The Aspirational Citizen and Neo-Liberal Hegemony a Discourse

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The Aspirational Citizen and Neo-liberal Hegemony

A Discourse Theory Analysis

Sean Hosking

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

The University of New South Wales, 2011

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Surname or Family name: HOSKING

First name: SEAN Other name/s: ROBERT

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School: Social Science and International Studies Faculty: Social Science and Arts

Title: The Aspirational Citizen and Neo-Liberal Hegemony: a Discourse Theory Analysis

Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE)

The Aspirational Citizen and Neo-Liberal Hegemony; a Discourse Theory Analysis

The concept of an aspirational class came to major prominence in Australia in recent times as a key mainstream demographic around which both major political parties formulated and marketed their policies. Prompted by the electoral success of the conservative Coalition Government in winning key Labor Party heartland seats, the aspirational discourse identified a 'new' class of citizen: practical, hardworking, unsentimentally materialistic, and captive to the prosperity claims of the free-market.

Although arguments for the existence of such a class were not supported by any substantive social research, the reality of the aspirational class was typically uncritically accepted in mainstream political and media commentary. As such the aspirational class was most often invoked as the carrier of an immanent logic in support of the adoption of a range of specific political responses. These included prescriptions for small government, reduced government taxation, privatisation, industrial relations deregulation, and the curtailment of trade union power. The aspirational's status as emerging demographic and class reality meant that such political prescriptions could be objectively conveyed as real world imperatives.

The thesis argues that the aspirational discourse can only be understood in the context of the political interests and discursive logics in relation to which it was articulated. That is, as a neo-liberal mythology that both affirmed and promoted hegemonic values and interests, and responded to the social dislocations attendant to the neo-liberal reform agenda. In this respect the adoption of the aspirational discourse and the key elements articulated within it can be related to important political, social and economic developments in Australia following the commencement of neo-liberal reforms in the early 1980s.

The thesis analyses the rise to prominence of aspirational politics from a discourse theory perspective, employing an approach developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Core theoretical concepts of Laclau and Mouffe, in particular in regard to the function of ideology, the discursive production of social antagonisms, structural dislocation, and the role of mythology, serve to capture the political character of the aspirational discourse and the articulatory practices, discursive logics and social interests implicated in its production.

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Acknowledgements

This thesis is dedicated to my children Ellie, Xavier and Alexandra.

I’d, like to thank my mother Jan for being a constant supportive presence in my life, my partner Karen, who has shown enormous patience and fortitude in line with her ‘highly evolved’ spirit, and my father John.

Special thanks to my supervisor, Dr Alan Morris, for his advice, support and patience, and Dr Susan Keen without whom this thesis would not have been written.

Abstract

The concept of an aspirational class came to major prominence in Australia in recent times as a key mainstream demographic around which both major political parties formulated and marketed their policies. Prompted by the electoral success of the conservative Coalition government in winning key Labor Party heartland seats, the aspirational discourse identified a 'new' class of citizen unencumbered by traditional political allegiance, practical, hardworking, unsentimentally materialistic and wholly captive to the prosperity claims of the free market. The capacity to politically capture this class was posited as an essential component of political success.

Although arguments for the existence of such a class were not supported by any substantive social research, the ‘reality’ of the aspirational, and the range of values and demands ascribed to it, was typically uncritically accepted in mainstream political and media commentary. As such the aspirational was most often invoked as the carrier of an immanent logic in support of the adoption of a range of specific political responses. These included prescriptions for small government, reduced government taxation, privatisation, industrial relations deregulation, and the curtailment of trade union power. The aspirational’s status as emerging demographic and class reality meant that such political prescriptions could be objectively conveyed as ‘real world’ imperatives, distinct from the ‘compromised’ realm of ‘politics’ and ‘ideology’.

The thesis argues that the aspirational discourse can only be understood in the context of the political interests and discursive logics in relation to which it was articulated. That is, as a neo-liberal myth that both affirmed and promoted hegemonic values and interests, and responded to the social dislocations attendant to the neo-liberal reform agenda. In this respect the adoption of the aspirational discourse and the key elements articulated within it can be related to important political, social and economic developments in Australia following the commencement of neo-liberal reforms in the early 1980’s.

