‘What Happens Next?’: Is Australia Classist?

Man: The top 20 percent in Australia have over 90 times the wealth of the lowest 20 percent. Certainly, if you go back 100 years, we're better than we were then, but more recently we've become more unequal.

Woman: I think the problem of basically having a segregated schooling system by class in Australia is getting worse.

Dr Susan Carland: When we talk about inequality in our society, there's a lot of focus on issues like gender and race inequality. However, we don't seem to give the same attention to class inequality. Why is that? Is class inequality getting better or worse?

In this new series, we'll be looking at class inequality in Australia. We'll talk to experts across different fields about how class inequality impacts our society in areas such as politics, education, and journalism. Our guests on this series are Chair of the Monash Sustainable Development Institute John Thwaites, author Bri Lee, senior reporter for The Saturday Paper Rick Morton, and historian Dr Tony Moore. Welcome to our look at class inequality on What Happens Next?.

John Thwaites: Hi. I'm John Thwaites and I'm the chair of the Monash Sustainable Development Institute at Monash University, and ClimateWorks Australia, also part of the Institute. And I've just led a project called Transforming Australia, which has highlighted the growing wealth inequality in Australia.

Dr Susan Carland: John Thwaites, welcome. What do you see as the moral or ethical problems with class inequality?

John Thwaites: Well, the moral aspect of that is that it's totally unfair for one group of people to get unequal access to all the opportunities that another group has. And I think it goes back to our fundamental beliefs in humans as being equal, whether it's the declaration of human rights, or many religions have a general underpinning that humans morally should all get a fair go and an equal go. So I see it as very deep and a very moral issue.

Dr Susan Carland: Obviously there's lots of different types of inequality, but if you think about class inequality in Australia, do you think we are getting better or worse over time?

John Thwaites: That's a really interesting question because certainly if you go back 100 years, we're better than we were then, but more recently we've become more unequal. So I think the story of Australia was, we were world leaders in giving middle class people, working people, rights, minimum wage, those sorts of things. In the early 20th century, right up until probably the last 20 years, obviously the one glaring omission was our Indigenous community, who have never had equal rights and were treated appallingly through most of the 20th century. But for the non-Indigenous community, it was a very good story of progress. The last 20 years, though, has been that period where the trickle down economic theory has dominated a lot of thinking around the world, economic liberalism, which has really just been another way to say ‘transfer wealth from the bottom to the top’.

Dr Susan Carland: If Australia continues down its current trajectory – let's assume we change nothing, we don't change anything to do with taxes or welfare, and we just continue down the path that we're on – what do you think Australia looks like in the next, say, 50 or 100 years when it comes to class inequality or socioeconomic inequality?

John Thwaites: Well, it looks more unequal, and that means it's not the Australia that I think most Australians would want to live in. It looks more like the United States. And I don't think any of us want to go down that track where a few billionaires – now nearly trillionaires – own a huge part of the wealth of the country, and not only the wealth, a disproportionate amount of the power. And Australia has prided itself on being a relatively egalitarian society, and by comparison with, once again, the US, we have been. But what we've seen in the last 20 years is that the share of wealth owned by the top 20 percent has increased and the share of wealth at the bottom 20 percent has decreased.

I think the top 20 percent now have something like 90 times the wealth, 90 times the wealth of the bottom 20. And that's not just a figure on a spreadsheet, that is power, it's access to goods and services. And over time, that level of inequality drives conflict and it reduces the social contract. The feeling that we all have is that we want to get in and help the country and do the best. But once again, in the United States, I think you've seen that breaking down of the social contract and a lot of the conflict that they have there – a lot connected to race, but also class. So that's not the track we want to go down in Australia.

Dr Susan Carland: Obviously, different types of inequality can feed into each other. Racial inequality can then impact on social inequality, economic inequality. What do you see as the main things feeding into class inequality in Australia? How do we untangle that knot?

John Thwaites: Well, wages are a good start. So working class people haven't had a pay rise since about 2012. I mean, wages have been very flat for nearly a decade, so that is one factor.

But I think if something else has come in much more in the last 20 years or so, and that's the casualisation of the workforce, where more and more people are not in a full-time job, they're in a casual job. And a lot of focus of that has been in the so-called gig economy and so people – Deliveroo riders, these sorts of things. But actually it's coming in a lot of other areas too, including universities, where in the past people would see a full time and a long term career opportunity, now so many people are getting short-term contracts.

