The "new class"

THE «NEW CLASS»(essay)
Recently reactionary journalists and right-wing populistshave been dusting off and resurrecting Pareto-style theories about the «circulationof elites» and the idea first raised at the end of the 19th century by thenihilist Jan Waclaw Machajski and the anarchist Max Nomad, that the modern intelligentsiaconstitute a new and oppressive social class.
Thisrecycled «new class» theory takes a variety of forms in different hands,but all the major recent Australian exponents of it give it a distinctly conservativespin, imitating similar thinkers in the US and Europe. Katharine Betts arguesthat this «new class» forms a rootless cosmopolitan elite, whose views,sympathetic to migration and opposed to racism, defy the more popular racist wisdomof the native Australian Volk. Michael Thompson takes a similar line. P.P. McGuinessvery explicitly revives Pareto and says that the «Chardonnay set» andthe «chattering classes» are a silly group, who continue the «self-destructivehedonism of the 1960s», when what is really required is constructive conservatismas represented, of course, by his own reactionary ideas on all questions.
Theonly point at which this sustained right-wing ideological polemic impinges on sociologicalreality is in the chapters in Katharine Betts' book The Great Divide on The SocialLocation of Intellectuals and Australian Intellectuals and the Immigration Question.In these chapters Betts gives some statistics about the changed educational compositionof the Australian population, which is, in fact, not a bad starting point for aserious inquiry into what are the new features of the class formations in Australia.
Betts,however, only uses her figures in a very loaded polemical way, to develop her tendentious«new class» thesis. Unfortunately on further investigation Betts' figuresturn out to be a bit inaccurate, and therefore I have collected all the usefulmaterial available from that wonderful institution, the Australian Bureau of Censusand Statistics. The figures I now rely on are some of Betts' figures, with thoseof her figures that seem to be inaccurate corrected by the statisticians' figures.
Thetwo most useful census documents for this inquiry are Australian Social Trends1999 and the Social Atlas for each capital city, and I will use the 1996 SydneySocial Atlas as my working example. On page 83 of Social Trends 1999 is the ABSclassification of qualifications, which divides post-school qualifications intofive categories: «bachelor degree and above», «undergraduate diploma»,«associate diploma», «skilled vocational qualification» and«basic vocational qualification».
Forpurposes of describing people who have a university degree or equivalent, it seemssensible to group the first two together as representing a university degree. Inthe first census where degrees were tabulated, 1966, 1.5 per cent of the populationover 15 years had degrees. In 1976, 3 per cent had degrees. By 1996, KatharineBetts gives the figure of 10.2 per cent, but she seems to be wrong, as the Bureaugives the figure of 12.8 per cent.
Inaddition, the Bureau gives a figure of 8.8 per cent for people with undergraduatediplomas and associate diplomas together. For simplicity's sake, we may assumehalf the 8.8 per cent for each category, which means that in 1996, according tothe Bureau, approximately 17.2 per cent of the adult population had a universitydegree. By 1998, according to the Bureau, the figure had become 14.5 per centplus 7.9 per cent, which takes the number with a university degree up to 18.4 percent of the adult population, a very high figure indeed.
Anotherframework that is useful in relation to the educational qualifications of the populationis the figures for the raw number of tertiary students. In 1912, when the Australianpopulation was 4.5 million, there were a tiny 3672 tertiary students. In 1938,when the population was approximately 6.5 million, there was a still tiny12,126. In 1966, when the population was 11.7 million, the number of students hadrisen to 91,272. Thirty years later, when the population had increased about 50per cent to about 18 million, the number of tertiary students had soared sevenfold to 634,094.

Women predominate among graduates in the fields of health,education and society and culture
Inthe Census Bureau's documentation there is a very detailed breakdown of «Peoplewith post-school qualifications, by type of qualification» by both age andsex. They reveal a very sharp increase in the number of women with universityqualifications, who now number about the same as men, and who are concentrated insuch areas as teaching, the health industry, social work and also, to some degree,in commerce and business.
Thenumber of female primary teachers went up between 1988 and 1998 from 71.7 per centto 77.5 per cent. The number of female secondary teachers went up from 48.3 percent to 53.5 per cent, and the number of women teaching in higher education wentup from 27.3 per cent to 35.1 per cent.