The thesis analyses the rise to prominence of aspirational politics from a discourse theory perspective, employing an approach derived from Antonio Gramsci’s concept

ii of political hegemony, and the development of this approach by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Core theoretical concepts of Laclau and Mouffe, in particular in regard to the function of ideology, the discursive production of social antagonisms, structural dislocation, and the function of myth, serve to capture the political character of the aspirational discourse and the articulatory practices, discursive logics and social interests implicated in its production.

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Table of Contents

ACK NOWLEDGEMENTS i ABSTRACT ii CONTENTS iv INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER ONE

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE ASPIRATIONAL 14

 Popular accounts of the aspirational...... 15  Defining the aspirational in the literature...... 22  Conclusion...... 31

CHAPTER TWO

DISCOURSE THEORY 34

 Toward a discourse theory analysis...... 35

 Laclau and Mouffe’s adoption of a fully discursive conception

of the social order...... 37

 Key theoretical concepts...... 42  Common criticisms and responses...... 46  The utility of discourse theory for a study of the aspirational...... 50  Methodology...... 53

CHAPTER THREE

FROM EGALITARIAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY TO ASPIRATIONAL NEO-LIBERALISM 56

 The Australian Settlement and post-war social democracy...... 57 iv

 Neo-liberalism ...... 62

 Hayek and neo-liberal conceptions of government, citizenship, and power...... 69

 Discursive contestations...... 73

 Conclusion...... 76

CHAPTER FOUR

TECHNOCRATIC GOVERNANCE AND POLITICAL MALAISE; THE LABOR PARTY AND THE IMPLEMENTATION OF NEO-LIBERAL REFORMS 78

 The elite vanguard of neo-liberalism...... 79  The Labor government and neo-liberal reforms...... 83 o Technocratic reform and consensus politics...... 87 o The dislocation of the Labor discourse...... 92  Conclusion...... 96

CHAPTER FIVE

DISLOCATIONS IN THE NEO-LIBERAL ORDER 98

 Dislocation...... 99  Changes in Australian Society...... 100  Socio-economic indicators...... 104 o Inequality...... 104 o The labour market...... 106 o Debt...... 110  Social Attitudes...... 111  Western Sydney...... 116  Conclusion...... 124

CHAPTER SIX FILLING THE LACK; THE POLITICAL RESPONSE 125

 The Suppression of Antagonism and the emergence of populist politics...... 126

 Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party and the revolt against neo-liberalism...... 131

 The Howard Coalition government; the conservative panacea...... 138

o From battler to aspirational...... 144

 The Labor party and the aspirational politics of Mark Latham...... 149

 Conclusion...... 158

CHAPTER SEVEN

DISCURSIVE LOGICS AND KEY MOMENTS 161

 The field of discursivity, relations of equivalence, empty signifiers and nodal points...... 161  Discursive moments...... 167  Unique moments...... 174  Conclusion...... 179

CHAPTER EIGHT

ANTAGONISMS 181

 The aspirational and the ‘negating other’...... 181  Values, quality of character and the welfare sector...... 189  Private schools versus public schools...... 196  Conclusion...... 201

CHAPTER NINE

MYTH 203

 The function of myth...... 204  The aspirational as creature of the pure and anonymous market...... 206  Self interested individualism and the aspirational as terminus a quo and terminus a quem...... 210  More sameness less equality...... 214  The aspirational as needy and deserving...... 220

 The aspirational as consumer...... 226  Conclusion...... 230

CONCLUSION 231

BIBLIOGRAPHY 240

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Introduction

The concept of an aspirational class came to prominence in Australia in the second half of the 1990s and quickly rose to be identified as an emergent ‘mainstream’ constituency that dominated the Australian political discourse for much of the next decade. The primary catalyst for its emergence was the Labor party’s unprecedented loss of safe ‘working-class’ seats to the conservative Coalition1 in the federal election of 1996, particularly in outer- suburban Western Sydney. This electoral shift was politically interpreted as constituting evidence of a fundamental political realignment away from traditional party-political allegiances based on ideological and class identifications, and toward an embrace of the free- market.