And that means that these people are a lot less secure in their work, they get less income, they don't have sick leave or holiday pay. And I think that's feeding into a class divide now, which is more about the type of work you're on whether you are in what were traditional working class or middle class occupations.

So some people in what might have been classed as working class occupations, more trades have been protected historically by unions. And a lot of them are men too, and so men have traditionally had that union protection. A lot of the workers in the casual area are women, not unionised, they don't have protections. And that's sort of a new lower class if you like that's become embedded in the last 20 years or so. So I think we have to move away from that casual type of employment to more secure employment. And that's quite a shift in thinking for employers and for society.

Dr Susan Carland: We talk a lot about inequality now. Equality in many ways seems to almost be almost the religion of our modern society – it's the thing that we focus on a lot, we see as the ultimate good and goal. One thing I've noticed, though, when we talk about inequality in our society, is there is a lot of focus on gender inequality, there is a lot of focus on racial inequality, there is a lot of focus on things like homophobia. We don't seem to give the same attention to class inequality, it doesn't seem to have the same social traction. Why do you think that is?

John Thwaites: Well, it's partly because things have changed. The demography has changed so that traditional division of labour between workers in traditional working class jobs and then capital in the middle class, some of that's broken down. And so, as I said, a lot of the inequality is being suffered now by people who aren't in what were classed as traditional working-class jobs. They are in these casualized jobs, new jobs in hospitality or the gig economy. So those traditional classifications are potentially less relevant, but it doesn't mean there's any less inequality.

What we're seeing is that people who might have come be in areas in white collar jobs, but they're still in very low-paid, insecure white collar jobs. So I think it's better to focus on what people are actually getting in terms of their wages and conditions if you were going to tackle that level of that type of inequality.

And I think in our cities, for example, we're seeing more changes in where people live. Traditionally, you had working class suburbs, middle class, upper class suburbs, you've seen the inner suburbs, which were working-class, now becoming much more the home of the wealthy. And so once again, some of those traditional place-based categorisations don't apply in the same way. And we're seeing levels of inequality now spread throughout the suburbs with people in insecure work not getting as much work as they would want. And they could be spread anywhere around Melbourne, but particularly now more in the outer suburbs.

Dr Susan Carland: Rick Morton is an author and the senior reporter for The Saturday Paper. Rick discusses the impact class inequality will have on journalism as well as our democracy. Here's journalist and author, Rick Morton. Rick Morton, you've written quite a bit on the role of class in Australia. What impact do you think class inequality has on journalism?

Rick Morton: I think it has such huge explanatory power and – class is, I think, the most important thing in journalism. And class is intersectional, so it applies to race and disability and all these other kind of privileges or lack thereof, but it's really about money and the concentration of power. And when you're a journalist, you are tasked with telling other people's stories, you are meant to be able to account for their lives.

And increasingly – this is not just my view, but it's backed up by research – increasingly, there are fewer and fewer journalists from kind of underserved backgrounds, minority backgrounds who grew up in poverty, who were working-class from other ethnicities with disabilities.

And when you don't have those voices in the room, or even have them in your own head, you miss stuff, and you miscalculate, and you tell stories that are not necessarily true, even though you might be acting in perfectly good faith. You actually don't have the experience to try and get across what are really, really nuanced points about the way people live.

And so I think people think class is just about money, right? But it's about power, it's about cultural cachet, it's about influence, it's about confidence. When you grow up with nothing, or you kind of grow up in a family that's broken, or your parents are really smart in a street sense like my mom was, but they don't grow up reading quote-unquote “the right books”, you lack the confidence to kind of make your own arguments in the world, and that takes a long time to learn. So this thing has many, many tentacles, I think, and it's very easy to miss if you're not from that world.

Dr Susan Carland: I remember reading in a review, I think it was in The Monthly, about your first book that said class is about access. And I guess that's what you're saying, that it does open doors and that it also gives you the confidence that you are allowed to walk through those doors.

Rick Morton: When you think about work, if you grow up in even just a middle class family, but the higher up the ladder you go, the less friction there is in your everyday life. And that's really how I like to look at it: it's about friction. So I've been pretty successful in my career so far, I'm 34. But, God, it could have gone any other way, so many different times along the way. And there were so many people that had to come into my life at the right time to stop me from going in the wrong direction or from giving up, to be quite honest, because it was really hard.