In1996 227,000 people had bachelor degrees or higher in business and administration,35.7 per cent of them were women; 213,600 had university degrees in health,66.2 per cent of them were women; 357,800 had university degrees in the delightfulABS classification called «society and culture», defined as «economics,law, behaviour, welfare, languages, religion and philosophy, librarianship, visualand performing arts, geography, communication, recreation and leisure, and policing»,54.8 per cent of them were women. In engineering, however, with 120,100, only8.4 per cent were women.
Thegreat numerical explosion of people with university degrees was a product of theWhitlam period educational reforms. The extremely useful book, Australian SocialTrends 1999, has a detailed breakdown of the age composition of people with universitydegrees. Part of this table is reproduced here.
PROPORTIONS WITH DEGREES, 1996
Bachelor degreeAssociate or
Age (years)or higherundergraduate diploma
Males
15-244.2 per cent2.4 per cent
25-3414.6 per cent5.9 per cent
35-4416.2 per cent6.9 per cent
45-5413.5 per cent7.0 per cent
55+6.6 per cent4.4 per cent
Total10.8 per cent5.2 per cent
Females
15-246.8 per cent4.6 per cent
25-3416.6 per cent8.5 per cent
35-4515.3 per cent9.5 per cent
45-5410.7 per cent8.6 per cent
55+3.6 per cent4.5 per cent
Total10.1 per cent6.9 per cent
Theextraordinary increase in both men and women with degrees in the age group 25 to54 clearly illustrates the magnitude of the explosion of tertiary education fromabout 1974 onwards. This forcefully underlines the very important point that thiswas the period when women soared from being a very small portion of the peoplewith university degrees to rough numerical equality with men. It is fascinatingto note the rage of conservative misogynists like Michael Thompson against theWhitlam period of free education. Possibly the rough equality in educational achievementgained by women in this period is one of the features that infuriates them.
Whatemerges most strikingly from these statistics is the enormous growth in the proportionof the whole adult population with university degrees. The very size and diversityof this group makes nonsense of the conservative rhetoric that they comprise, asa whole, an elite «new class».
Itis important to bring to bear other available statistical information to get apicture of what is really the Australian class formation at the moment and howthis vastly increased group of university graduates fits into it. This is wherean investigation of the information contained in the Social Atlas comes in, particularlyif you superimpose on this information the fairly elementary and obvious informationprovided by the statistics of electoral behaviour in federal and state elections.
TheSocial Atlas tells you that people with degrees are heavily concentrated in Sydneyon the North Shore, most of the Eastern suburbs, and in a belt in the inner Westernsuburbs. There are smaller concentrations in the Sutherland shire, the GeorgesRiver area and the Blue Mountains. If you go, however, to the useful separate categorythat was provided in the 1991 Social Atlas, called «managers and administrators»,you find that this coincides almost exactly with the map of «high income earners».
Boththese maps, however, coincide only in part with the map of people with universityqualifications. Most of the people in the southern part of the Eastern suburbs andin the Inner Western suburbs, with university degrees, are thus neither «managersor administrators» or «high-income earners» as defined by the ABS.I submit that, quite obviously, these graduates are by and large the ones workingin teaching, health, social work, etc.
Coincidentally,the divide in political voting behaviour is on almost exactly the same geographicallines among graduates as the apparent geographical divide between «high incomeearners» and «managers and administrators» and the rest of the population.The southern-eastern suburbs and the Inner West vote overwhelmingly Labor or Greenetc. The North Shore, Wentworth, the Georges River area, etc, all vote solidlyLiberal. Any serious investigation of all these statistical tools shows that areal economic, political, and class division exists within the ranks of universitygraduates, not between graduates and the rest of the population.Census information, combined with election results gives a roughbut informative insight into the current Australian class structure
TheSocial Atlas provides a wealth of useful information. There are maps of the distributionof migrants of different backgrounds, and these maps are very informative. Mostnon-English-speaking migrants are concentrated in the Eastern suburbs, the InnerWestern suburbs, and the middle western suburbs.
