environmentalists. Zero net immigration has been espoused by groups advocating an “ecologically sustainable” population, and indeed some environmentalists go much further and argue that the Australian population is already too large for the carrying capacity of our land.

So far the main difference which has manifested itself between the Hansonites and their opponents is that the latter are more willing to take violent action against One Nation meetings, to disrupt them and try to prevent them. It is true that this has come mainly from a relatively small number of the lunatic Left. But the civilised defenders of “tolerance” and open hearts towards Aborigines and immigrants have shown little sign of any notion of how to deal with the Hansonite phenomenon other than by authoritarian and repressive means.

The genie is out of the bottle. It cannot be stuffed back in by forbidding the use of terminology which is unacceptable to the great and the good, nor by denying One Nation the status of a party which can command a substantial vote. It cannot be suppressed and it cannot be ignored, even if it splits and self-destructs — for there will be successors. Nor can the situation be remedied by returning to the economic policies of the ’50s, any more than we can return to the ’50s in social policy and “family values”. Instead of wringing our hands and denouncing Hanson while agreeing with most of her policies, it is time for rational thought.

***
5.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Labor’s true voice should rise above chardonnay chatter,” The Sydney Morning Herald, June 10, 1999, p. 15.

The ALP needs to rediscover its pride in the party’s working-class roots.

Speaking recently at a meeting of mainly Labor Party members, I was appalled, although not surprised, to hear somebody say that the trouble with members of the Australian working class was that they were racists and homophobes. The meeting was at an inner-city pub, and the middle-class socialists attending were eating excellent lunches and drinking red wine. They were classic examples of the “new class”.

Not that there is anything unusual about having a good meal; nor, unhappily, is it unusual to hear this kind of denigration of ordinary Australians and their traditional attitudes. It is all part of the changing composition of the Labor Party and its takeover by relatively well-educated middle-class people who like to think of themselves as occupying the moral high ground on all issues, and who, in the process, have developed a thorough-going detestation of their country and its people.

Of course, it is true that the composition of Australia has changed. There is a very much more diverse community than there was 50 years ago, and we have benefited greatly from immigration. But the great achievement of Australians has been to change and develop while retaining a distinctively Australian character which, as far as ordinary people are concerned, has a basic decency and tolerance.

While there are always extremists, it is not in general true to say that Australians are racist or homophobic. There is much to be critical of in our past, both in our treatment of Aborigines and of recent immigrants. But there is nothing like the depth of feeling which characterises true racism — people, as they get to know others, have always been accommodating. There is a good deal of stereotyping, but this falls away on personal contact.

As for homophobia, it is quite true that there is disapproval of overt homosexual behaviour, and of homosexuality in general. But apart from some violent yobs, the basic Australian attitude is, let’s mind our own business and live and let live.

However, it is not homophobic to take strong moral exception to homosexual practice as many people do; that is an aspect of most traditional religions. Nor is it homophobic to be unwilling to laud homosexuality while being otherwise indifferent to it; other people’s sexual preferences are neither a matter of pride nor significance.

Why is it so important to the urban elites to denigrate the common people? Partly it is the desire to feel good in themselves at being in the vanguard of enlightened thinking. But “enlightenment” does not always turn out so well. After all it was the advanced scientific and socialist thinkers who gave us eugenics and the vulgarised doctrine of evolutionary superiority which influenced Aboriginal policy for many years. All the attitudes of the past which are now derided were held most clearly by the type of people who now are most certain of their own virtue.

These people have come to dominate the Labor Party over the last generation and they embrace all kinds of strange doctrines and minority interests not as permissible but as preferable to the mainstream. They permeate all political parties in various degrees, but Labor is their preferred instrument of power, and they provide its administrators, its inner urban membership and benefit from the spoils of office by way of career advancement.

There has been a growing, though generally inarticulate, resentment among traditional Labor supporters and the mainstream of lower middle-class family people who have sensed that their interests are not only being ignored but that they are considered inferior. Hansonism is a distorted manifestation of this.

But there are plenty of well-educated people in Australia who place sufficient value on the character and uniqueness of the Australian people, who respect and admire their sincerity, honesty and openness, who have also noticed what has been going on, and they are beginning to speak up. There is a growing swell of new publications which are challenging the “new class” takeover of the Labor Party and the way in which anyone who questions their definitions of what is true and good is classified as beyond the pale.