On this basis the aspirational class was popularly promoted as representative of the emergent global free-market age of prosperity which was generating unprecedented social mobility and transforming the entrenched class identities and outdated economic practices associated with the ‘old order’ (Sheehan, 2002; Scanlon 2004; Scalmer, 2005; Smith, Vromen and Cook, 2006). The aspirational class essentially denoted the organic embrace of the new free-market order by a society awakening to its wealth generating potential. As such they were portrayed as unencumbered by traditional political allegiance, practical, ambitious, rationally self- interested, hard-working and unsentimentally materialistic. They were also conceived as embodying a very specific political logic. This included prescriptions for small-government, low-tax, the dismantling of the welfare state, privatisation, industrial relations deregulation and the curtailment of trade union power. The capacity of political parties to capture the ‘aspirational voter’ was posited as essential to maintaining modern political ‘relevance’ (Latham, 1999, 2004; Davidson, 1999, Kelly, 2001a; Sanchez, 2001) and they were regularly invoked in relation to their capacity to determine elections. In the words of the journalist Damien Murphy in 2007 aspirational voters had decided “every federal election since...1996” (Murphy, 2007). Such was the resonance of the concept in the Australian political discourse,

1 The Coalition consists of the Liberal party, a conservative party of the right, and the National party, the primary conservative party in regional and country Australia. Federally the Labor party and the Coalition hold over 90% of the seats in the house of representatives and approximately 80% of senate seats. 1

it eventually transcended its initial identification with the working-class demographic of Western Sydney to be articulated as a mainstream signifier of Australian national identity.

The concept was prominent in media political commentary, particularly in the Murdoch press2 which regularly editorialised in support of a ‘new aspirational politics’ as a means of framing its advocacy of a range of free-market reforms. Both the Labor party and the Coalition identified aspirationals as a core constituency, and cited their existence as testimony to the wealth generating potential of the free-market and as a rationale for further neo-liberal reforms. A central theme in these representations was the invocation of the value of ‘fairness’ in the face of the socio-economic effects of neo-liberal reforms. Aspirational mythology was promoted as representing the popular embrace of the competitive individualism of the free-market, over and above the redistributionist/collectivist ethos of the social democratic welfare state. In this sense the ‘average’ persona of the aspirational was connoted with the basic open democratic character of the free-market and its extension of social mobility and prosperity to those social groups previously subject to the entrenched structural inequities and class divisions of the ‘old order’.

The aspirationals’ status as ‘emergent class/mainstream reality’ was complimented by their typical rendering as imbued with objective class interests and rational agency. Thus, in accordance with free-market, neo-classical economic models which promoted the idea of the rational market actor as an essential component of the ‘efficient’ functioning of the market3, the aspirationals’ rational endorsement of the free-market was conceived as fundamentally in accordance with their objective (material) interests, which in turn were synonymous with the greater public good. Aspirational politics was therefore promoted as constituting an apolitical/consensual based approach to the ‘system’ based on the rational acceptance of the objective validity of the free-market order (Sheehan, 2001). As the journalist Paul Kelly put it, “aspirational voters want results, not ideology” (Kelly, 2001).

Yet despite the widespread use of the term and its employment as a means of facilitating a specific political agenda in Australia, the concept of the aspirational as an emergent

2 Press owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. 3 For instance in typical neo-liberal renderings of Adam Smith’s concept of the ‘invisible hand’ and economic models such as ‘rational choice theory’ and the ‘efficient market hypothesis’ which attribute rational agency to market actors as a means of defining the free-market as essentially efficient in its allocatory mechanisms. 2

mainstream ‘class’ has largely been almost ignored as a subject for substantive research. The small number of studies undertaken have primarily been empirical studies utilising a range of social attitudes and electoral data, the outcome of which has produced little by way of meaningful conclusions (Manning, 2001; Goot and Watson, 2007). Such research has failed on its own terms to provide any substantive validation of the concept. As Anne Harding from the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling (NATSEM) stated in 2001, “the aspirational class has no basis in social research” (Harding cited in Morton, 2001: 2). In light of this, a study of the aspirational must account for its popular validity as a signifier of a demographic/class ‘reality’ and its efficacy in providing a narrative framework that dominated the Australian political discourse for close to a decade.

In approaching a study of the aspirational, the primary concern of this thesis is to effectively capture the explicit political dimension evident in the articulation of such an identity in a way that interrogates the ideological processes, discursive logics, social interests, political dynamics and historical factors implicated in its production. This involves rejecting those empirical approaches that have sought to identify the ‘reality’ or otherwise of the aspirational identity as embodying a unified and coherent set of interests, or to identify it as reflecting universal or general structuring principles of the kind typically identified through positivist or essentialist approaches.