Thepattern of people with trade qualifications is the obverse of the pattern of peoplewith university degrees. Many people with trade qualifications are concentratedin the southern part of the Eastern suburbs and the further Western suburbs,but quite a few are also concentrated in the Sutherland shire and areas like Hornsbyand the northern beaches. An overview of all the statistical information availablegives a breakdown of the class structure of the Sydney population on broadly thefollowing lines.
Atthe very top of Australian society there is a powerful ruling class, which interlockswith a power elite, if you prefer that form of words. This group is very small.It, however, exercises direct ideological influence and hegemony over a broadergroup who show up in the statistical figures as «managers and administrators»and «high income earners», and these two maps in the Social Atlas arealmost completely coincidental.
Forstatistical purposes, it is useful to group the core power elite and/or ruling classand the aforementioned two groups, together, as statistical Group One.
StatisticalGroup Two are very distinctly represented in the Social Atlas by the section ofthe map of university graduates, who are excluded from the map of «high incomeearners» and «managers and administrators». These lower paid universitygraduates comprise university staff, teachers, health workers, many public servants,minor bureaucrats in welfare organisations, and other such people. They are concentratedheavily in the Inner Western suburbs and the southern part of the Eastern suburbs.A very large number of these people are of upwardly mobile Irish Catholic or olderEuropean migrant background, and include many people who don't state a religiousbelief in the census. They are overwhelmingly Labor voters.
StatisticalGroup Three are the most diverse group. They are scattered all over Sydney exceptin the areas of very high incomes on the North Shore and in the northern Easternsuburbs. They include such people as clerical workers, proprietors and workers insmall retail businesses, bank workers, computer workers, call centre workers andfinance industry workers. They also include many self-employed tradesmen.
Theyrange from low incomes to quite high incomes and are of very diverse ethnicity,Anglo, Irish Catholic, European migrant and even including self-employed recentmigrants. A significant part of this group votes Labor, but many also vote Liberaland the biggest number of swinging voters is concentrated in this group. Theruling class attempts to exercise ideological hegemony over this group, particularlythrough television and the tabloid press, and a lot of the current reactionarypopulism of the right is an attempt to influence this group electorally.
StatisticalGroup Four includes the blue-collar section of the working class and the unemployed.Although manufacturing industry has declined somewhat, the blue-collar section ofthe working class is still a very decisive section of the population. This groupis now composed overwhelmingly of recent non-English-speaking (NESB) migrants.This section of society is concentrated in the Western suburbs, which are alsothe areas of recent migrant concentration and relatively high unemployment. Thisgroup overwhelmingly votes Labor in elections.
Evena cursory overview of the correlation between the information provided in the censuspublications and electoral results confirms the general thrust of the above break-upand analysis. This four-level description of Australian society is realistic anduseful for a variety of purposes.
Inmy view the decisive class division in Australian society is between the rulingclass, with enormous economic and political power, which exercises very great ideologicalinfluence and hegemony over the «high-income earner» and «managersand administrators» Statistical Group One, and the rest of the population.This four-level division of Australian society holds for all the major capital citiesand for the Illawarra, Newcastle, Whyalla, Launceston and Geelong, with the qualificationthat the smaller capitals and the provincial towns have a much lower NESB componentin Statistical Group Four, the blue-collar section of the working class.
Ruraland provincial Australia contains some elements of this division, but a concreteanalysis of rural and provincial Australia has to incorporate a number of otherfactors, and I will deal with rural and provincial Australia in another chapter.
Thealternative intelligentsia «new class» thesis is really ideologicallyloaded nonsense, belted out from time to time by different conservative punditsfor 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 underprivilegedAustralians against more educated Australians, as scapegoats, and it is an attemptto persuade the most underprivileged Australians that their interests lie withthe free market and the ruling class.
Thisconstruction is episodically useful to the ruling class electorally. Michael Thompson'sunpleasant humbug about non-manual employees' «core values of family, hardwork, independence and patriotism» counterposed to the almost unmentionablealternative values of his «new class» is the clearest expression I'veseen anywhere of this kind of pitch to backwardness.