The latest of these is to be launched in Sydney tomorrow by Labor’s Federal parliamentary spokesman on employment, Martin Ferguson. It is Labor Without Class, a small book by Michael Thompson, who springs from the old Balmain working class and after years as a builder’s labourer went to university as a mature student and took law and economics degrees. (I had better declare an interest here: the author is a friend and we have discussed these issues at length, and I have commented on earlier drafts.)

It is being launched deliberately on the 50th anniversary of Ben Chifley’s “Light on the Hill” speech. Thompson has meticulously analysed and documented the seizure of the reigns of power by the “chardonnay socialists” and the self-justifying discourse of the academics who are their cheer squad.

It is not sexist to point to the fact that the middle-class feminists have all too often pretended that any criticism of their self-interested activities is male prejudice, while they treat their poorer sisters who want nothing better than to lead fulfilled family lives with contempt. Only recently has the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling in Canberra pointed out that the main losers from the family policy of the Labor Government were the single-income, two-parent families.

Other writers, such as Katherine Betts, an immigration specialist, and Miriam Dixson, one of the earlier feminist historians, are taking a similar direction. But Thompson will be the most reviled, because of his bluntness, his obvious dislike of those people who denigrate his family and people, and his scathing sincerity. He is an articulate, rational and highly educated spokesman for the common people of Australia.

***
6.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Labor’s ‘chardonnay socialists’ definitely not a premier crew,” The Sydney Morning Herald, June 17, 1999, p. 19.

History tells us a social elite is essential, but this crop has produced a poor vintage.

What’s in a name? Or a tag? The term “chardonnay socialists” seems to have upset a lot of people, as did its predecessor, “Bollinger Bolsheviks”. The choice is partly a matter of alliteration; but if so, why not something like “sauvignon socialists”? The answer, as another false prophet once put it, is blowing in the wind.

It was Neville Wran who announced years ago that he had made a decision after considering it over a bottle of Rosemount chardonnay. That brought this then-trendy wine into prominence as a symbol of well-to-do (now seriously rich) Laborites.

The use of this term to describe a group is, of course, faintly pejorative. That’s why obvious members of the group, whether chardonnay drinkers or not, try to dismiss or ridicule it rather than facing up to the ideas behind it.

After all, they are the people whom Federal Labor frontbencher Martin Ferguson and the author of the newly released Labor Without Class, Michael Thompson, have described as determined to occupy the moral high ground; they are always more virtuous, civilised and cultured than the mass of ordinary people.

This is not surprising, since, as Karl Marx once put it, every rising class represents its own interests and claims as being for the general good of humanity.

The term “new class” was coined by a Marxist thinker, the Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas, who spent years in jail for his penetrating analysis of what was going wrong in the communist world.

He pointed to the way in which the education administrators and intellectuals of a “socialist” society tended to centralise and perpetuate the power of their own kind. They end up as, in effect, the ruling class — making the important decisions and dominating public discussion — while the mass of the people are treated as unthinking and in need of guidance.

Ever since the days of the Whitlam Government, it has been clear that such a group (by no means defined in terms of networks, but rather a common interest in accruing power and income through the mechanisms of the State) had emerged in Australia.

Socialism was a convenient ideology for members of the new class. It enabled them to express their often sincere concerns for the disadvantaged while offering policies which would provide careers and influence for themselves, involving, as state socialism does, an ever-expanding and influential administrative class.

The intellectuals would share their power through the universities, where they are taught, and the media, which they dominate.

At the same time it promoted a false enemy, big business and corporate capital, which they could attack as the “real” rulers of our society while they set about replacing them, as they have successfully in many areas. They dislike globalisation when it diminishes their power (in economic matters) but endorse it when it enhances it (environment, human rights, treaties, etc).

The term “elite” also upsets many people, because for so many years elitism has been a boo word. In fact, it has a long and respectable history as a concept in social theory.

It was the great Italian economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) who developed the concept of the circulation of elites, whereby particular minorities develop, fight for power, rule, and then are challenged and replaced — peacefully or otherwise — by new rising elites.

Pareto saw history as a continual cycle of one elite replacing another, with true democracy a mere chimera and, in fact, dangerous.

