‘What Happens Next?’: Can We Open the Halls of Power?

Dr Susan Carland: Welcome to part two in our look at class inequality. On today's show, we will speak to our experts about class inequality in Australia. What are some of the ways we can help change class inequality? What new approaches do we need to consider to ensure we are hearing from a broad range of people in the most powerful places? Welcome to part two on this topic on What Happens Next?. John Thwaites is a professorial fellow at Monash University. He's Chair of the Monash Sustainable Development Institute and ClimateWorks Australia. Professor John Thwaites, what do you think we need to do to try to improve it in Australia? If you could wave a magic wand now and try to sort out some of our class inequality, what would you do?

John Thwaites: There are a number of things. The first is to understand that this is not inevitable, class inequality. You sometimes hear people say, “Oh, it's linked to globalisation or artificial intelligence.” Actually the thing that drives inequality more than anything is political decisions. Decisions about things like taxes. Who pays the taxes? Wages, whether wages are going to go up. Benefits, how benefits are paid. So there are clear political decisions that can be changed that will reduce inequality. I mean, tax is the classic example. In this country, like a number of others, we actually tax capital at a lower rate than income. So that means someone who's on a very large income and can invest in shares and property ends up getting taxed at half the rate of a cleaner on $50,000 a year. So that's the first thing. Our tax system needs to recognise that we should be aiming for equality, not inequality. And that means taxing more fairly. I also think our welfare system needs to be looked at. So once again, in the last 10 years, 15 years, we've gone backwards in some of our welfare areas, particularly unemployment benefits. Where 15, 20 years ago, the unemployment benefit was at about the poverty line, now it's 30 per cent below the poverty line. So that's a choice that we make as a community, and we could change that.

Dr Susan Carland: Why do you think we don't?

John Thwaites: Well, I think because those who are benefiting have had the political power and they've been able to convince those in governments around the country to put the money in their area, not in the other.

I mean, the classic was the debate we had about franking credits before the last election. I find the idea that someone who makes a whole lot of money out of shares and then expects to get a cash payment for that extraordinary. While an average worker, as I say, a cleaner or something like that, a worker in a shop, is expected to pay full tax. So I think that's another area.

I think the other big area that historically Australia has been proud of is to have high levels of employment, low levels of unemployment. But once again, in more recent years, we've got used to thinking that 5 per cent or 6 per cent is the right level. We should be targeting 3 per cent. Much lower levels of unemployment. That means that those people that have been long-term unemployed have more chances of getting a job. And we put more effort into skills, training up people rather than thinking that a level of unemployment's a good thing because it keeps wages down.

So there's a few things. One, our tax system. Second, to look at our welfare system and third, wages. To drive up wages through lower unemployment.

Dr Susan Carland: Here's journalist and author Rick Morton. Imagine if we do change things right now. You can wave your magic wand and we finally start getting things right about class inequality in Australia. What does that society look like in 100 years?

Rick Morton: It looks like fairness. And here's the thing. We think it's just about money. And to a large degree, it is, right? There are studies where the best thing to help people out of poverty, believe it or not, is money. Just give them money. Don't tell them how to spend it.

Dr Susan Carland: Not an Instagram post? That's weird.

Rick Morton: Yeah. It's not some antique or whatever. It's just money, and it's money without conditions because poor people... God, even the term I hate. But people like my family, we know how to spend money. We know how to make a dollar go around the world twice. It is a phenomenal bookkeeping ability that is there because you have to have it, right? But it's also about the other things where we think, oh, okay. Well, we've got HECS for university, right? So you can just go to university and study and bang, there's a job. A, there's no guarantees because of the way the employment market works, but B, it's not just about paying for the degree. Particularly if you move from a country town to a city where you have to go to a university and you don't have money to pay your own rent, so you've got to work. And automatically now you've got a different playing field to people who actually live in the same city as their parents, and can stay at home while they study or get subsidised rent.

And so all of these little things actually make a huge difference. I dropped out of uni because I couldn't hack it on so many different levels. And that was partly because of my classes. Partly because of my cultural access. It was partly because of my mental health, but I don't have a degree because of it.