Inthe McGuiness-Thompson version it is associated with a ferocious misogynism directedagainst «femocrats» and the «obscenity» of the Whitlam-periodfree education, when so many women made the great initial leap into further education.This curiously vehement anti-feminist rhetoric from the McGuiness-Thompson coteriehas a delightfully personal quality, suggesting many years of grievances on theirpart against the feminist phenomenon.The Katharine Betts-Robert Birrell bunch's anti-migration versionof the «new class» theory
Themost sustained and developed recent version of the «new class» theoryis the Betts version. In The Great Divide Betts repeats, from her old book, thechapter headed, The Case for Growth. This chapter heading is rather deceptive. Itwould be more correctly titled, «Betts' arguments against growth». Shenowhere 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 ofthe chapter is a sustained polemic against migration, with her arguments overwhelmingthe 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, calledThe Social Location of Intellectuals, with the following imperishable paragraph:
«Thenew class cannot have supported the idea of high immigration because expert opiniontold them that it was a good idea. Disinterested experts refute most of the argumentsfor immigration and are equivocal on nearly all the others. Consequently if wewant to explain new-class attitudes we must look at the ideological role which supportfor 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 backgroundquestions to be explored. What is this entity termed the „new class“,what role does it play, and why should educated people want to demonstrate thatthey belong to it?»
Whatfantastic chutzpah the woman has! Some of her fellow anti-immigrationists become«disinterested experts», yet she nowhere seriously addresses the casefor migration, and constructs a value-loaded «sociological» explanationfor the viewpoint of university graduates, which she continually asserts from herreading of very old opinion polls, mainly from the 1970s and 1980s, favours immigrationand multiculturalism, when, according to her, the ordinary Australian volk are againstthese things!
AsI've outlined above, her merging of different segments of the university-educatedsection of the population as some sort of global «new class» is intrinsicallyabsurd, 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 andmulticulturalism.
Fromwhere I stand, the fact that my political opponents on the Liberal right includea significant group who are at least civilised in relation to race, migration andmulticulturalism, seems to me quite a good thing, and I will form a united frontwith them on those questions, although we will war against each other on othervery important matters.
Thepopulism of Katharine Betts' attack on employers in the building industry for favouringmigration is typical of her frequently expressed concern for the interests of poorerAustralians. Nevertheless, the entrepreneurs in the building industry are absolutelyright. Migration is obviously good for generating work, commercial activity andprosperity.
ThroughoutBetts' two chapters expounding the «new class» theory, she desperatelytries to paint a picture that hostility to multiculturalism and migration is thenatural condition of ordinary Australians, and that the more civilised views ofuniversity-educated people are an aberration from this so-called «norm»,which she tries to imply is general in Australian society.
Sheeven gets in a sharp attack on the Catholic Church in her introduction. That hoaryold Anglo bogey, international Papism, supports migration because the birth rateis dropping and it wants more Catholics! Ms Betts will dredge up the most ancientativisms in her attempt to mobilise the population against migration and multiculturalism.Racism is not innate in «human nature»
Ifyou step back a little from Betts' ugly narrative, the flaws in it become reasonablyobvious. Racism and opposition to migration and multiculturalism are not innatein human beings. They are usually learned behaviour. Kids in schools don't developany hostility to people of a different appearance unless such hostilities are deliberatelystirred up by adults.
Theapparently 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 backwardleadership of the labour movement in past eras. It wasn't innate.
Itwas constructed in the context of the imperialist British conquest of Australiafrom its indigenous inhabitants, who often resisted quite vigorously. This racismwas developed in the domestic conflict here with the Irish Catholic section ofthe population, who were in constant conflict with the racist pretensions of theruling class of «British» Australia.
Fromthis angle, rather than being some aberration, it is strikingly obvious that improvededucation organically undermines racism and hostility to migration and multiculturalism,by allowing the more civilised instincts, which are the ones really innate inhuman beings, to develop. Betts' and others' (including her ostensible opponent,Ghassan Hage) fancy post-modernist story that university graduates' oppositionto 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 complexstory.
Bettsmakes great play of the fact, pointed to by all of these reactionary populists,that the enormous upheaval in English speaking countries against the monstrous imperialistwar in Vietnam, was one of the major commencement points in the enormous swing amongeducated people against all forms of racism and opposition to migration.
Thesepopulists associate this development also, in their propaganda, with the explosionin numbers of tertiary educated people, which commenced at approximately the sametime. Well, the dates and times are more or less correct, but their interpretationof these developments is only valid if you presume a bigoted racism as the normin human behaviour.
