- Title
- Class in Australia: public debates and research directions in a settler colony
- Creator
- Gerrard, Jessica; Threadgold, Steven
- Relation
- Class in Australia p. 3-22
- Relation
- https://publishing.monash.edu/product/class-in-australia
- Publisher
- Monash University Publishing
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2022
- Description
- On the night of the conservative Coalition electoral victory in 2019, Prime Minister Scott Morrison declared, ‘These are the quiet Australians who have won a great victory tonight’ (ABC, 2019; McKenna, 2019). Combined with the mantra of ‘jobs and growth’, Morrison’s reference to ‘quiet Australians’ follows a long lineage of rhetorical terms used to evoke a majoritarian politics. You may recall John Howard’s ‘battlers’ (McAllister, 2017) as well as populist appeals to ‘ordinary Australians’, ‘working families’ and ‘middle Australia’. The rhetorical appeal and power of these figurations is that they encapsulate everything and nothing, while being easy to identify with. For both sides of politics, to be ‘ordinary’, ‘quiet’, or a ‘battler’, at the very least denotes being a worker. The cultural importance of work in Australian contemporary politics cannot be understated.
- Subject
- Australia; class; politics; public life
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1446654
- Identifier
- uon:42932
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781922464897
- Language
- eng
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