The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics quotes him as saying, just before his death, in his essay Liberta: “Most people are incapable of having a will, not to mention a will which has a positive effect on the nation, whose fate always seems to be in the hands of a minority which imposes itself with faith helped by force … Faith and power are interdependent: the existence of one is a necessary prerequisite for the existence of the other; it is possible and at times helpful not to make a show of force, but it is nevertheless a necessary presence.”

This was an extraordinarily perspicacious description of what was to happen under both communism and fascism, and what has happened in all democratic societies in a much gentler form since.

There is a generational element in the circulation of elites, in that the children of the ruling elites are given special advantages through education and contacts while the children of rising elites challenge the power of the established elites.

But one thing is common to all elites: a sure sense of their own virtue. They have a barely disguised contempt for ordinary people, they look for a faith (“vision”) to justify themselves and their role and, while accepting the forms of democracy, they see it as a matter of their own power.

Slogans like “people power” or “participatory democracy” mean the exercise of power by the articulate, educated elites who are prepared to sit through meetings and discuss their affairs (in every sense) interminably in coffee shops. (One commentator has suggested instead of “chardonnay socialists” the term “macchiato mob”.)

It is not surprising that such people deride appeals to the working-class traditions of the Labor Party as old-fashioned. They are. It is, of course, true that Labor could never hope to govern with only the old blue-collar base as its support.

Labor has to seek support from the great majority of middle-class Australians. But they are not “progressives” in the contemporary sense used by the elites, but are committed to fairly traditional values. While the young play around and experiment (as they always have, more or less openly), middle-class Australians value home and family, decency, a fair go, and they do not preach — but they do practise — tolerance.

They include the fastest-growing sectors of the workforce, including the small entrepreneurs — it is a traditional Australian working class dream to “be my own boss”.

***
7.
Frank Devine, “Hail to the Chif, but the light on the hill’s gone out,” The Australian, June 17, 1999, p. 13.

It will take more than wistful words to revive the party of the people.

As romantic and inspiring as Labor’s past is, there’s no going back to it, I’m afraid.

Peter Walsh, former Labor finance minister, for whom the romance lingers on, had called from Perth more or less to command my presence at the launch by Martin Ferguson of Michael Thompson’s romantic new book Labor Without Class: the Gentrification of the ALP. It was to be held at the Revesby Workers Club.

Walsh hung up without telling me where Revesby was, though. Roughly 20km southwest of the leafy Sydney suburb where I reside and in Labor’s heartland. I kind of remembered. But I was not sure how to reach either location.

Turning on to Henry Lawson Drive, after a tortuous journey, gave me metaphorical as well as cartographic encouragement. Within minutes, the palatial Workers’ Club came into sight.

Lest this sound like a squire’s visit to his tenants, I should say that I am fully aware of the malicious provenance of “leafy suburb”, am a lapsed Labor man who still hears the distant baying of the Hound of Chif. and of working-class lineage dating at least back to Cromwell, and possibly to the dawn of time.

Workable genes I have inherited but not a skerrick of wealth or privilege, unless there’s some murky lawyers’ business buried in the past. Could I actually be of royal rank? The odds seem to be against it.

Apart from Ferguson, the Labor aristos at the book launch were Walsh and Bill Hayden, and the local member, Daryl Melham. No sign of Gough or Paul, perhaps lost somewhere along Henry Lawson Drive.

The most stirring speech was delivered by Thompson, the author, a labourer turned lawyer by dint of mature-age university study.

My favourite passage: “The New Class … believes their moral superiority enables them to bully governments into adopting authoritarian means, such as anti-discrimination and anti-vilification legislation and tribunals, conditions on tax concessions and the like to implement their ideologically loaded agendas on feminism, multiculturalism, the environment and so on.”

This brought vividly to mind two of the most repellent images of mutual manipulation by Labor and New Class opportunists: Bob Hawke gravely receiving an Australian Conservation Foundation representative bearing a totally idiotic projection of global calamity as a result of pollution from Kuwaiti oil wells set alight by Iraq; and Paul Keating’s Nuremberg rally at the Sydney Opera House, at which he promised actors, artists and writers the earth if they would look at things his way.

Thompson also warmed hearts when he accused the New Class of “vociferously opposing virtually all proposals for urban consolidation, especially light industry and low-cost housing (which they believe, but do not publicly argue, lowers their property values). The only land use they approve of is open spaces (which they believe, but again do not publicly argue, improves their property values).