Ifyou 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 mostfamiliar, the Whitlam period of free education did coincide with the enormous popularmobilisation against the imperialist monstrosity in Vietnam, in which I personallywas 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 andlower middle class Anglo-Australians, and of the first generation in universitiesof European migrant background.The shift in attitudes to race among students and graduates coincidedwith their shift towards Labor in electoral politics
Thedramatic shift in attitudes to race and migration that took place in this periodamong university graduates, also coincided with the swing of both universityundergraduate populations and university graduates to the Labor side in electoralpolitics. Untilabout 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.
It was only in the 1969 election that Labor even got to 40 per cent preference amongst tertiary students, and it was only in 1972 that polls suggested a majority of students, for the first time ever, supported Labor. It was only about 1972, also, that a majority of graduates began to swing towards Labor.
All these major changes coincided with the massive expansion of university education to social groups that had never previously had access to it. In this wonderful period of the expansion of tertiary education to new layers, there were a number of significant secondary features. For instance, in 1967 the extra school year was introduced in New South Wales.
As a result, the only freshers in universities were a large cohort of mature-age students who were encouraged to take advantage of the gap year to start university education. (This was the year when the Vietnam antiear protests, incidentally, really began to gather momentum, and it is my very distinct memory that many of these mature-age students, who by then knew a bit about the world, were in the forefront of this development.)
A little later, throughout the 1970s the very notable phenomenon took place of mature-age women students taking advantage of scholarships and the Whitlam free education to get degrees, and many of these women became rather belligerent feminists, having previous been deprived of tertiary education by social circumstances.
In short, the combination of all these factors produced a massive change in the moral, cultural and political climate of the times, and this had a very big and happily enduring impact on the generations who acquired their education in the 1960s and 1970s. It was a time of great inquiry, criticism and change.
It may have had its aberrations and eccentricities, but it was a great time to be alive. In this period, as I observed and experienced it, a number of previously latent currents in Australian society came to a certain flowering, such as the basically healthy ethical training in relation to matters like race and migration in Catholic schools.
This was the period when the products of the Catholic education system formed a disproportionate part of the undergraduate population, having been well instructed by the brothers and nuns to take full advantage of all the Whitlam period educational opportunities available to them, which pitched them headlong into the political and cultural radicalisation of the period.
Thesubstantial swing among students and graduates in this period against racism, did owe a lot to the educational revolution of the period, but it also owed a lot to the new moral climate that emerged in these conditions, which actually corresponds more adequately to basic civilised human instincts than the bigoted backwardness that the Katharine Betts of this world believe is normal in human beings.
Happily, these more civilised attitudes have persisted among people who acquired their education over this period. It's their normal state of being in relation to all these matters. There may be a certain amount of group identification in it as well, but that's no bad thing either! It's better to be a proud member of the generation of 1968 or 1972, in my view, than to be a dopey bigot.
Over the last few years I have time and time again had the experience of graduates of the classes of 1968 or 1972 bringing their children into my bookshop, reminiscing about the past and attempting to introduce their sometimes rather bored kids to the delights of Furry Freak Brothers comics and the serious literature of the period.
It is my impression that the decisive sea change on cultural matters, censorship, politics, race and migration made in the 1960s and 1970s, by many people who were educated then, tends to persist into the next generation. Even if the children of the class of 1968 or 1972 are sometimes a bit bored by them, they tend to retain the basic values acquired by their parents during the great sea change.How Betts, Birrell and company worry about Sydney. Bob Gouldlive from Gomorrah
Arather bizarre aspect of the 25-year Betts-Birrell crusade against migration andmulticulturalism is the particular attention these Anglo-Victorians always giveto the perceived problems of life in Sydney. Over the period they have made constantdire predictions of social, environmental and economic disaster in Sydney, andlater events have mostly proved them wrong.
Overthis period Sydney has constantly evolved. There are real problems in Sydney, manyof which stem from the successful economic development of Sydney and NSW. A veryserious and worthwhile Sydney economist, Phil Raskell, has made his recent lifework the careful documentation of, for instance, such things as the widening economicinequality in Sydney.
