ral and provincial Australia in another chapter.
The alternative intelligentsia "new class" thesis is really ideologically loaded nonsense, belted out from time to time by different conservative pundits for 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 underprivileged Australians against more educated Australians, as scapegoats, and it is an attempt to persuade the most underprivileged Australians that their interests lie with the free market and the ruling class.
This construction is episodically useful to the ruling class electorally. Michael Thompson's unpleasant humbug about non-manual employees ' "Core values ​​of family, hard work, independence and patriotism" counterposed to the almost unmentionable alternative values ​​of his "new class" is the clearest expression I've seen anywhere of this kind of pitch to backwardness.
In the McGuiness-Thompson version it is associated with a ferocious misogynism directed against "femocrats" and the "Obscenity" of the Whitlam-period free education, when so many women made the great initial leap into further education. This curiously vehement anti-feminist rhetoric from the McGuiness-Thompson coterie has a delightfully personal quality, suggesting many years of grievances on their part against the feminist phenomenon.
В
The Katharine Betts-Robert Birrell bunch's anti-migration version of the "new class" theory
В
The most sustained and developed recent version of the "New class" theory is the Betts version. In The Great Divide Betts repeats, from her old book, the chapter headed, The Case for Growth. This chapter heading is rather deceptive. It would be more correctly titled, "Betts 'arguments against growth". She nowhere 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 of the chapter is a sustained polemic against migration, with her arguments overwhelming the 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, called The Social Location of Intellectuals, with the following imperishable paragraph:
"The new class cannot have supported the idea of ​​high immigration because expert opinion told them that it was a good idea. Disinterested experts refute most of the arguments for immigration and are equivocal on nearly all the others. Consequently if we want to explain new-class attitudes we must look at the ideological role which support for 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 background questions to be explored. What is this entity termed the "new class ", what role does it play, and why should educated people want to demonstrate that they belong to it? "
What fantastic chutzpah the woman has! Some of her fellow anti-immigrationists become "disinterested experts", yet she nowhere seriously addresses the case for migration, and constructs a value-loaded "Sociological" explanation for the viewpoint of university graduates, which she continually asserts from her reading of very old opinion polls, mainly from the 1970s and 1980s, favours immigration and multiculturalism, when, according to her, the ordinary Australian volk are against these things!
As I've outlined above, her merging of different segments of the university-educated section of the population as some sort of global "New class" is intrinsically absurd, 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 and multiculturalism.
From where I stand, the fact that my political opponents on the Liberal right include a significant group who are at least civilised in relation to race, migration and multiculturalism, seems to me quite a good thing, and I will form a united front with them on those questions, although we will war against each other on other very important matters.
The populism of Katharine Betts 'attack on employers in the building industry for favouring migration is typical of her frequently expressed concern for the interests of poorer Australians. Nevertheless, the entrepreneurs in the building industry are absolutely right. Migration is obviously good for gener...