And so if we get these settings right, and if we have a true understanding, which can only come, by the way, from people who come from those backgrounds in the room, making decisions with people who have the power. It's not just the case of saying, “All right, well we gave you HECS. Why aren't you finished with your university?” Or, “You finished your degree, but why don't you have a job?” It's all the other attendant social forces that come with class and that cultural upbringing that you may or may not have.

But if you get those things right, then you actually live in a society and a country where people who have intellect, who have ideas, who have really stunning things to contribute to the world can actually contribute them. Some of the smartest people I've ever met have been in public housing. Just real tinkerers and thinkers and philosophers who, for whatever reason, have been kept in place. And some of them seemed happy enough in those circumstances, but others I knew for sure should have been able to do more.

Dr Susan Carland: Rick Morton, thank you so much for your time today.

Rick Morton: Thanks for having me, Susan. I appreciate it.

Dr Susan Carland: Tony Moore is a historian whose work has included researching the Australian working class – how they see themselves and express themselves, and their impact on national identity. Historian, Professor Tony Moore.

Tony Moore: My key expertise – interest – is in the area of culture and the different ways class relations produce inequality in culture, but also potential and possibility.

I guess I make the argument that working class people have a positive culture. It is constantly changing. It is diverse. It changed with post-war immigration. We had an immense immigration in the 19th Century and it was incredibly diverse. So there's not just one Anglo type of male working class culture, but many groups that we might now give them an identity as people of colour, or their gender identity, or their sexual identity that also is enwrapped in an elegant way with class, and sociology and cultural studies need – and history needs – to understand that. And it does.

Dr Susan Carland: How do you think the historians of the future will look back at this time in Australia and understand our position on class?

Tony Moore: I was gobsmacked when my friend and colleague Peter Lewis at Essential did a poll that said 31 per cent of Australians still regard themselves as working class.

Dr Susan Carland: Because what percentage would it actually be?

Tony Moore: Well, I would say that's... it would probably be bigger because we're used to thinking of class as manual work from an earlier period. So it's a nostalgic notion.

Dr Susan Carland: Right. If you're a plumber you're working class?

Tony Moore: Yes. Now plumbers may have a different relationship as a self-employed contractor.

Dr Susan Carland: Yeah. They're business owners now.

Tony Moore: Paul Keating wasn't made up. He was a real person, and the economy was liberated by Hawke–Keating. And so tradies can paradoxically be a contract tradie in a mine and be a member of the CFMU. They can own shares and that. But culturally, they inherit a culture from their parents and they live in particular suburbs. And if they're in maybe New South Wales, they might not aspire for university for their children, for example. So it's where you live. So that's complicated.

But the people we don't think about are the huge army of precarious migrant workers who are doing the nursing, the cleaning, the Uber driving, who maybe aren't unionised, are falling between the cracks. And that's where new politics is forming. We saw the case about the Uber the other day.

This used to be on the wharves, and then the wharfies, who had to be a strong communist union, fought back and kind of… So they used to have zero hours contracts, and turn up every day and find out if they're working. That's a terrible – Imagine what it does to your mind, particularly if you're a woman working in a factory, or as a cleaner in a shop, and you mail – or doing piecework at home and you don't know when you'll be working. You don't know when you'll be forced to work. So work choices were about that.

And Australians have a basic sense of right and decency around working things. So when they look back, I think they'll say eyes went off the ball. People tried to make labour as cheap as possible. And I hope they'll say people fought back.

I'm really interested in the negative development that's happened in the last 30 years where we think we’re – and it may be partly because of reduced working class participation in cultural industries and in politics – but where we think of working class people as disadvantaged and worthy of middle class charity, and they have to be compensated and brought up.

Whereas when I was growing up, as I said, they were a force of progress. And we looked to what their cultural resources were to maybe build a new politics, improve things. And we wouldn't think now to not say that Aboriginal people don't have a culture – a positive culture, a diverse culture that is used as resources, or people from non-English speaking backgrounds. And we let the ball go on the notion of class there.

