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May 9, 2013
Nick Cater’s book The Lucky Culture And the Rise of an Australian Ruling Class is the voice of the Murdoch media in Australia, which controls 70% of the press and a fair slice of the screen. Cater speaks for the political power that is centred on big business, the Murdoch global media empire, elite private schools and the Liberal and National Parties.
His book continues the culture wars--it promotes climate change denialism, winding back mass university access, funding state-led economic development through the construction of dams, highlights the cultural divide and attacks the impractical, progressive cosmopolitan inner city elites as being out of touch with suburban Australia and favours endless economic growth.
Cater argues that in the first decade of the 21st century, a new “self-appointed ruling class” emerged in Australia, comprising university graduates who were “cosmopolitan and sophisticated”. These powerful inner city elites did not simply feel better off but held that they were better than their fellow Australians. Australia is under threat from the elitism of a "morally snobbish intellectual class". Labor is part of a new social and political elite, a class of tertiary educated progressives who sneeringly look down their noses at ‘ordinary Australians’.
Cater says that this is:
A class that relies for status on cultural rather than financial capital cannot concede that wealth carries virtue, and resorts to attacking Rinehart’s cultural standing in the most personal terms. It amounts to a crude assertion of cultural refinement … (on) how to handle money and how to arrange their hair. In a society where net wealth is considered a poor guide to character, the sneer is an assertion of class superiority … In a country where cultural superiority becomes important, belittlement of others is an underhand form of self-aggrandisement, a habit that once adopted becomes almost impossible to break.
Cater, in arguing for a narrowing of university access back to the standards of the 1950s, supports a two-class system, with one set of rules for the conservative establishment and a different set of standards for their political rivals.
Behind the culture war sits a neo-liberalism of transnational capital that favours the imposition of austerity regimes in which nation-states are used by the corporate elites as key drivers of neoliberal globalization. This mode of governance criticizes democracy by taking the form of a politics that says that increasing taxes to fund social welfare spending for the poor destroys the incentives for wealth creation through hard work, enterprise and talent. This mode of governance aims to castrate democracy by insulating economic policies from democratic politics.
This politics reconfigures the social contract in the name of ending the age of entitlement and returning the budget to surplus. The welfare state is to be dismantled. Essential public services are to be cut so that the rich may pay less tax. The public realm is privatised and the regulations restraining the ultra-wealthy and the companies they control are made light. It makes a virtue of the high levels of inequality in that it says that inequality encourages people to work harder, and the bigger the gap, the more some people will strive to try to close it. It exploits the language of Australian national identity to justify the dismantling of the welfare state.
When it comes to economic/social justice or democratic accountability, the state is presented by neo-liberals as a life-draining bureaucratic monster to be fought at every opportunity. But when it comes to the military, defence, and the punitive, and national security functions of the state, it is cast as the last bastion of civilization and freedom which brooks no qualification or oversight.
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"the regulations restraining the ultra-wealthy and the companies they control are made light. "
The rhetoric is "reduce the burden of excessive regulation" rather than "tie up business with yet more red and green tape".