Class

David Penberthy’s health sandwich is laden with a generous helping of cynicism and a pinch of exaggeration.

By calling for a reduction of the harmful fats in our food, Bob Carr is not seeking to ban fast food outlets. Instead, he is highlighting how easy it would be to make our takeaway foods substantially healthier.

Australians love to eat out - nearly one in three of us do so almost every day, which adds up to a massive 3.8 billion meals eaten out every year.

Continue reading "Big fat exaggeration" »

Our supposedly classless society is showing signs of being divided into two camps where people’s private choices as individuals and their behaviour as families are regulated on the basis of their affluence.

And it’s in the area of nutrition, preventative health and exercise where the working class, for want of a better term, is increasingly being treated like a bunch of babies, while the more affluent members of society continue to live as they please.

It’s only a small thing but it’s a signifier for the times, a demonstration of a mindset which holds that working class people are unable to modify their behaviour, while the gentry can be trusted to keep its conduct in check. But get along to the SCG, that great people’s arena, where our knockabout, egalitarian society lets the members drink as much full-strength beer as they want and limits the great unwashed to light beer.

Continue reading "A bourgeois recipe for working class palates" »

Bondi’s finally done it. The powers that be that run Australia’s most famous beach have put up the metaphorical “closed for business” sign and jacked up parking fees to deter the Westies.

(View The Punch - Poser suburbs of Australia in a larger map)

The local council is not even pretending there’s another good reason for the latest fee hike to $5 an hour, with Waverly Mayor Sally Betts saying she wants to “protect residents from visitors.”

“We don’t want people from western Sydney coming here and parking - we want them to take public transport. But I don’t think the 50c is a disincentive,” Ms Betts told yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph.

Continue reading "The poser map of Australia" »

Standing outside the Unity Hall Hotel, in Darling Street Balmain, Jan doesn’t hold back. She stands for everything that Old Balmain was, working class, down to earth, unpretentious and with a village atmosphere.

Jan doesn’t like how the place has changed. To her Balmain used to be a “kooky” place, with a sense of community but now “we call it Yuppieville… it’s the people moving in that can afford the extravagant rents and the house prices.”

Further down the road at the London Hotel, you can still see the vestiges of the Balmain of yesteryear. It is buildings such as the London Hotel (built in 1870) hold an important place in Australia’s political and social history.

Continue reading "Poor to pretentious in one generation: Balmain" »

The people of Frankston, Victoria, deserve full marks for enterprise. But they’ve damaged their bogan credentials by becoming the latest mulletted suburb to jump on the I-Heart-New York-style merchandising bandwagon, with the suburb’s GDP ballooning to several thousand dollars with the sale of I Love Frankston t-shirts, stubbie holders and prophylactics.

The Herald-Sun chronicled the marketing push last week, with residents of “Franga”, “Franghanistan” and “Funky Town” as Frankston is also known hailing the move as a sign their city was on the improve.

It’s the kind of upwardy-mobile stuff which appalls committed westies such as bricklayer Todd Farrawell, from St Marys in Sydney’s West, who went public last month to bemoan the aspirationists who were getting all giggly about the “new buzz” out west.

Continue reading "Frankston not in the hunt for Australia’s top bogan suburb" »

It may seem a little odd to some but I am a snob when it comes describing those who are generally referred to as bogans – where I’m from the correct term is booner. So being from Canberra it will always be booner and I rarely make allowances those who may not know what I’m talking about.

This may seem ridiculous but it does makes sense: calling someone a bogan (or booner) is after-all an inherently snobbish exercise in differentiating from others you consider yourself to be better than in some way, so you may as well do it properly. 

Another reason for objecting to the term is its ubiquitous use in Australia at the moment is slowly strangling other regionalisms that at least gave a certain colour and flair to our condescension.

Continue reading "The lost tribes of bogan: booners, westies and bevans" »

“White underclass” is a term I’ve used often in my writing, and most American readers seem to know what I mean. They’ve got eyes and live in the same nation I do. But in a sudden burst of journalistic responsibility, I decided that if I am going to throw around the word underclass, then I should offer some clearer, perhaps more scientific definition.

So I started writing this with a pile of published research papers before me. Now they a re in the trash can by my side. Looking down on them, I can see the gobbledygook titles, the stuff of which government policy and political platforms are made. They run together in slurry of the language of our society’s commissars: Concerning-Prevalence-Growth-and-Dynamics-Concentrated Urban Poverty Areas- block-level vs. tract-level segregation-800-tract-tables-urban abstracts-Defining-and-Measuring-the-Underclass-from-The Journal of Policy Analysis and Management-s tatistical-summary-of …

What I find is that nobody in social science seems to agree on the term, or, being firmly placed in the true white middle class themselves, even agree if such a thing as a white underclass exists.

Continue reading "An underclass war that is more than just linguistic" »