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Our Snobs Are Tops

By Strewth

Tony Moore on why the lucky country has always been a tosser's paradise.

We hear a lot today about the brave new world of globalisation and the information revolution sweeping away the old boys network and the clubby hierarchies of yesteryear. Well, I want to know who's doing the sweeping and who's being swept. Ask around the office space and tell me that the bright young things of the cyber age aren't the same old private school cabal who have always assumed the right to run this country. Maybe that's the way it has to be. What isn't so nice is the crowing on the graves of people who took their medicine. Ever heard someone derided by the smart set as rednecks, westies, shitkickers, bogans, dole bludgers, homeboys or white trash? Welcome to the new snobbery.

Snobbery is everywhere--it does not require a plummy voice or a pommy aristocracy. Just as it pays to be wary of a bloke who calls you "mate" beware when a country protests its egalitarianism too much. Snobbery is not about accents and money or Englishness or education (though these things still fuel a rancid form of snobbery in Australia) but stems from an unquestioned assumption of self-importance and superiority over other people.

Who are Australia's snobs? Forget John Howard's pretence to be the battler's friend. The Liberals are still the same party of small-minded suburban real estate agents, greedy city lawyers and in-bred born-to-rule ninnies we love to hate. Go to any branch meeting and they're chockers with snobs who want to sort everyone else out: unions, republicans, feminists, greenies, Aborigines, youth gangs, dole bludgers, those ethnics. But mainly they don't like the way you talk. Are you RC? Like the Nats, most ALP branch members are fair dinkum, but Labor has a fair share of snobs too--middle class lefties who tut tut like disapproving schoolmaams, and working class social climbers from the right who can't wait to get the house in the eastern suburbs and a trip to the Harvard School of Business. For some reason many media people are awful snobs too, especially those who circulate around the broadsheets, the ABC and Channel Nine.

Australia has always had class divisions camouflaged by an egalitarian ethos that is about as fair dinkum as a SOCOG ticket lottery. We make a big noise about being classless but inequalities in wealth are getting worse, not better. New technology, globalisation and free market economics conspire to make some people very rich and happy, while consigning others to the scrap heap. The gulf in money is exacerbated by widening inequalities in the things that all citizens are supposed to share--education, employment, health services, cultural amenities, public transport, scenery, trees, parks. It's no secret that in Sydney the western suburbs not only have the lowest incomes and highest unemployment, but also the lowest school retention and uni entrance rates, the greatest number of health problems and the highest levels of imprisonment.

Snobbery gets in the way of a fair dealing out of the cards. It's the unspoken passport that shoehorns a kid from an elite private school into a well-paid job. Snobbery ensures one old boy gives another old boy the lucrative contract he craves. Snobbery ensures the same old stagers get to the front of the trough when the Australia Council hands out arts grants. Thanks to snobbery we have to put up with David Caeser whining about being the country's only working class filmmaker.

The Snob Streak

Since the bush balladeers of the 1880s, the national culture has celebrated the underdog--the Eureka gold miners, sheep stealing swaggies, renegade bushrangers, striking shearers, uncouth Irish larrikins, scallywag street urchins like Ginger Meggs, unruly diggers, poor boys made good like Chif, Nifty and Hoges--an unbroken line of sentimental blokes from Lawson to Kerrigan. We like the larrikin who upsets upper class English manners, but perhaps the ocker protests too much.

From the earliest days of the colony at Sydney, trumped up free immigrants took the name Exclusives and raised themselves above the scorned ex-convicts. Two-bit speculators and ne'er-do-well second sons of the British gentry in cahoots with the corrupt screws of the Rum Corps carved up the harbour foreshore, pinched the good land from the aborigines and dreamed of presiding over an antipodean plantation system as some sort of Bunyip Aristocracy. Convicts drawn from Britain's unwanted underclass got stuck with the shit work, the dodgy housing and no views.

Once freed, ex-cons were expected to check in their ticket of leave at the trademan's entrance and work for their betters. Just like the cranky mother country, Australia was a land divided--by class, race and religion. Throughout the last century the Protestant ascendancy ran the colonies as landholders, merchants, professionals, administrators, legislators, magistrates and missionaries.

Putting the natives to one side (which they did, in reserves) it was the Irish who were to be ascended over, despised for their religion, rebelliousness, bad habits, and a poverty not entirely of their own making. This is an animosity that shapes Australian snobbery. In the 1930s my Protestant mother was not allowed into the home of her Catholic grandmother. When I was a kid in the 1960s poor Protestants and Catholics still brawled after school, ignorantly fighting a tribal war run by generals far away in time. The anti-Irish cast of the establishment explains the mad, irrational hate which the Liberals have for Keating--the uncouth, swaggering Irish spiv from their worst ancestral nightmares. Today this antipathy is simmering just below the surface in the republican debate, as the land of hope and glory set fight one last battle against treason.

The ruling class couldn't get away with it forever, and by the time of the great strikes and political ferment of the 1890s a democratic counter-mythology idolising the ordinary bush worker was loose in the land. Australian egalitarianism always left more people out than it embraced, but in the big scheme of things it gave the toffs the fright of their lives and concessions were made. By the 1950s Australia was supposed to be a classless society, but striking miners, immigrant factory fodder and Aborigines didn't quite see it that way. To this day the egalitarian ethos is used by politicians, business bhagwans and commentators to hoodwink us into thinking the shit sandwich tastes yummy. Don't believe them.