Those empirical studies that have analysed social attitudes data and societal/demographic trends as a means of determining whether such a class ‘existed’ have failed to account for the essentially figurative character of the aspirational and its symbolic generation of a diverse range of significations (values, identities, political beliefs, etc), the totality of which are not conducive to a strictly empirical approach requiring a degree of definitional rigour. Similarly, attempts to conceive of aspirationals as imbued with rational agency of the kind synonymous with that posited through neo-classical economic theory, fail to account for the complex character of social identity; that is, the divergent range of subject positions that are a consequence of the failure of representational systems to fully define and control the social order. Such approaches assume unified, coherent and consistent social agents, fully cognisant of their environment and able to rationally deduce their best interests. In the face of the aspirational’s ‘rational’ embrace of the market, any assessment of the Australian working- class or ‘mainstream’ outside of the positive and one-dimensional representational framework promoted through the aspirational discourse, finds evidence of significant stress, social 3

disaffection and resistance to the neo-liberal reform agenda. It also identifies a host of contradictory subject positions, non-market rationalities and aspirations. In this context, conceptions of social agents as imbued with rational agency, that in turn correlate with ‘objective interests’, as represented for instance through the ‘consumer choice’, ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ narratives of the free-market, can only constitute ideological representations concerned with the interpellation of social agents and the maintenance of dominant social relations.

In accordance with this, this thesis argues that representations of the aspirational essentially involved the articulation of a highly prescriptive neo-liberal political agenda; an agenda that was validated in the public discourse through its (quasi) empirical identification as a demographic/class ‘reality’. As such the pragmatism of the aspirationals, their status as creatures of the market concerned with material acquisition and economic advancement, and their negation of concepts of citizenship concerned with extra-market values such as those related to the public interest, political engagement or civic duty, reflected the relentless marketisation drive of neo-liberalism and its project to extend the scope of commercial exchange and market penetration. Importantly the articulation of the aspirational identity did not just represent a uniform symbolic endorsement of the neo-liberal agenda but also involved a performative dimension concerned with the hegemonic management of the immediate political environment and the de-legitimisation of alternative political projects.

On this basis, the aspirational can only be understood in the context of the discursive logics, social interests and political dynamics in relation to which it was articulated. In approaching the subject from this perspective, this thesis employs the discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantelle Mouffe and, in doing so, references a range of other theorists associated with a ‘post-structural’ perspective including Slovoj Zizeck, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Discourse theory conceives of the social order as derivative of relational systems of meaning and practice reflecting contingent hegemonic practices. It dispenses with the essentialist remnant in post-Marxist thought and instead conceives of discourse as co-extensive with the social; that is, that all social meaning and identity is a product of discursive practices that are not subject to any a-priori or essential ordering principles. As such discourse theory provides a framework for considering the ‘objective’ social order as a purely political construct. As Norval has indicated, it is therefore primarily concerned with the “way the subject is given

coherence and meaning through discursive mechanisms and how this subjectivity is forged through relationships of power” (Norval cited in Bastow and Martin, 2005: 216).

In approaching the aspirational as a hegemonic discourse, discourse theory offers a means of capturing the political contestations that conditioned its articulation. These contestations arise from the tenuous nature of the social order; that is, the impossibility of ‘necessary and determining logics’ and the resulting susceptibility of hegemonic orders to ‘dislocations’ from events that cannot be domesticated or integrated. Hegemonic orders are therefore highly unstable and require a set of mobile tactics and strategic political responses in order to manage the social in the face of antagonistic political projects. To undertake a discourse analysis is therefore to interrogate the ways in which ideology seeks to atone for the failure of the hegemonic order to master the social. As Stavrakakis observes:

...a rigorous theoretical approach to the analysis of ideology has to take into account the fact that ideological construction emerges in a dialectic with something that exceeds its symbolic boundaries. The fantasy - the illusion - supporting all ideologies is that they can master this excessive element (Stavrakakis, 2000: 101).

Thus ideological practices are conceived of as those practices that simulate the non- contingency of the social order through the colonisation of objectivity and common sense. Rather than representing one element of social relations, ideological practices are intrinsic to the production and maintenance of the social order. In this respect, discourse theory moves away from the common conceptualisation of ideology as relatively stable frameworks of social organisation particular to specific social practices and institutions, and instead focuses on the diverse and dynamic articulation of ideological representations - myths, social imaginaries - in a variety of social contexts.

