The John Button Oration, August 2015, Melbourne Writers’ Festival
Thank you so much. It’s a real thrill to be here at the Melbourne Writer’s
Festival, my first invitation and hopefully not my last.
I want to start by (also) acknowledging the traditional owners of the land,
past, present and future generations of the Kulin Nation.
The recognition of Indigenous peoples at the beginning of public lectures like
this one is now, happily, de rigueur. Perhaps it has paved the way for broad
public support for recognition of prior occupation in our constitution, which
will hopefully occur sooner rather than later. (Recent polling shows broad
support at about 63%) My only quibble with the ‘welcome to country’ is that it
is often done too quickly and the opportunity it provides to inform the
audience about the ancient history of the land we stand on is often missed.
Sometimes a speaker acknowledges Indigenous generations and the cultures
they have miraculously managed to maintain and then moves on to speak
about their chosen topic, without thinking of making connections between
this topic and the challenges and opportunities facing indigenous peoples.
You can’t speak about inequality in this country, as is the chosen theme of
my lecture tonight, without talking about Indigenous Australians, and I will do
so later in my talk.
In preparation for tonight, I did some cursory research on the Kulin Nation. It is
made up of five distinct but related language groups, who formed a
relatively harmonious confederacy, one that worked well together, traded
and intermarried. One of the more interesting bits of information I learned in
my research about the Kulin Nation is that the word ‘Kulin’ itself comes from
the tribes’ common word for ‘a human being’. In a spectacular but not
unique example of unequal treatment John Batman attempted the only
recorded treaty with the Kulin people, claiming to exchange blankets and
other goods for almost 250,000 hectares of land in the Port Phillip District. This
treaty was not recognised by colonial authorities.
Addressing inequality in all its forms was a lifelong quest of the man after
whom this oration is named, John Button. I had the chance to meet John
only once. I was about 25 years old, attending a Fabian Conference at
Melbourne’s Trades Hall. The Labor Party was in the middle of its long period
of opposition and Labor figures were busy publishing books about The Third
Way and wondering whether this internet thingy would prove important in the
years to come. At the pub afterwards I was sitting with a few other
participants and John interrupted our discussion to praise our speeches but
also to gently admonish us about a glaring omission in most of the talks the
day. “Don’t forget about poverty”, he told us. And off he went with a wink
and a smile, briefcase in hand and a jaunty scarf around his neck. In addition
to honouring John’s legacy, I also want to acknowledge members of his
family who are here tonight. As the daughter of a ‘great man’ stroke
‘workaholic’ I recognise it’s not all fun and games to be the support team for
a public figure. It’s just terrific that you continue to ensure The John Button
Foundation thrives and can host events like this.
There is one more person I want to recognise tonight. Joan Kirner. As you
would all no doubt be aware, Joan died earlier this year. Lucky me, I
considered her a friend and mentor. And I would like to acknowledge Ron
Kirner, who is here tonight. My thoughts this evening are dedicated to Joan
and inspired by her example, a life led fighting for fairness. I learned many
important lessons from Joan. She taught me a lot about power, how to use it,
get it and keep it. But she also taught me power is only important if it is
exercised to help those who don’t have it. For Joan it wasn’t about how high
you could climb but if you could pull people up with you. And make the
climb easier for those coming after.
Tonight I’ve promised to give you all a glimpse into the mind and mood of
Australians when it comes to issues of inequality and fairness.
I should stress that I am not an expert on social and economic inequality in
itself. I am an expert on perception rather than reality, which is exactly why
people like me shouldn’t be given too much of a say in policy matters or in
politics for that matter.
I do however, have a very general understanding of the current nature of
inequality in Australia through my involvement in the Chifley Research
Centre’s Inclusive Prosperity Commission. The Commission released its first in a
series of discussion papers a few weeks ago, warning of a new level of
inequality emerging in Australia. That report shows that while Australia is one
of the few countries to have resisted the trend to a shrinking middle class up
until now, there are new threats on the horizon. Income inequality in Australia
has been rising and we are now in the bottom half of the equality ladder.
Those at the top, our most wealthy Australians, have been taking a greater
share of the nation’s income. This isn’t as bad as in the United States but it is
getting worse. The gender pay gap is widening and it wasn’t that flash to
start with. Wealth inequality, especially driven by housing, is far worse than
income inequality. There are huge and obvious implications here for younger
generations. In addition to this, wages have failed to keep pace with
productivity improvements. There is a long list of social groups that face large
and different challenges in terms of workforce participation, wages and
wealth and access to infrastructure of all kinds. These groups include
Indigenous Australians, frail and those caring for frail Australians, people and
those caring for people living with disabilities and those living in poorly
serviced regional, outer urban and rural areas. And of course those almost
totally forgotten Australians, those living in homes where there is
multigenerational unemployment.