Snobbery Today

We still have with us the old Rule Britannia snobs of yesteryear like Bronwyn Bishop and Janette Howard, but it's the shiny new millennial snobs that are our real problem--the consultants, media gurus, celebrities, freelancers and sundry 'professionals' that we read about in the colour supplements. They're the upper middle class, tertiary-educated elites accustomed to seeing their world view reflected in the Sydney Morning Herald, who do very nicely out of the new economy because they do well out of every economy. Hugh Mackay might call this new elite "symbolic analysts" but, despite affecting a fashionable left-of-centre banter, these time-poor, home-renovating cosmopolitan harbour huggers enjoy a continuity with the ancestral Australian snobs. They are for the most part Anglo Saxon, private school old boys and girls hogging whatever gigs offer the most money and status. Once it was sheep, colonial administration, the East India company and land speculation; now it's media, government consultancies, Microsoft and...well, land speculation. Social balls and charity have morphed into PR events and openings. New frocks and new drugs but the same budgets, same VIP lists, same mindless chatter, same servants on shit wages, same exclusion. Upper middle class Australia is no longer the exclusive property of the Protestant ascendancy, but the newcomers to money and status have learned the old putdowns. The habits of the Irish push remain beyond the pale--it's just that it's the Bankstown Lebs and the Cabramatta Vietnamese who now carry the shillelagh.

Social Climbers

Snobs don't just look down on others, they also look up to their betters. Passionate believers in hierarchy, a snob believes some people are superior to themselves, but hopes desperately that a little bit of the superiority will rub off. Like Basil Fawlty, they run around noisily policing hierarchies to impress those upstairs. Australia is full of these insecure little guys. Look at John Howard's craven attitude to the British monarchy or the lackeys who write the social pages. Watch Michael Knight roll out the red carpet when Juan Antonio comes to town. Check out the door bitches at a trendy nightclub/art opening/fashion show. Hang out on the film set of an AFTRS production and watch the wankers bask in the director's reflected light. Get your hair cut in Darlinghurst. Talk to a researcher at Channel Nine. The old English aristocracy were right. The worst snobs are the social climbers.

Art Snobs

An obsession with hierarchies of taste marks out as snobs the high modernist culture priests like Robert Hughes, Colin Lancely and Robert Dessaix who condemn popular taste and "mass culture" while they repeat fire their rusty cannons. I'm talking about guys like Philip Adams who work for News Corp and reckon we are all brainwashed by American TV while going into a lather over the latest art flick or British costume drama. What about the network programmer at ABC TV, Hugh McGowan--now there's a snob who stood up for "God Save the Queen" when he was in britches. And why is it that the commissars down at the AFC and the NSW Film and TV Office fund obscure films for the Cannes circuit that Australians don't want to see? You see, like a good old Tory with a thoroughbred, the culture snobs can suss out true quality. The high priests repeat the sermon that we are indeed philistines in order to keep art in its heaven and us in our place.

City vs The Bush

Snobbery can be ugliest in a small town, where local matrons freeze out the unmarried mother, while the mortgage-strapped trades belt slag off the unemployed "housos" down the hill. The province discriminates with obvious, clumsy and occasionally brutal disdain. Look at Pauline Hanson's cheer squad or the pecking order in a country RSL. Big cities like Sydney and Melbourne like to boast that they are "cosmopolitan" and "tolerant", but in my opinion the small "l" liberal intelligentsia of the metropolis can put most rednecks to shame. More often city snobs are just better at keeping a safe distance from those they don't like, or are more clever when they make their assumed inferiors feel like a bag of shit.

White Mans Burdon

For many white inner-city sophisticates, Aborigines are best kept in the Dreamtime and "multiculturalism" ends at the restaurant. Aborigines are more likely to hang out with white knockabouts than play the exotic at an inner-city dinner party--I wonder why? Multiculturalism is all about "us" being enriched. Migrants are praised for improving "our" food but snobs run a mile from a real Bankstown Leb acting the modern Larrikin. Remember how Australians of Arabic ancestry suddenly lost their nationality and became "Lebanese" after shots were fired at a police station. That was our urbane Labor Premier reminding us that Anglo superiority can be relied on in a fix to make others feel shit. The Aussie fair go has become the multicultural fair--the wogs are tolerated as long as they dance in their national costumes and don't hang out on our streets.

Neck and Neck

Working class and rural whites are stereotyped and mocked by inner-city wits for their westie accents, conservative ideas, intolerance, crude manners, addictions, cars, garages, bad taste ornaments, bad hair, cheap tracksuits, big dogs, TV dinners, processed cheese, commercial TV, instant coffee, sexism and homophobia. This is a classic case of blaming the victim. In a bizarre replay of the dispossession of peasants in the industrial revolution, the information revolution has dealt cruelly with the Australian working class in city and country, not just eliminating their jobs but tearing the guts out of their communities and traditions. Then on top of all this they have to cop being villified as rednecks or buffoons by clever urban sophisticates. After upper middle class right wing bastards have done their darnedest to rob blue collar people of a decent income, a job, a train station, a hospital bed and unemployment benefits, along comes a bunch of lefty middle class whingers to make them feel shit about their way of life. No wonder they listen to a ratbag like Pauline Hanson and kicked Jeff Kennett and the republic to kingdom come.

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  Issue 77 contents

»	Games Workers Still Waiting on Closing Ceremony
»	Showdown: Howard Faces Court Over Rail Sell-Off
»	World Awaits Landmark Slave Labour Decision
»	American Voters Reject Vouchers
»	Illawarra Fights The Big Bastard
»	Retailers Rethink FairWear Retreat
»	Killer Holidays: Activist Fired for Taking Vacation
»	ANZ Faces Contracts Challenge
»	Cup Workers Score Heady Brew
»	Meals on Wheels Turns Mean
»	Wild Horses Get Maurie's Goat
»	Labor Council backs Souths Rally
»	Sisters Celebrate Four Years
»	Reith to Face the Music

»	The Soapbox
»	Sport
»	Trades Hall
»	Tool Shed

»	Nader no Fels
»	Sartor's Veladrome

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