results gives a rough but informative insight into the current Australian class structure
The Social Atlas provides a wealth of useful information. There are maps of the distribution of migrants of different backgrounds, and these maps are very informative. Most non-English-speaking migrants are concentrated in the Eastern suburbs, the Inner Western suburbs, and the middle western suburbs.
The pattern of people with trade qualifications is the obverse of the pattern of people with university degrees. Many people with trade qualifications are concentrated in 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 Hornsby and the northern beaches. An overview of all the statistical information available gives a breakdown of the class structure of the Sydney population on broadly the following lines.
At the very top of Australian society there is a powerful ruling class, which interlocks with 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 broader group who show up in the statistical figures as "managers and administrators" and "high income earners ", and these two maps in the Social Atlas are almost completely coincidental.
For statistical purposes, it is useful to group the core power elite and/or ruling class and the aforementioned two groups, together, as statistical Group One.
Statistical Group Two are very distinctly represented in the Social Atlas by the section of the map of university graduates, who are excluded from the map of "high income earners" and "managers and administrators ". These lower paid university graduates comprise university staff, teachers, health workers, many public servants, minor bureaucrats in welfare organisations, and other such people. They are concentrated heavily 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 older European migrant background, and include many people who don't state a religious belief in the census. They are overwhelmingly Labor voters. p> Statistical Group Three are the most diverse group. They are scattered all over Sydney except in the areas of very high incomes on the North Shore and in the northern Eastern suburbs. They include such people as clerical workers, proprietors and workers in small retail businesses, bank workers, computer workers, call centre workers and finance industry workers. They also include many self-employed tradesmen.
They range from low incomes to quite high incomes and are of very diverse ethnicity, Anglo, Irish Catholic, European migrant and even including self-employed recent migrants. A significant part of this group votes Labor, but many also vote Liberal and the biggest number of swinging voters is concentrated in this group. The ruling class attempts to exercise ideological hegemony over this group, particularly through television and the tabloid press, and a lot of the current reactionary populism of the right is an attempt to influence this group electorally.
Statistical Group Four includes the blue-collar section of the working class and the unemployed. Although manufacturing industry has declined somewhat, the blue-collar section of the working class is still a very decisive section of the population. This group is now composed overwhelmingly of recent non-English-speaking (NESB) migrants. This section of society is concentrated in the Western suburbs, which are also the areas of recent migrant concentration and relatively high unemployment. This group overwhelmingly votes Labor in elections. p> Even a cursory overview of the correlation between the information provided in the census publications and electoral results confirms the general thrust of the above break-up and analysis. This four-level description of Australian society is realistic and useful for a variety of purposes.
In my view the decisive class division in Australian society is between the ruling class, with enormous economic and political power, which exercises very great ideological influence and hegemony over the "High-income earner" and "managers and administrators" Statistical Group One, and the rest of the population. This four-level division of Australian society holds for all the major capital cities and for the Illawarra, Newcastle, Whyalla, Launceston and Geelong, with the qualification that the smaller capitals and the provincial towns have a much lower NESB component in Statistical Group Four, the blue-collar section of the working class.
Rural and provincial Australia contains some elements of this division, but a concrete analysis of rural and provincial Australia has to incorporate a number of other factors, and I will deal with ru...
