Class in Australia
Craig McGregor, Penguin Books, 1997
Review by Doug Hynd
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 60
Autumn 1998

Getting a handle on what is really happening in Australian society as we draw to the close of the 20th century is more difficult than it might at first appear. It is easy to be overwhelmed by the flood of commentary that appears in the daily papers offering instant analysis, often with little or no historical perspective or awareness of relevant academic research. Much of this material is perhaps even more dangerous because the author is unselfconscious about the underlying framework or vision within which they are writing.

For those who want to engage substantially with this question, Craig McGregor's Class in Australia has got quite a lot going for it and makes a useful counterpoint to Hugh Mackay's reporting on and interpretation of the national pysche in his Reinventing Australia and Generations. While Mackay reported on what he has heard from listening to Australians, McGregor has drawn heavily on the work of sociologists and interpreted and illustrated their findings with the assistance of some excursions into popular culture and interviews with significant contemporary Australians.

McGregor in taking up the issue of class does not present us with a detached academic tract but a piece of work in which he is personally engaged. He is quite clear about the extent to which his own life experience and moral vision shapes his argument, as he notes in the Preface: "This is a book on class in Australia, which as I wrote it, developed into a general commentary on Australia as well. It is based upon both academic research and personal experience . . . primarily, this is an attempt to look at the class structure in contemporary Australia, how it works, how it makes an impact on particular people . . . and what might be done about it".

This book is written to convince and to motivate us for action and is relatively accessible in its writing and presentation. Some of the best writing in the book though is found in the author's 'class profiles', based on interviews with significant Australians and providing interpretations of their experience in the light of his broader argument about the nature of class in Australian society.

To a fair extent in, McGregor's choice of the persons profiled we are presented with a range of the usual suspects: John Howard and Kim Beazley make an appearance, as do Bernie Fraser, Paul Hogan, Jimmy Barnes, Bobbi Sykes and Elizabeth Evatt. The predicability of their inclusion is offset by the poignancy of their history and the contrasting of the irreducible individuality against the broader social patterns that have shaped that individuality.

There are, however, a couple of treats in which less familiar territory is covered. The profile of Marg Barry, a community activist in inner Sydney for example, had me wishing for more while the long sketch of a middle class nuclear family and profile of Bondi Junction are engaging in the connections they make with the broader argument.

McGregor sums up the argument he has attempted to make in the book in the closing chapter: "One of these days people are going to do something about class. We're never going to achieve the old socialist ideal of the classless society: it was never attainable anyhow. But utopias are important not because they are achievable but because they provide an ideal, a model, a map to help us see which way we want to go. Because class is the chief distributor of inequality of privilege and underprivilege, of gross power and terrible deprivation in our society, the task of reducing the effects of class is one of the crucial endeavours in our society."

What McGregor has provided us with in this book is a passionate and thoughtful contribution to the debate about what Australia has become as a society and what it might yet become. What is absent from the book is a serious engagement with the interaction with the role of religious belief and its relationship to the social structure. It is at this point of silence, though, that the indictment of the Christian community begins. As a community we have become defined by the structures of class and unconscious of the extent to which it has penetrated the life of our communities and do register as being in any way relevant to McGregor's argument.

This is a matter of both challenge and profound concern. At the foundation of our life (and the defining story which shaped our initial practice as a community) is news of reconciliation which cut across the major restrictive barriers in the ancient world: "neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female". The subversiveness of Paul's vision of the Christian community cut deep into the surrounding culture and, while that culture moved to domesticate that subversion, it was never quite able to wipe out the memory of the gospel story and its practice in the early church.

The recovery of the practice of the gospel in the Christian community is one practical way in which the church could contribute to the struggle against the increasing destructiveness visited by class structures on Australian society. It would be a sign of hope in a time when that virtue is in very short supply. This is a book to argue with and about. A good way to begin that discussion and to test the validity of his case for the impact of class on Australian society is to start the discussion with some reporting by group members of the experience of their own families over the past couple of generations and the extent to which their local churches reinforce or challenge the barriers of class.

Doug Hynd is a regular contributor to Zadok. He currently works as a public servant in Canberra. He is a single parent, teaches courses in Christian Ethics at St Mark's National Theological Centre and is part of a house church in the Woden-Weston Creek area.