And it suited a certain way of doing the economy, the neoliberal moment, to think of people as just individualised socioeconomic statistics. But if you think of it as a living class, a way of life in regions, in communities, and we do longitudinal work, I think we can think of the resources to improve and build those situations and build politics.

Dr Susan Carland: Tony Moore, thank you so much for your time.

Tony Moore: Thank you, Susan.

Dr Susan Carland: And for our final word, 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, an activist and freelance journalist based in Sydney.

If I could point to specific fixes that might have a positive impact on how class segregated our schooling system is – the thing that really gets me is that private schools, so Catholic and independent schools, are allowed to use all kinds of basically vetting procedures to choose the students that they are even willing to take, and they also get public money. And so the first step for me would be to say that any educational institution that wants public money is not allowed to discriminate en masse. They have to educate anyone who knocks on their door.

But then the problem that is automatically presented to us, which brings me to my second point, is that Australia is also extraordinarily segregated by postcodes. And it's related to this intergenerational problem of housing availability and housing inequality. And so even if I snap my fingers now, and every school had to take any student within the catchment zone, for example, you still just have this huge problem of entire areas of Australia being significantly wealthier than entire other areas. That brings me to the second point about inequality, I would say, which comes down to housing.

And there is so much about the Australian identity that is also connected to real estate. It's just this... Yeah, it's part of the Australian dream, but I think it's even more than that. This crazy bubble that just never bursts actually, really. And how plenty of other places overseas have much more of a balance between tenant and landlord rights. They have things like 99 year leases or lifetime leases. The way other places conceptualise of making a home in a place that you don't necessarily own.

In other places, home ownership isn't seen as this, I mean, right of passage. It's not necessarily seen as an indicator of class or so much... It's not so connected to identity as it is here. And I see housing availability, housing inequality, and these issues with regards to education as very interconnected.

Dr Susan Carland: Bri, do you have any examples of where things are working well, or at least looking promising in us tackling class inequality in Australia?

Bri Lee: Yeah. One very specific example is that in amongst the announcements that the Education minister made last year about university funding, which were for the most part, in my opinion, absurd and disastrous, one thing that Dan Tehan did identify was scholarship opportunities and extra funding for what I typically referred to as ‘first in family’ students. And I'm really –

Dr Susan Carland: So what does that mean? What does ‘first in family’ mean?

Bri Lee: Yeah, I'm really interested in this because it's what I care about, us trying to get better and do better at, is it just means that a person who has no parents, in particular, but no other family members, who've ever gone to university, encouraging them to feel university is a place for them, but also opportunity costs and barriers to them. Often things like having to relocate to be able to get anywhere close to a campus or people who have caring obligations.

And what I'm interested in is, for example, a friend of mine who works at a university in Townsville who spoke to me incredibly about what a high proportion of her students in Townsville are first in family. And often also mature-age students who are women who have raised children and are finally at a stage in their lives where they have a chance to go and get the education they always wanted to, because of caring obligations and opportunity costs they couldn't do before.

The thing I just couldn't get over is how so many of our processes and schools and institutions and systems supposedly are about knowledge sharing and actually get all of their value by virtue of who they can exclude. And so what I'm interested in is looking at any schools, any universities, any scholarships, any programmes, whatever – any facet of the academy that are actually willing to try and open their doors properly, instead of the places who just bolster this image of power and bolster this sense of pride in exclusivity.

Even when we hear reports about secondary schools, particularly in Sydney, we hear this phrase, for example, “this is one of Sydney's most exclusive schools”. That should be embarrassing. The school is supposed to be about teaching and about knowledge sharing. What are we communicating to our young people that the best part about it is the number of people it doesn't let in? Yeah, it's a really core problem.

And so I think incentives for first in families, incentives for carers to go back and retrain. Those are things where we have the terminology and language and understanding that we will get a return on those investments. That gives me a bit of optimism. It's absurd.

Dr Susan Carland: Bri, thank you so much for your time today.

Bri Lee: Oh, that flew by. Thanks for having me.

Dr Susan Carland: That's it for this episode and for this topic. A big thank you to all our guests, and, as always, more information on what we talked about today can be found in the show notes. We are back next week with a brand new topic.