“Once the open space has been granted … the New Class effectively appropriate it for themselves by means of restrictions on parking and through roads, and the events that can be held.”

Thompson succinctly summarised a major theme of his book: “The basis for entitlement to access programs and safety-net schemes should be socio-economic status, not gender, ethnicity or other such categories unrelated to a person’s socio-economic circumstances.” Means testing, in other words.

As an exorcism of special interest invaders, Thompson’s words — spoken and written — have power and possible efficacy. But what then?

Ferguson introduced the romance, recalling that the book launch was taking place within a day of the 50th anniversary of Ben Chifley’s “Light on the Hill” speech.

Remember? “I try to think of the Labor movement, not as putting an extra sixpence into somebody’s pocket, or making somebody prime minister or premier, but as a movement bringing something better to the people; better standards of living, greater happiness to the mass of the people …”

That was the way, Ferguson said. Labor must become again the party of people who “do not enjoy the security, the financial rewards, the autonomy or the opportunities for advancement that are the birthright of the fortunate minority who have ‘careers’. It is both a moral and electoral imperative that we listen to them …”

Even after lapsing, I might once have heard such declarations with a lump in my throat. Now it strikes me as self-indulgent of Labor even to contemplate embracing any cause in a sectionalist way — be it chardonnay socialism or the succour of the poor and deprived. To be effective morally and electorally it has to listen to all Australians.

Chifley’s light on the hill is, alas, a mirage, created by viewing through the distorted lens of socialism. He tried to nationalise the banks. Heaven knows what he would have brought under stultifying government control had he held office through the 1950s.

Yet he is rightly a Labor hero. It took me some time after lapsing to work out why I admired him so much and why I felt an occasional, unwelcome pang of longing for his kind of Labor Party.

It comes essentially down to the simplicity of his life and his proudly working-class philosophy. His tiny cottage near the railway station at Bathurst is the greatest Labor shrine.

To revive a romantic past and recapture its heartland, Labor needs a new, Marxism-free Chifley as leader. Unfortunately, the nearest approach it’s got to a new Chif is John Howard.

***
8.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Yuppies now bobos, and the clowns want it all,” The Sydney Morning Herald, June 8, 2000, p. 19.

Bourgeois bohemians can’t see their own contradictions.

A new piece of pop sociology is achieving some fame in the United States at present, since it puts the finger quite precisely on one of the central features of modern society. This is Bobos in Paradise: the New Upper Class, by David Brooks (Simon & Schuster). Bobos are the successors to beats, hippies, yippies, yuppies, dinks and all those made-up words which purport to represent social trends. Bobos are the bourgeois bohemians who ever since the baby boom have been having their cake and eating it too.

The yuppies (young, upwardly mobile professional people) and dinks (double income, no kids) are bobos — people who, having adopted some kind of trendy leftism and progressivism in their youth, remain committed to a range of related opinions or dogmas, while in their working lives setting out to get everything in material terms which they can, accumulating high disposable incomes and wealth while they preach redistribution and generous welfare provision.

But they do not take the old path of the radical young who make good in later life — they try to live in much the same style as they did when young, simply on a much higher material plane. The original Australian bobo would have to be Gordon Barton, the founder of IPEC and of Tjuringa Securities; Gordon, a friend since my youth, achieved considerable wealth and now lives in retirement on the shores of Lake Como in Italy. He was in the old Sydney Push, and when he built himself a mansion in Coolong Avenue, Vaucluse, with servants’ quarters, children’s quarters, a huge kitchen paved with flagstones from a Portuguese nunnery, and much else, he made his own private quarters exactly like a beatnik’s dream of “If I were a rich man …” It was amusing to watch the faces of the high-powered suits he sometimes invited to lunch there. If only they had known what was under their feet.

Barton was ahead of his time, in this and other things. He founded the Australia Party, the forerunner of the Democrats, and The Review, which became Nation Review, fondly remembered by those who still glorify the Whitlam days. Now, as David Brooks has so accurately perceived in America, the bohemian style is the preferred style of the bourgeoisie. The only attributes of bohemianism they reject are poverty and independence of thought.

