migration, and the larger it is, the more it undermines stupid xenophobic practices and attitudes.
Anyone with an eye to see, walking around this laid-back, tough, intense Sydney of ours, can't avoid being struck by the way the cultural diversity that is now dominant in our city works so effectively. It has been very moving to me in the last couple of weeks attending demonstrations, which rapidly grew in cynical old Sydney, to 30,000 people, in support of the people of East Timor, to observe the wonderful cultural diversity of the Australians in those demonstrations.
I grew up in the 1940s and the 1950s and you'd better believe it, mass migration has been overwhelmingly beneficial to every aspect of the real quality of human life in Australia, as I experience it. Food, culture, politics, the economy, the whole universe of things that affect the essential features of our life.
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"New class" theory
Opponents of migration and other reactionaries have recently dusted off the quite old theory of the new class to stigmatise supporters of migration and multiculturalism as members of an egregious elite, different to the popular Australian "volk" who, it is claimed, are ativistic and racist to the core.
This desperate rhetoric is inaccurate as a sociological description of modern Australian society, and rather ineffective as a call to arms. When examined closely, it is obviously a biased, primarily ideological construct.
Nearly 20 per cent of the adult population, including school teachers and nurses, now have degrees, and half of them are women. Do they all constitute members of a "new class "? The idea is absurd. When pressed, ideologues such as Betts, Dixson and Bill Hayden redefine their proposition a bit to say that maybe the "new class" consists only of people in the media and the bureaucracy who favour migration (and disagree with them), which makes this construction even more absurd sociologically speaking. It is merely a sort of bizarre point-scoring aimed at stirring up perceived popular animosity to people with degrees.
The problem with it as a call to arms is that a majority of the industrial working class without university degrees, at whom it is presumably directed, are recent non-English-speaking-background (NESB) migrants themselves, and are therefore very unlikely to respond to this demagogy. This recent desperate new class rhetoric underlines the developing social isolation of the people who use it in the newly evolving Australia that is already around us.
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Opinion polls and notions of public opinion
Betts and other conservative populists make big fuss about some very old public opinion polls, which they claim show that migration is unpopular. Occasionally Betts acknowledges that opinion polls results are influenced powerfully by how the questions are asked, and what information is given to the people polled about the issues before they are polled, but she shrugs off this problem and makes much of her proposition that the elites are ignoring public opinion in their support of migration.
In the absence of carefully controlled polling, not overloaded by emotive construction, Betts's conclusions from her polls have to be treated with great reserve for the same reasons that opponents of the death penalty tend to put aside emotive tabloid polls, which often seem to favour capital punishment.
We now know a great deal about the phenomenon of push polling, and many of Betts's favoured polls get close this. The deliberately emotive way many public opinion poll questions are posed is the reason that most democrats are very suspicious of the right-wing populist mania for citizen-initiated referendums.
An interesting new development, probably caused by rapid demographic changes in Australia's major cities, is that recent opinion polls, organised though they are in this fairly emotive way, are beginning to show a fairly substantial swing in favour of migration (Article by Murray Goot in The Bulletin of February 15, 2000). What spin Betts and company will put on these changing poll results?
In reality, political outcomes in bourgeois democracies such as Australia are decided by a complex interaction between various aspects of the popular will, and the special interests of the ruling class, expressed through their manipulation of the media. What comes through in the media is much more an expression of the interests of the tiny elite that owns the media than any independent expression of opinion by a so-called new class of media workers.
In elections the voting is decided by a multitude of factors, and "public opinion" is actually a product of the push and pull of assorted interests and pressure groups. It is even possible that, influenced by right-wing populist hysteria against migration, expressed through the tabloid ...
