One way of conducting class warfare is to accuse your opponent of conducting class warfare. In his speech in reply to last week's Budget the Leader of the Opposition attacked the government for 'deliberately, coldly, calculatingly play[ing] the class war card', of portraying the political contest as 'billionaires versus battlers'.
There was a time when someone on the Government benches would have interjected to call Tony Abbott the billionaires' lacky, and pointed to some incriminating evidence is support: donations by the mining industry to his Coalition parties have soared over the past five years from a few hundred thousand dollars a year to $3 million, during which time donations to the Labor Party have gone from hardly anything to a bit less than that.
If only life, and class relations, were so simple. But they are not. It is not long since a government of which Abbott was a senior member itself played 'the class war card', but for the other side, for 'Howard's battlers'. And for most of the intervening period Labor studiously avoided playing that same card, preferring to talk about 'Australian working families' rather than battlers — or billionaires.
The frisson of comment about the terms of Abbott's assault on the Budget reflects a national ambivalence, and confusion, about class. Talk about class has never been absent from our history, but we also like to think that since no-one tugs a forelock to anyone, we (unlike the poms) are classless.
Abbott appealed to just this logic before he attacked the Government for not using it. His was 'an Australian life', he averred, 'much like yours, with Margie, raising three daughters in suburban Sydney, paying a mortgage, worrying about bills, trying to be a good neighbour and a good citizen'.
The term 'class' can itself wears much of the blame for this national confusion. 'Class' conjures up a vision of vast battalions, homogenous, distinct, and immutable. What the concept tries to draw attention to is in fact more like one of those Bureau of Metrology videos on the net, images of endlessly-swirling forces of every colour, patterned certainly, but never neat and stationary.
One of those forces is the force of language, and there is probably no time in Australia's history when the term 'class' has been so on the nose. In some ways that is a good thing, reflecting the fact that we are now much more conscious of other kinds of social