Forthis useful project, he has worked extensively on the public statistical recordsof who pays tax and at what level. But Phil Raskell never overloads his useful andthoroughly commendable work on income inequality, with the vehement anti-migrationand anti-development rhetoric that the Monash group does. They tend to grab holdof Phil's economic work, whenever it is published, and then they put their ownunpleasant anti-migration spin on it.
Sydneyis a very significant city. It has been in the forefront of Australian economicdevelopment since the early years of the 20th century. It is now, in fact, Australia'seconomic and financial capital, and it is the city in Australasia that is mostlocked into global financial markets and to trade in the region.
Itis Australia's global city, and has a similar role to New York, Shanghai, Bombayor London in the US, China, India or Britain. It is at the bottom end in Australiafor unemployment and the top end for job creation. It has always had a distinctethnic and cultural mix.
Inthe 19th century, Sydney and NSW were widely noted for having the highest proportionof Irish Catholics in the country. For the past 15 years Sydney has been the favouredpoint of entry for the spectacular wave of Asian migration, and about half the Asianswho come to Australia have Sydney as their first preference.
Sydneyand NSW have historically had by far the longest period of state Labor governmentsin Australia. The Labor Party started here in 1891. The defeat of the conscriptionreferendum in 1916 was a product of the size of the Catholic population in NSW andthe strength of the labour movement in this state.
NSWwas also the site of the greatest ever popular mobilisation of the labour movementagainst the ruling class during the Lang period in the 1930s. At this moment wehave a state Labor government almost as firmly entrenched as two earlier governments,the one led by McKell and the one led by Wran. The present electorally very successfulPremier in this Labor government looks like Pinocchio, can't drive a car (likemyself), is well known for his literary and historical interests, and is marriedto a confident Asian migrant, a businesswoman, Helena. He has just been re-electedas Premier in one of the biggest electoral swings in recent history.
Sydneyis full of the bustle and activity that so pained one of the literary anti-migrationists.Sydneysiders rather like this bustle and activity, because it means jobs and incomes.
Sydneydoes have plenty of problems. There is increasing inequality. Housing prices aremuch higher than elsewhere, which is good for those who own a house, but bad forthose who are starting out. Taken as a whole, however, the problems of Sydney arenot insoluble and they are not made worse by migration.
Migrationactually produces an economic prosperity that lays a basis for the solution ofmany of these problems. Even the poorest cohort in Sydney, people who live inthe Western suburbs, have increased economic opportunities because of the natureof Sydney. The Victorian academics who use Sydney as a shock-horror example ofthe consequences of migration, are at a considerable loss for an explanation forthis basic conundrum. If Sydney is so bad, why is it the favoured point of settlementfor about half the people who wish to migrate to Australia?Their Arthur Calwell and mine
BothThompson and Birrell wax lyrical about different things said by Arthur Calwell inhis autobiography. I find their colonisation of Calwell thoroughly offensive. Calwellis one of my heroes. I actually knew Calwell and had some political dealings withhim. I revere him for the following things that he did in his life:
·          His oppositionto conscription and support for Irish independence during the First World War,which earned him a military intelligence file.
·          His opposition,from within a Labor cabinet, to conscription during the Second World War.
·          His decisiverole in starting mass migration from non-British sources in 1946, which includedhelping Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and pushing aside the rabid Melbourneestablishment anti-Semitism of the time.
·          His solidsupport for the Labor side against the Groupers during the Split.
·          His courageousand far-sighted opposition to the Vietnam War and conscription, which was the contextin which I had dealings with him. He was quite willing to speak for our hard-nosedand militant Sydney Vietnam Action Committee, despite the fact that we were denouncedby many of the «official Left» as splitting Trotskyists.
Calwell was a complex, courageous and intelligent man, but he was a man of his place and time, with some of the religious and cultural prejudices that came from his background.
Predictably, Thompson and Betts celebrate only his most backward statements and attitudes, which suit their reactionary purposes. In my view, Calwell's great contribution to the Australian labour movement and Australian life will endure after this petty colonisation of his legacy has been forgotten.
The area in which Calwell's weaknesses were striking were his attitude to race and his moralistic attitude to questions like censorship and sexuality. In both these areas the absolutely fundamental cultural changes of the 1960s and 1970s are irreversible. The vast majority of the people, whose origins are in the robust Irish Catholic layer of Australian society, who had their education in the 1960s and 1970s, have a totally different attitude now, on questions such as sexuality, censorship and race.