That’s a very cursory description of the reality for you. Now let’s talk
‘perception’.
After ten years of researching Australian attitudes, it’s clear that a long period
of affluence – what journalist George Megalogenis’ calls ‘the longest
decade’ – has ramped up the lifestyle expectations of some parts of the
Australian population. Your perceptions about what it is to be ‘middle class’
or ‘doing well’, your values and the extent you are prepared to use debt to
fund particular lifestyle choices (such as yearly overseas holidays or private
schooling) directly impact on any perceptions you might have about fairness,
whether you are getting ‘a fair go’ or whether other people are. It also
shapes your sense of optimism or pessimism about the role of government
and the direction of economy.
Here’s a telling example of this. My previous employer, Ipsos, runs a large and
robust study on consumer trends and sentiment as well as media use. It’s
called Enhanced Media Metrics Australia or, the friendlier, Jane Austenish title
of emma. The emma project surveys over 54,000 Australians a year. It collects
a huge amount of data about their attitudes and behaviours from everything
from shopping to immigration. Out of this data, Ipsos created what we in the
research biz call a segmentation, a classification of the entire population into
groups or types. There are ten in all.
There are two segments in this study, which, when compared, show exactly
how much expectations of what it is to be ‘middle class’ shape perceptions
of inequality and fairness.
These segments – we call the first group Assertive Materialists and the second
Conscientious Consumption – are on the face of it very similar. Both groups
are dominated by middle and upper middle class families living in urban
areas, with children parented by highly educated, big earners who are
strongly engaged with new technology (particularly smartphones and
tablets) and social media.
What divides these two groups are their values and attitudes to what it
means to be ‘middle class’.
The Assertive Materialists (11% of the population) place great value on social
mobility, status and lifestyle. Private schooling, for example, is a priority for
members of this group. They are almost entirely internally focused. They are
also heavily committed in terms of mortgage and credit card debt and
spend a lot on discretionary items. They are pessimistic about the role of
government, worried about the direction of economy and their own financial
future. In focus groups they are likely to talk about high taxes, cost of living
and ‘doing it tough’. They are less likely to believe the government should
intervene on issues like climate change or have a more expansive
immigration program.
In contrast, the Conscientious Consumption group (9% of the population)
while in a very similar situation economically to their Assertive Materialist
neighbours, see the world quite differently. They are more optimistic about
their own economic future and the country’s, more confident about sending
their kids to a public school, supportive of the idea that government should
do more in the area of climate change and open to an increase in
immigration.
For some members of the Australian middle class, ‘doing it tough’ has almost
nothing to do with how the economy is or the reality of their own economic
situation. It has to do with anxiety and expectations of what it is to be ‘middle
class’.
Let’s return to my brief description of the current state of economic and
social inequality outlined by The Inclusive Prosperity
Commission. To what extent do Australian’s perceptions of inequality and
fairness mesh with that reality?
I’m pleased to tell you that in my experience, perception and reality aren’t
entirely at odds. In fact there are some heartening continuities. When I was
director of the long running Mind & Mood Report, I conducted countless
studies where discussion group participants discussed the notion of inequality,
either directly or indirectly. These insights from the last 10 years of Mind &
Mood studies have been usefully summarised in a recent report, co-funded
by ACOSS, The Reichstein Foundation and The Australian Communities
Foundation.
In the forward to that report, ACOSS CEO Cassandra Goldie quotes statistics
from her own organisation’s analysis of inequality in Australia, which meshes
with much of what is in the Inclusive Prosperity report when it comes to rising
income and wealth inequality. She writes …
A person in the highest 20% of income earners has around five times as
much income as someone in the lowest 20% of income groups. Wealth
is far more unequally distributed than income. A person in the highest
20% of income earners has around 70 times more wealth than a person
in the lowest 20% of income earners. The average wealth of a person in
the highest 20% increased by 28% over the past eight years, while for
the lowest 20% it increased by only 3%. Meanwhile, the lowest 40% of
households own just 5% of all wealth. And for those who think it’s all
relative, [ACOSS’s] research shows that inequality in Australia is higher
than the OECD average.