And there's often this kind of if you come from nothing and you are sheltered like I was, and then you have to move from the country to the city, which is another type of barrier, and then you don't have any money, so you've got to work while you're doing university, and you don't know how to have the same discussions that people who grew up in quote-unquote “the right households” have, then there are often – the stress of that is its own mental illness. It's its own kind of physiological malady.

And so you're trying to do all of these things, and do the bare minimum that other people have who might not have the same concerns. And so it's a very real physical problem rather than just a theoretical mind game, but it does – all of those things then end up affecting your confidence. So you don't end up having, rightly or wrongly, the same level of access that other people do from more well-off backgrounds.

Dr Susan Carland: I feel like we talk a lot about inequality at the moment, it's almost the topic du jour. We talk about racism and sexism. I feel like we talk a lot less about class inequality, though. Why do you think that is?

Rick Morton: It's a really good question, and I'm not one of these people who thinks that class is the only answer. And obviously, I write about it because I grew up poor, but also I'm White and I'm able bodied. So I don't have the same ability, nor should I, to write about these other issues.

But I think we've got really talented, smart people who are disabled, who are from different ethnic backgrounds, from different other kinds of minority groups. But class is a really tough one because to come – typically, and I don't want to say this as a kind of general rule, but if we're having those other discussions, generally speaking, it’s from people who've come from well-off backgrounds themselves, even if they're from different races or they're disabled. You still don't get to hear a lot of those stories from people who come from nothing.

And that's down to a bunch of things, including education, including the type of parenting that you can get in those households as well. I mean, I was just so lucky in so many ways to be born oriented, I guess, the way I am, towards learning, because Mum thought education was important, but wasn't particularly well educated herself. And really the one thing I knew to do was to work and to work hard. But beyond that there weren't any clues.

And so I think it's really difficult to have the class conversation if you don't have the representation even in a little kind of small way in these circles where decisions are made. And that's the hardest thing about vaulting people into that position, is A, that they get there, and B, that they remember what it was like where they came from. Because it's very easy, I think, if you've not got your foot in the world you left behind, which I do, to want to see it all go away and not be reminded.

Dr Susan Carland: Imagine Australia in 100 years. We don't make any changes to the way we deal with class, we don't do anything to try to reduce class inequality, the causes of it, the knock-on effects of it. What does our society look like to you?

Rick Morton: It worries me a lot because there has been a concerted effort, I think, and particularly in the last decade, but over the last few decades to kind of introduce this kind of Americanised version of the social state into Australia. The GP copayment was an example of a coalition government trying to insert policy that was kind of the thin edge of the wedge when it comes to privatisation of healthcare services. Now no one in their right minds, unless you are an ideologue, or a libertarian who wants to drink and drive and not wear a seatbelt and go hang everyone else, no one in their right minds thinks that we have a bad healthcare system in this country because the state pays for most of it. No one.

And there are people who get to access those services who are actually quite well-off, but know that they would be floored by a $40,000 medical bill, which is what people routinely get in the States. And so if those campaigns are successful – and the problem here is the Labor scare campaign in 2016 was that the Libs were going to prioritise Medicare, that was just wrong, right? That's not the argument that's going to win you the election. The argument is that we need to stop every little skirmish because you lose those things once, you lose them forever.

And so we've got a persistent, entrenched underclass in Australia of about 700,000 people according to the Productivity Commission. They're there every year, regardless. They might be different people, but it's about that number. And then you've got the working poor and the working class, and the people on the welfare system who just cannot catch a break and who are actually pummelled into the earth further by this punitive kind of, again, this system built on distrust, it's like we cannot trust them with our money.

And so if we don't do anything about it, and if we don't bring people from those backgrounds into positions where decisions are actually made – even benign decisions like those in the public service who are trying to imagine what it's like to come from these backgrounds – if you're not from there, you actually don't get it. And you're going to make policy that gets stuff wrong, even when you're not trying to do people over, or when the ministers are not trying to kind of scrounge more money from the budget. You just kind of get it wrong.And so these little things add up over a long time.