Like me, quite a few of those people respect Calwell's contribution on the other matters, but they laugh in a slightly embarrassed and amused way about just those things that Thompson and Betts celebrate in Calwell, because as a social group, the Irish Catholic-identified section of the Australian population have painfully shed those prejudices — rather more so, possibly, than Anglo-Australians.
We respect Calwell for his great contribution, but we understand him as a man of his place and time, and there's not the slightest chance that his backward prejudices on some matters will strike any chord at all among the majority of those who come from the cultural background that he came from. It is really cynically eccentric for reactionary Anglos like Betts and Thompson to be hanging their hats on Calwell's weaknesses. I revere Calwell, but he belongs to us, not to them!Why Betts and company can't win
The Betts-Birrell bunch have been conducting an energetic and resourceful campaign against migration and multiculturalism for the past 25 years, and this new outbreak is only the latest episode in their campaign. In my view they have to be combated and opposed, but happily I don't think they have much chance of winning. Australian society has evolved well and truly past them.
If you look at the books that they have published at intervals during the course of this campaign, the actual scale of migration that has taken place subsequently has tended to be at the top end of their direst predictions, and at the top end of their predictions for Asian composition etc.
Happily, none of their gloomy prophecies of social disintegration, racial conflict and other baleful results from this high immigration, have taken place. In fact, throughout the period, there has been a steady, small decline in unemployment during periods of fairly high migration — a real conundrum for Betts and company — and a steady improvement in prosperity and economic activity, despite the obvious persistence and even widening of inequality.
The decisive major obstacle to their campaign to stop migration stems, however, from the real class formations that currently prevail in urban Australia that I have described above. In modern urban Australia, the population is now so diverse and marriage and family formation has now such an exogamous element, that the objective basis for nativist opposition to migration and multiculturalism of the Betts-Birrell-Sheehan sort is constantly being eroded by the new social circumstances.
All Australian tertiary institutions outside the smallest provincial centres are now ethnically and culturally diverse and produce many, many multiracial couples in all levels of society, from the poorest to the very richest. Most urban schools are now ethnically and culturally diverse, with the same result. The civilised attitude of both the Liberal-voting managerial group, and the Labor-voting public service and education group, among university graduates, is not going to change.
The next layer, the bank clerks etc, are also ethnically and culturally diverse, and opposition to migration is steadily declining among these people because of the diversity of the group. The bottom segment of urban society is overwhelmingly made up of recent migrants. In one of her asides, Katharine Betts remarks that, from her point of view, the group that she found in her old opinion polls who had the highest figure of support for migration and multiculturalism, were that dogged, hard-core, pro-migration group, NESB migrants with university degrees.
Well, of course, that group is growing constantly as well. In the real terms of actually evolving Australian society, many of the arguments of the anti-migration lobby are educated atavisms and unpleasant shrieks from the primeval past, but we have to work hard, educate people and campaign vigorously to keep it that way.Robert Birrell and the Monash anti-immigrationists are at it again
You have to hand it to the Robert Birrell, Monash University bunch. They don't give up on their 25-year campaign against immigration, and their more recent campaign against Asian immigration, which they try to cloak in a show of concern for the migrants they investigate. They have just produced a new study aimed at highlighting the number of recent migrants who are in poor social groups. (Article in the Sydney Morning Herald, September 19, 1998, page 3, by John Marsh)
This is a slightly new spin in their long campaign against migration. The last time I remember one of their studies being highlighted in the press, they concentrated on the notion of alleged Vietnamese ghettos in Cabramatta, Sydney and Richmond, Melbourne.
This line of argument was refuted by other demographers and migration consultants, who were able to satisfactorily establish that Birrell and company were wildly overstating the ghetto angle and that the concentration of Indo-Chinese, for instance, in Cabramatta and Richmond was less than 20 per cent.
Obviously, the ghetto argument wasn't terribly successful among serious commentators, although it has been considerably more successful in the spher of urban myth spread by people such as Pauline Hanson and Paul Sheehan.
Therefore, Birrell and company have produced a new study, in which they look for concentrations of poor people from a number of non-English-speaking backgrounds, in certain working-class suburbs around Sydney. What an amazing discovery! Poor, non-English-speaking migrants tend to be concentrated in poorer working-class suburbs. Gee whiz!
