Whatever its faults, Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead is a dazzling tapestry of character study. Rand sketches her characters with acid wit and little sympathy. One of her few sympathetic characters, at least initially, is the innocently sincere Catherine Halsey. But even she ends up as a nasty harridan — a wealthy old maid social reformer with “a mouth to issue orders…but not big orders or cruel orders; just mean little ones”. Halsey pretends to be an altruist, but in truth she despises the “fallen women” and working-poor she bosses around mercilessly.
The wealthiest electorates of Australia just elected their own little army of Catherine Halseys in teal shirts.
In the mountain of commentary about the billionaire-backed “tealslide”, nobody has picked up a glaring fact: the animosity of the most affluent electorates towards the Liberals is not because of climate change or women’s equality.
Those are the excuses that make them feel good about their vote.
What really drove them to hollow out the Liberal vote is plain old class hatred.
Ever since John Howard pitched to the battlers, the Liberal party owed more and more of its success to working-class Australians who deserted the increasingly air-fairy left Labor. A similar demographic shift happened in the US, where the Democratic party that once gave America Harry Truman turned with undisguised venom on the poor, working-class they dubbed “Deplorables”.
Liberals being unseated by teals, and to a lesser extent Greens, reveals a sector of exceedingly well-off Australians who cannot stand to be confronted with the daily lives of people who are not like them. They do not want “their” party to heed the views of those beneath them. You know, those grubby little people who have to worry about things such as making ends meet for bills, food and daily survival.
In fact, the poster issues for the teals are those which actively make working-class peoples’ lives worse at every turn while leaving the teal class untouched. Climate policies have sent electricity prices sky-high, but what’s a few hundred more on power when you’re in the top quintile of earners? Covid lockdowns were a doddle for the teals: they got to stay at home on full pay and order in Uber Eats while they browsed ABC iView. None of them had to worry about keeping a small plumbing or hair-dressing business open, let alone paying a mortgage while the factory was shut. Not one of the “refugees” the teals weep for move to the better suburbs.
Despite their fake sincerity and motherhood statements about wanting a better world for all, the cashed-up elites care more about pandering to their own luxury concerns and neuroses than dealing with regular old blue-collar issues that affect people they strenuously avoid having to have anything to do with. This is no different to the days when the born-to-rule class sat in grandeur […] That is the society the platinum progressives want to recapture, with themselves safely ensconced at the top of the social order where they believe they belong.
Catherine Halsey and the teals are exemplars of what Orwell called “all that dreary tribe of ‘high-minded’ women…who come nocking towards the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat”. They are determined to institute, not a dictatorship of the proletariat, but a “dictatorship of the prigs”.
What we are seeing in Australia’s most Scrooge McDuckian suburbs is a dirty, relentless class war, hidden under the guise of progressive politics and greater equality. The silence of platinum progressives when struggling businesses in Sydney’s poorest suburbs were going under and families suffering during Covid restrictions is a case in point. It is the ultimate piece of hypocrisy to pretend to care about progress and equality while doing everything possible to hurt the poor and demolish the social structures, relationships and institutions that the commoners still care about.
Which is the great opportunity that awaits the Libs, should they be smart enough to seize it. Having shed the dead, soggy weight of Tim Wilson, Trent Zimmerman and Dave Sharma (unfortunately, Bridget Archer held on in Tasmania), the Libs need to shake off the millstone they represented: the ideological dead-weight of silver-spoon wokeism.
The Liberals ought to leave the teals, Greens and Labor to fight among themselves for the votes of the inner-city elite. The Liberals need to study their Howard years and complete the task of turning the one-time party of the rich into the party of the battlers. Forget the “rainbow” bullshit and start listening to what ordinary Australians are saying in pubs and living rooms across the country — and make sure that they can say it in public without being destroyed by a Twitter mob.
Most important, they would ignore screeching demands to let sulky upper-class women dictate policy and understand those women will be satisfied only with a party that places them at the top of the pecking order – never one that governs for the unwashed masses.
The Australian