Their favourite grand opera is La Vie de Bohème — especially in Baz Luhrmann’s brilliant production which sets it in the ’50s Beat movement. They are in advertising where they peddle products they despise made by business they despise to customers they despise. They are in broadcasting, the public service, in merchant banking, in the stockmarket, in the churches, in the new electronic industries, and of course in the media everywhere. They have never got over the sexual revolution, despite failing performance, and hold as their chief articles of faith the desirability of abortion on demand and full-time professional care at public expense for the survivors. They are the republicans who do not trust the people to elect a president, the walkers for reconciliation who hire sky writers, the detesters of the rednecks who grow the marijuana they smoke at parties. They are the lawyers who derive huge fees from defending the poor and the human rights of the distant subjects of foreign bobos.

They are, too, the teachers and professors who have abandoned the uncomfortable disciplines they did not study assiduously in the ’60s and ’70s. Instead, they have replaced them with play time and popular culture — thus “cultural studies”, “post-colonial writing”, “performance art”, and amateurish daubing have replaced literature and art, with flourishing and well-paid professors and curators entertaining the bobos of the business world with illusions of social progress and radicalism.

“Progressivism” is the favourite hurray word of the bobos. It heals all wounds, smooths over any occasional feelings that there might be some inconsistency between their youthful bohemian idealism and rejection of the rich and powerful on the one hand and their opulent lifestyles, modified only by exercise and colonic irrigation in the attempt to live forever, on the other. They prattle incessantly about the Third World and its problems, the destruction of the world by business and environmental depredations, while they wheel like a mob of sheep back and forth to the latest “in” restaurants charging huge prices for tricked-up food and mediocre wines. Not to mention the café latte paradises.

Like most of the left-wing or progressive fashions of the last 50 years it is a product of America’s global hegemony. American firms have pioneered the fad for “dressing down” days, where for one or more days of the week the “suits” are encouraged to dress like the bobos they hanker to be. And, of course, dressing down does not mean turning up in shorts and thongs over a bulging beer belly. No, it has to be “designer” jeans, sneakers, and so on. They have been enthusiastically imitated in England and here. The real American imperialism has always been the dissemination of Donald Duck leftism.

The rapid spread of the bobo style is, however, threatening one of the most cherished illusions of the bobos. This is that there is an evil business establishment which rules the world, while the bourgeois bohemians, despite their leisured and decorative lifestyles, are somehow at one with the oppressed and the morally superior indigenous peoples of the world — who want to be bobos too, as some of the noisiest of them have become. The threat derives precisely from the “dressing down” phenomenon — when even the CEOs of corporate America, Australia and England begin to wear jeans, join in reconciliation walks, abuse John Howard for his supposed obstinacy and mean-mindedness, praise and collect post-modern art, and go all spiritual, what is there to distinguish them from the bobos?

Nothing, of course. They are simply members of the same new class elites which aspire to run our society if it were not for the inconvenience of voters and democratic elections.
_____
Further reading for Economics.org.au readers:
a) Recipe for government intervention: Gather winners and scatter losers — Bert Kelly, “How the strident pressure groups beggar everybody else,” The Australian, July 21, 1986, p. 9.
b) Robert Haupt, “Why no-one is nailing the Big Green Lie,” The Sydney Morning Herald, March 17, 1990, p. 6.
c) The ABC and the self-evident — Padraic P. McGuinness, “Stop the rot at the ABC: divide and rule,” The Australian, March 9, 1990, p. 13.
d) Neville Kennard, “Tax Producers vs Tax Consumers,” Economics.org.au, April 29, 2011.
e) G.K. Chesterton, “The Horrible History of Jones,” in vol. X of The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), pp. 500-01.
f) Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Marxist and Austrian Class Analysis,” The Journal of Libertarian Studies, vol. IX, no. 2 (Fall 1990), pp. 79-93.
g) And, for fans of alliteration à la “chardonnay socialists”: Shit State Subsidised Socialist Schooling Should Cease Says Singo — John Singleton, “The day the parents became citizens,” Nation Review, August 6-12, 1976, p. 1044.
h) Oh, and here’s Paddy McGuinness’s review of Don’s Party (1976).
i) Lastly, Paddy McGuinness had another term for champagne socialists: the AVRSL. This term is a parody on the RSL, which used to be quite a force. Perhaps this term is dated now, but perhaps its datedness makes it more cutting. Here are two McGuinness columns on this: “Today’s conservatives belong to the Anti-Vietnam RSL,” The Australian, April 25, 1989, p. 2; and, also at that link, “Protestors fighting the phoney war,” The Sun-Herald, May 31, 1987, p. 43.