These facts are indeed ‘felt’ by the Australian population. Except for a
concern about rising cost of living (in general the cost of living has stabilised
or even decreased slightly for most Australians over the last 10 years),
Australians are worried about the casualisation of the labour market, job
insecurity (not just for themselves but for other Australians, particular younger
ones), wage restraint, the high cost of housing and its impact of wealth
inequality and the high price of entry into the property market. In addition,
while poverty is not as popular a topic as supermarket prices in the discussion
groups I’ve conducted over the years, there is in general an appreciation
that there are fellow Australians who are living in poverty or part of the
working poor. Indeed, it seems that some are becoming more conscious of
the number of people who are slipping into ‘real’ poverty and associated
problems such as homelessness - with little hope of being able to find a way
out.
The public response to the 2014 federal budget was a beautiful example of
the still existing altruistic impulse in the Australian populous, evidence we are
still wedded to fairness not just as an abstract concept but as a concrete
outcome. That budget seemed to trigger a fresh wave of sympathy towards
those who were genuinely ‘doing it tough’. According to quantitative
research conducted by Ipsos in the immediate aftermath of that budget,
70% of respondents to a national representative survey of over 1000 voters
believed the burden of the budget would not be shared equally across
society. They thought the budget was unfair and worried about its impact,
not just for themselves, but on other people. Qualitative research conducted
seven weeks down the line also suggested that participants were worried
that the budget was taking too much away from the young, the older and
the more vulnerable in our society.
Another question worth asking is … do Australians even feel as if the notion of
egalitarianism, encapsulated in the Australian vernacular phrase of ‘the fair
go’, is even relevant anymore?
The idea of an egalitarian society and the right to ‘a fair go’ is one that
Australians still hold dear. The values of fairness and equality are often seen as
being at the heart of what it means to be Australian. In a report the Mind &
Mood team did in 2011 on Australian identity, there was plenty of evidence
that Australians across divisions of class, gender and generation still believed
that Australia was and should fight to remain an egalitarian society.
We give everyone a fair go. We have a fair go attitude.
The thing about Australia that is a good thing is that everyone should
get a fair go.
Fair go, mateship, helping each other. … It is a strong Australian value.
These are just some of the typical comments from the participants in that
study.
And yet this largely positive picture, the continuity between the reality and
the perception of inequality and the remaining support for the concept of ‘a
fair go’, is shot through with dark and unsettling strains of prejudice and
fatalism.
By fatalism I mean the sense Australians have that while inequality is rising and
that it is, to use that hackneyed phrase, ‘unAustralian’, there isn’t much that
can be done about it. In addition, it may be that we are losing some of our
sense of the damage (both social and economic) that inequality can cause.
In the quantitative research done by Ipsos after the 2014 budget, while a
strong majority of respondents, 73%, thought the gap between rich and poor
is getting wider, only just above half of those same respondents, 58%,
believed having large differences in income and wealth was bad for society.
In addition only 67% of those surveyed thought that rich people don’t pay
their fair share of tax. I guess that was a survey with a 23% quota of people
who consider themselves to be rich!
In terms of prejudice we know that Australians’ commitment to a fair go and
mateship may not extend to people who arrive here on boats to seek asylum.
Whoever came up with the idea of describing these people as ‘queue
jumpers’ was pretty clever, in a Dr Evil cat-stroking type way. The phrase
manages to tap into Australians’ ideas of ‘fairness’, at the same time using
that phrase to attack those who have been treated unfairly. Who amongst us
hasn’t been enraged when someone cuts into line at the polling booth or
coffee cart? Australians love many things, an orderly queue is one of them.
Paranoia about what is now commonly called ‘illegal immigration’ or ‘illegal
arrivals’ is now rampant in the community. And it is paranoia. Globally Ipsos
released a 14-country study in August last year called ‘The Perils of
Perception’. The Australian wave of research included a survey of 1000 voting
aged Australians. The report found that Australians significantly overestimated
the numbers of migrants in this country. They guessed that the percentage of
the population who were first generation migrants was on average 35%; it is in
fact 28%. More worrisome was that 33% of those surveyed though it was 56%,
more than double the actual figure. Why? 42% of those surveyed believed it
was because “people come into the country illegally so aren’t counted”. The
same number also agreed with the statement “I still think the proportion is
much higher”. So even in the face of clear facts about numbers of migrants,
Australians are convinced that our population is bloated with illegal arrivals.
Such is the almost perverse desire, unchecked by so much media and
political discussion, that we are being overrun by people from overseas.
Furthermore in terms of prejudice, the story of a fair and equal Australia is only
occasionally disrupted by the question of the status and future of Indigenous
Australians. In the report I mentioned previously about Australian identity,
participants seemed to be at a complete loss about how to talk about the
first Australians. The vast majority of non-Indigenous Australians have little or
no direct interaction with Indigenous peoples and their communities. We are
all caught between the Qantas poster ads of smiling Koori kids and the night
time news stories of violence, abuse and poverty in Indigenous communities.