The underlying bias of the Monash Centre for Population and Urban Research against migrants and migration is made very clear in Birrell's reported comments, in which he uses his «discoveries» as a chance to once again repeat his long-standing attacks on multiculturalism and immigration.
A few questions must be asked about Birrell's study. Did he try to track the Asian and other non-English-speaking migrants alongside, say, a study of English speakers of rought the same socio-economic group in the same suburbs?
He obviously got his idea for selectively tracking non-English-speakers from the excellent research work of Phil Raskell who, for many years, has been studying the breakdown of economic power and income in Sydney, Who is Rich and Who is Poor?, and doing it as one properly should, not for migrants alone but for the whole population.
In his studies, exactly the same suburbs that Birrell mentions emerge as centres of poverty for both migrants and English-speakers. Birrell has turned this normal demographic inquiry into class, income and status, into a value-loaded attack on recent migrants.
The tendency of recent and poorer migrants to concentrate in already-existing poorer working class areas, is in fact obvious, and has existed right back to the first European settlement in Australia. For instance, from the middle of the 19th century, when Sydney began rapidly developing as a big port city, the poorest suburbs were the city itself, which had an enormous population in those days, Glebe, Chippendale, Ultimo, Pyrmont and Camperdown.
Studies in those days showed those suburbs to be the areas inhabited by the poorest working-class and even lumpen-proletarian people.
Census figures in those days, which listed occupations, showed a preponderance of labourers, domestics, unemployed and some tradesmen in those suburbs. They also showed a sharp religious imbalance in Sydney suburbs. The poorer working-class areas that I've just named had a much higher preponderance of Irish Catholics, around 40 per cent of the population, whereas richer people tended to live in the outer suburbs of Sydney, such as Petersham, Canterbury and Ashfield, and these suburbs were only about 15 per cent Irish Catholic.
The anti-migrant bigots of those days, largely from the British Protestant upper crust of the colony, used to regard the predominantly working-class Irish Catholic suburbs as cesspools of poverty and iniquity.
Further on in Irish history, in the 1950s and 1960s, many of the suburbs Birrell mentions had a high proportion of Greek, Italian, Polish and Yugoslav migrants, who in their time, were also much poorer when they arrived, for the obvious reasons.
Many studies were done in the 1950s and 1960s showing the poverty of the newer working-class migrants from European countries, and there was much clucking by the Robert Birrells of the time about Greek, Italian, Maltese and Yugoslav alleged ghettos. The irony is that many of the suburbs discussion the 1950s and 1960s in relation to the older European migrants are the same suburbs that Birrell talks about now.
All any of this underlines is the obvious point that the poorer cohort of every wave of migration tend to end up in the poorer suburbs.
As sugar coating on his essentially racist approach, Birrell mentions that there are many Asian migrants in Sydney who are affluent and do well, and who live in suburbs other than the ones he names, and he implies that their immigration may be all right. This, of course, raises the obvious question: is he demanding that only already affluent Asians be allowed in? This seems to be implied in his attack on family reunion and high levels of migration of less-skilled Asians.
Civilised Australians of all ethnic and cultural backgrounds, who have some sens of Australian history, should consider that Australia has been for most of its existence a country of rapid mass migration. This migration has always been dominated by poorer people looking for a new life and better chance in a new country.
Poorer migrants have always outnumbered richer migrants. This was true of the Irish in the19th century and the Europeans in the post-war years. I bet Birrell did not conducta survey among the poor migrants on whom he descended as to whether they preferredbeing in Australia or in the poorer countries from which they came.
Theanswers they would give in any such survey are pretty obvious. Mostly, even difficultconditions in Australia are better than the conditions in their countries of origin,and it's this impulse that drives all mass migrations.
Birrell'sconcern for these poor people can be dismissed as crocodile tears, overlain on aconstant and implacable desire to keep out the people from the nether world whohe views as threatening the Australian social fabric.
CivilisedAustralians should mobilise vigorously, as a lot are, in defence of the generalpolicy of keeping Australia's doors reasonably open to migrants from many countrieson a non-racist basis, and on a basis that allows poorer people to migrate as wellas richer people.