Peter Goers: We were taught to know our place and not aspire to counter jump the classes

The Great Aussie Battler is nearly extinct. Now he’s classed as a bogan, writes Peter Goers.

The upper class can kiss my arse. I mean that nicely - in a caring and sharing way.

That Australia is classless is a foundational lie, just like terra nullius. Aboriginal people were truly classless before white invasion and then they became an underclass and largely remain so. White Australia was also founded on a convict underclass.

Property equals money equals power equals the upper class. In 1982 you could buy a nice suburban house in Adelaide on a quarter acre block for $32,000. Forty years later that same house is $700,0000 and rising.

House prices have risen by 25 per cent in the last 18 months. Real estate agents report 40 people looking at a single property to rent.

Rents and land taxes are sky high. Home ownership is at a dismal low in Australia compared with comparable nations.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg sand Finance Minister Simon Birmingham. Picture: Adam Taylor

The new underclass will never own a house and will face the vicissitudes of the rental market.

The great Australian dream of owning a Gloria Soame is a nightmare.

Middle class folk can’t afford to leave the homes they own. Even downsizing costs more than you have.The middle classes are slipping backwards into further debt. Only the rich truly prosper.

Rich people spend much more on groceries than poor people earn. Jobseeker is $46 a day. The pensionable are a growing underclass. For shame.

Our Federal Government denies the underclass and yet spends billions repaying the French for a botched submarine deal and more billions on other submarines.

We, who who were raised in the working class often exaggerate our deprivations. We were taught to know our place and not aspire to counter jump the classes. In my first 15 years I never went to the eastern suburbs. My grandmother used to say, “Do you know why we travel second class? Because there’s no third class”.

The Whitlam Government changed a lot of that by making university education freely available to all - not just the rich. That was one of the greatest boons to our society. Education as social change.

Shane Warne’s famous victory celebration in Trentbridge in 1997. Picture: Getty Images

Australia has always been less classist than Britain but no nation is more class-riven than Britain. Jack and Jane are as good as their masters in Australia but they rent and they go hungry.

Class struggle is eternal. If you doubt that just look at the Crows/Power divide or the public/private schools divide. I’ve known maybe 10 St Peter’s College old scholars who do not have a galling sense of self-entitlement.

Some conservative governments dislike intelligence and sophistication. They distrust anything except for people making money to exploit other people.They tell the underclass to go and make money and blame them if they can’t or won’t. This is even worse in the US where Trump was elected only because wealth equals power and power equals wealth.

The Great Aussie Battler is nearly extinct. He’s become a bogan. I’m troubled by that word because it’s so classist but it’s also fond and we’ve recently seen the canonisation of the sadly late Shane Warne who was the king of the bogans.

Live with the rich and eat with the poor is always salient advice. Meanwhile home ownership is the great class division and most of us are living beyond our means which ain’t classy. I see no answers. Do you?

Peter Goers can be heard weeknights and Sundays on ABC Radio Adelaide.