For some, Australia’s Indigenous heritage is the missing piece of our national
story. They are looking to fill that gap with something meaningful and
constructive. But in the main, there is a silence, a lack of words, a sense of
hopelessness that dominates the discussion about Indigenous Australia in the
rest of the community.
To be honest, I think they’re trying to sort it out, but they just don’t know
what to do. The honest answer is they have no idea. It’s too big a
problem. You’ve taken a culture and completely fucked it up and you
can’t just turn around and say, ‘we’re sorry, let’s just move on’.
There’s no answer. I don’t see the answer.
Just some of the common sentiments from that study on Australian identity.
In his much loved and still highly relevant book, The Lucky Country, Donald
Horne nailed the uniquely Australian approach to fairness. He wrote that it
was “ingrained in the texture of Australian life”. Fairness was the general
belief that it is the government’s job to see that everyone gets a fair go. “Fair
goes are not only for oneself, but for the underdogs”, Horne wrote. Until the
underdog comes out from under and then he becomes a tall poppy and
can rightfully be torn down (take note Adam Goodes). There are blindsides in
Australians’ kindness to underdogs, Horne pointed out. He mentioned
Indigenous Australians. I would add asylum seekers. Australians, Horne writes,
like “people to be ordinary”. You have to fit the “majority pattern, follow the
rules”. Equality, fairness, a stake in our society and right share in its bounty
can be often predicated on fitting in and not speaking out.
When I think of inequality, I think of particular people I’ve met as a
researcher, their stories and what they tell me about how fairness and
unfairness work in this country. These are people facing multiple challenges,
caught in complex webs of disadvantage.
I think about a woman I met in regional NSW, a widowed mum in her 40s with
six kids and a grandchild on the way. She was sleeping on the bottom part of
a single trundle bed in her daughter’s room, having given up her own room
for her son and his heavily pregnant girlfriend. She was struggling to access
the right services in her own town, working uncertain and long shifts as a
disability support worker. Gender, geography, family status and work status
combined to make her life economically uncertain and stressful.
I think about the foreign exchange students from India who were involved in
a study I directed on the mind and mood of new migrants. They were working
shitty cash in hand jobs for exploitative restaurant owners (sad to say second
and third generation Indians themselves) and had paid high fees for substandard hospitality courses in this country. After all the money their parents
had paid for these courses, these young men couldn’t stomach returning to
India but couldn’t get ahead here in Australia either. Ethnicity, citizenship and
work status combined to make their troubles seem unsolvable and invisible.
The same too for a group of Sudanese refugees interviewed as part of that
same study. Despite their education and ability, the only jobs they could get
in our economy were as taxi drivers, supermarket trolley collectors and
garbage men. In this case add skin colour and religion to the mix of forces
creating unfairness for these new Australians.
I think about a group of 30 something mums living 40 minutes from the centre
of Melbourne. These women’s husbands had to commute long distances for
their jobs and so these women were solely responsible for the child care and
school shuttle run each day, not to mention supervising homework and
making dinner. Despite the fact their pre-baby jobs were in sectors like
financial services, they felt they had no choice but to pursue second-rate
jobs (like cashiers at the local supermarket) on return to work, the assumption
being these would be less demanding and more flexible. Gender and
location combined to ensure these women would struggle to find skilled and
well paid work again as they got older, relying heavily instead on their
partners’ income and support.
In the political and media talk – some of it sludge – about ‘doing it tough’,
about battlers, about the aspirational class, these kinds of people and their
stories rarely feature. Here is the real disconnect between perception and
reality. An asylum seeker isn’t an underdog. An Indian student slaving away in
a kitchen for $5 an hour is not a battler.
The Australian community at large continues to hold onto the idea that we
should be a fair society. They have some sense about the nature of social
and economy inequality; mostly, perception of who is struggling and who is
actually struggling aligns. We do worry that the gap between rich and poor is
getting bigger. When government looks as if it is making decisions that will
enlarge that gap, or make it harder for those who are already finding it hard,
the electorate will cry out, in focus groups and polls if not at the ballot box.
But do we truly understand the benefits of social equality? Or the downsides
of social inequality?
Do we believe governments can and want to address the causes of social
and economic disadvantage?
And does our mental image of inequality feature the faces of those who
aren’t ‘just like us’?
That is less clear.
Thank you all for listening and thanks again to the Melbourne Writers Festival
and The John Button Foundation for the invitation.