And there was a time when pretty much anyone in Australia who wanted a job, a good, well-paying job could get one. And it was a smaller place, and the factories paid well, and it wasn't as urbanised, education was free. And those things are not the case anymore. And increasingly, you get the ripples of discontent when you get those settings wrong. And I'm not one to magic into existence a dystopia, but there will be a point, if you don't get these things right, 50 years, 100 years down the track, where you do have the same underclass that you've got in America, which to me is a failed state because of it.

Dr Susan Carland: What is the role of class in education? Our next guess is Bri Lee. Bri is an author and freelance writer. Her third book, Who Gets to Be Smart? is an interrogation of the adage “knowledge is power'', and looks at how Australia's educational system exacerbates social stratification. Here's author Bri Lee.

Bri Lee: Hi. I'm Bri – Bri Lee. And I'm now an author, but I'm also a legal researcher and activist, and sort of freelance journalist, based in Sydney.

Dr Susan Carland: You've written a book that is about many things, but one of the key themes is about class inequality and the impact that that has on education. What do you see as some of the most striking and often unrecognised effects that class has on our approach to education?

Bri Lee: Well, something I was shocked and really saddened to find out in the research for this book is that it starts from really young children. So one in five Australian kids are not meeting their developmental milestones when they start grade one.

And regardless of where any individual’s sort of economic politics lay, if they consider equality of opportunity or equality of outcome, I think we can agree that 20 percent of children not meeting their developmental milestones before they even start is equality of nothing.

And it just really struck me with the announcements made recently by the government to sort of increase a bit of what they call “childcare funding”. It just seems to me so shocking that in Australia we consider children having a right to free education from age five and up, and for some reason, early childhood education, from ages five and below, is considered welfare.

And every decade that passes, we have more and deeper research that shows us how the first five years of our lives just can shape the entire rest of our lives. And one in five kids, because of socioeconomic factors, as well as other factors, of course – cultural, racial background, postcode, all the rest. But in particular, the one we could fix, we just don't.

And children are suffering because of it and it's so hard for them, those one in five, to ever really catch up. When they start on the back foot in these systems, it's really difficult to make up for that lost ground. And that sort of seed of the problem then just continues. And I just was really shocked to find researching this book pretty much since the Howard years, it's just been getting worse. I'm not seeing anything that convinces me that the problem is lessening. I think the problem of basically having a segregated schooling system by class in Australia is getting worse.

[Children's voices]

Dr Susan Carland: If we do nothing to change it, if we just continue on the way that we are, what does Australian society look like in 50 to 100 years?

Bri Lee: I don't know about 50 to 100 years. The question will be whether global warming has actually been dealt with by then, I feel like. But like maybe just a few less decades than that.

We're already at the stage where 80 percent of kids who have some kind of extra needs are in state schools compared to private schools. So these sort of broad categories that the government uses to identify children who need a bit of extra help, things like if English is their second language, if they're in a very small or a very regional school, if they come from an Indigenous background, if they have a disability, these categories.

Eighty percent of the kids who need extra help are in state schools, which typically, overwhelmingly, are significantly less funded than private schools. And that drift is getting worse. And this attitude in Australia that is held by, I would say the majority of our large middle class, is that if you can afford to send your kids to private school, why wouldn't you? That you would be crazy to still send them to a public school if you can possibly afford private school, and what that means is this drift happens. One of the sort of – I think I could spend the rest of my life researching and writing about the aspirational middle class, and aspiration can be an incredible thing.

But in my opinion, the argument I’m sort of making this book, is that as every sort of 10 more years passes with our current education system the way it is, that aspirational component of the middle class means that people just are busting their guts and working really, really hard to try and afford school fees for their kids for private school. And the people who can't afford it are just being left more and more behind, leaving basically a growing... there’s just this growing chasm between the two.
And I just didn't even realise that we're at the stage now where it's almost half of secondary school students are in private versus public schools. That is... How did it get so bad? And I don't think Australians realise that other OECD nations are not like that. In the UK and in most of Scandinavia, you're talking about a single-digit percentage of kids who go to private schools. That real split down the middle hasn't been allowed to get as bad as it is here.

Dr Susan Carland: Many of our nation's leaders come from a similar background: the best, most expensive private schools, the top universities. What are we missing out on by making it hard for people from outside this group to get a seat at the table?

In our next episode, we will take a look at some of the ways we need to address class inequality in Australia, and some of the things that are being done about it right now.
We'll catch you next time on ‘What Happens Next?’.