Just 15% of Australian workers are in a union. Nearly all of those are public servants or other white collar workers. The only real redoubt of blue collar unionism left is the building trades, where being a union member is often simply a necessary evil of being allowed to work on big construction projects.
But, as we saw in Melbourne last year, even the rank and file of the building unions are turning on the union bosses with undisguised fury. And the bosses and their Labor mates shat themselves.
Only a fraternity of freedom-minded men (and some women) could come together to scare the political class witless like that. They were scared to such an extent that Labor leader and current MP Bill Shorten had to go on the air and baselessly call CFMEU members neo-Nazis, comically blind to the irony.
This wasn’t the first time Shorten had betrayed the workers he purports to stand for, of course. As a union boss himself, he sneakily sold out the lowest-paid workers in the country, negotiating worse pay and conditions than they already had, in return for kickbacks from employers. Shorten also funneled union money to far-left activist group GetUp, whose campaigns against coal mining, amongst other causes, directly attack union members’ jobs.
Shorten is just the small, nasty avatar of a wider rot in the left: while pretending to champion the poor and working-class, the left is uniformly university-educated, middle and upper-class. And they not-so-subtly despise the working-class, whom they sneer at as uneducated “deplorables”.
While the working class may not be indoctrinated by university-education groupthink, they have a long streak of plain common sense that puts the elites to shame. As Orwell said, they’re simply not fool enough to believe the nonsense so beloved of the “intelligentsia”.
Among all this middle class moralising and senseless globalist chatter burped out by our leaders, the working class are increasingly the ones with the smarts, sense, and strength to stand up and say what’s right. It’s time for Australia’s workers to start shouting again. Not just for the good of themselves, but for the good of the country.
Non-graduates are overwhelmingly sceptical of Climate Change. They reject Big Australia. They recognise that 20-30 years of uninterrupted mass migration has indeed grown the size of the economic pie, but reduced working people’s share. They’ve seen their wages stagnate at a time when corporate earnings have skyrocketed. They’ve watched their home-owning dreams crumble while the top end of town buys the block. They tend to their shrinking gardens as crime runs rampant and dole-bludgers get double pay. And they’re left scratching their heads, wondering why the media says nothing.
Because the media are part of the elite, clustered into the fashionable inner-city terraces of Melbourne, or in the case of the ABC, within cycling distance of the ultra-exclusive Sydney harbourside enclave of Ultimo. In a you-just-couldn’t-make-it-up moment, an ABC executive sent journalists out to discover “the other Australia”… all of 10kms away, to Bankstown.
On the other side of the tracks, as the recent election proves, the rich and highly educated have mostly lost their minds. Dwelling on far away and fanciful abstractions, the wealthiest electorates in Australia have overwhelmingly chosen to vote for the high-taxing Teals and big-government Greens. In the cities, rainbow flags drape over offices, lobbies, necks and corporate logos. Rather than celebrate the country that gave them their riches and comfort in the first place, they instead choose to try and destroy it, with inner-city councils fighting to change the one day a year we might all come together in celebration.
The great monomania of the left is “diversity”: try and spot any diversity in a Greens-voting suburb. In the Greens’ Melbourne epicentre, Fitzroy, the white, wealthy Greens voters actively flee the diversity of the nearby Housing Commission towers, where their beloved refugees actually live. Instead of sending their kids to nearby Fitzroy Primary, with the highest concentration of African kids in Australia, the privileged white Greens voters load their precious offspring into their SUVs and drive them to exclusive (and nearly entirely white) private schools several suburbs away.
There’s a clear divide between top and bottom here, and something is seriously wrong at the top. I strongly believe in the future of this country, but as others have noted, our leaders are failing us. If we’re to get Australia back on track, the people who build the country may also need to run the country.
Spectator Australia
Well, don’t look to Labor for that. The last Labor politician to ever hold a job outside politics, John Faulkner (and he was a white-collar teacher), retired years ago.