Class in Australia: public debates and research directions in a settler colony

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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