ating work, commercial activity and prosperity.
Throughout Betts 'two chapters expounding the "new class "theory, she desperately tries to paint a picture that hostility to multiculturalism and migration is the natural condition of ordinary Australians, and that the more civilised views of university-educated people are an aberration from this so-called "norm", which she tries to imply is general in Australian society.
She even gets in a sharp attack on the Catholic Church in her introduction. That hoary old Anglo bogey, international Papism, supports migration because the birth rate is dropping and it wants more Catholics! Ms Betts will dredge up the most ancient ativisms in her attempt to mobilise the population against migration and multiculturalism.
Racism is not innate in "Human nature"
If you step back a little from Betts 'ugly narrative, the flaws in it become reasonably obvious. Racism and opposition to migration and multiculturalism are not innate in human beings. They are usually learned behaviour. Kids in schools don't develop any hostility to people of a different appearance unless such hostilities are deliberately stirred up by adults.
The apparently endemic racism of "British Australia "was an ugly construction, built and whipped up over generations by tabloid newspapers, bourgeois politicians, the Protestant churches, and accepted as a line of least resistance by the backward leadership of the labour movement in past eras. It wasn't innate. p> It was constructed in the context of the imperialist British conquest of Australia from its indigenous inhabitants, who often resisted quite vigorously. This racism was developed in the domestic conflict here with the Irish Catholic section of the population, who were in constant conflict with the racist pretensions of the ruling class of "British" Australia.
From this angle, rather than being some aberration, it is strikingly obvious that improved education organically undermines racism and hostility to migration and multiculturalism, by allowing the more civilised instincts, which are the ones really innate in human beings, to develop. Betts ' and others '(including her ostensible opponent, Ghassan Hage) fancy post-modernist story that university graduates 'opposition to racism is some kind of cultural badge of status is, like most post-modern rhetoric, a misreading of social reality or, at best, only a tiny part of a much more complex story.
Betts makes great play of the fact, pointed to by all of these reactionary populists, that the enormous upheaval in English speaking countries against the monstrous imperialist war in Vietnam, was one of the major commencement points in the enormous swing among educated people against all forms of racism and opposition to migration.
These populists associate this development also, in their propaganda, with the explosion in numbers of tertiary educated people, which commenced at approximately the same time. Well, the dates and times are more or less correct, but their interpretation of these developments is only valid if you presume a bigoted racism as the norm in human behaviour.
If you don't, other interpretations present themselves immediately. My interpretation, which I assert to be the valid one, is this: in Australia, with which I am most familiar, the Whitlam period of free education did coincide with the enormous popular mobilisation against the imperialist monstrosity in Vietnam, in which I personally was lucky enough to participate, with many thousands of others. It also coincided, indeed, with the avalanche into higher education of the first substantial generation, out of for instance, Catholic secondary schools, and of other working class and lower middle class Anglo-Australians, and of the first generation in universities of European migrant background.
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The shift in attitudes to race among students and graduates coincided with their shift towards Labor in electoral politics
The dramatic shift in attitudes to race and migration that took place in this period among university graduates, also coincided with the swing of both university undergraduate populations and university graduates to the Labor side in electoral politics. Until about 1969 the overwhelming majority of tertiary students and university graduates, to the number of about 80 per cent, always favoured Liberal in every election in Australia since responsible government. p> It was only in the 1969 election that Labor even got to 40 per cent preference amongst tertiary students, and it was only in 1972 that polls suggested a majority of students, for the first time ever, supported Labor. It was only about 1972, also, that a majority of graduates began to swing towards Labor. p> All these major changes coincided with the massive expansi...