In this thesis I will argue that the aspirational discourse arose in response to the dislocations in the neo-liberal order attendant to both the effects of the neo-liberal free-market economic reform agenda and the equivalential articulation of this agenda with elements of the culturally pluralistic and socially progressive policies which had gained a degree of bi-partisan political support in Australia since the early 1970s. Integral to this was the failure of the Labor party during its 13 years of government from 1983 to 1996 to sufficiently hegemonise its neo-

5 liberal reform agenda through the generation of new myths that reconciled neo-liberal values with traditional and embedded values of citizenship and national identity - in particular those related to the traditional Australian egalitarian social imaginary. As proponents of the neo- liberal order, the subsequent need for both the Labor party, following its landslide electoral loss in 1996, and the Coalition government led by John Howard, was to suture these dislocations through a rearticulation of neo-liberalism which integrated egalitarian signifiers into a compelling mythology of national identity and citizenship. The myth of the aspirational class/citizen, ideologically constructed as an objective mainstream reality, was an important component of this hegemonic project.

The efficacy of discourse theory in a study of the aspirational is in allowing for a consideration of the diverse factors impacting on the viability of the neo-liberal order in the face of its own constitutive flaws and the need to maintain its dominance in the face of social antagonism and structural dislocation. Conceiving of the aspirational as an ideological representation involves a consideration of factors impacting on neo-liberal hegemony at the time of its emergence. These include the social effects of its reform agenda, the efficacy and penetration of alternative discourses and, in the face of this, the capacity of neo-liberalism to counter these factors through its ideological simulation of a non-contingent social order, its politicisation of antagonistic identities and its interpellation of social agents through persuasive re-descriptions of the world. Discourse theory facilitates an interrogation of the discursive logics associated with the articulation of the aspirational discourse and the neo- liberal hegemonic project “to weave together different strands of discourse in an effort to dominate [and] organise a field of meaning so as to fix the identities of objects and practices in particular ways” (Howarth and Stavrakakis, 2000: 3). In this, the construction of political identities is crucial. As Stuart Hall has observed:

Electoral politics – in fact, every kind of politics depends on political identities and identifications. People make identifications symbolically, through social imagery, in their political imaginations. They ‘see themselves’ as one sort of person or another. They ‘imagine their future’ within this scenario or that. They don’t just think about voting in terms of how much they have, their so called ‘material interests’. Material interests matter profoundly but they are always ideologically defined (Hall, 1988: 261).

The aspirational discourse sought to interpellate a range of social groups through the projection of neo-liberal subject positions. Its initial association with Western Sydney reflected the political imperative at the time to hegemonise this demographic in the face of the disaffection with the neo-liberal reform agenda exhibited by the traditional Australian working-class, who had borne the brunt of the negative effects associated with neo-liberal restructuring. As such it represented a hegemonic project to articulate neo-liberalism in a particular relational ensemble structured around key (empty) signifiers, of which ‘prosperity’, ‘fairness’, ‘opportunity’, ‘equality’, ‘egalitarianism’ and ‘community’ were the most prominent. As such it was calibrated to the specific political dynamics attendant to dislocation. Its political utility as myth was manifest in its creation of a space of representation that sought to interpellate dislocated identities back into the neo-liberal order. To this end ‘aspiration’, as a signifier, effectively constituted a gesture toward an intangible ‘something’, linked most closely to the social imaginaries propagated through market populism, consumer culture and the sophisticated imagery of the advertising industry. Importantly these social imaginaries were grounded through the incorporation of a range of more traditional and conservative discursive elements.

In approaching the aspirational from a discourse theory perspective this thesis makes the following argument:

 That the aspirational discourse represented a neo-liberal hegemonic myth of citizenship and that, as such, it was indicative of dislocations in the neo-liberal order.

 That these dislocations were related to both the socio-economic effects of neo-liberal reforms and the ongoing saliency of values and practices associated, in particular, with the post-war welfare state and the interventionist forms of government associated with the ‘Australian settlement’.

 That up until the emergence of the aspirational discourse in the second half of the 1990s, neo-liberal reforms were introduced in Australia without sufficient incorporation of the popular sectors and through largely technocratic/administrative discourses which failed to generate compelling new myths and social imaginaries related to values and practices of individual citizenship and national identity.

 That the success of the populist right-wing political party, One Nation, following the landslide defeat of the Labor party in the 1996 federal election, represented the ultimate manifestation of dislocations in the neo-liberal order and the widespread view that neo-liberalism was anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic and elitist.

 That, as a means of suturing dislocations to the neo-liberal order, the aspirational discourse, as articulated by the major Australian political parties, the business/corporate sector and the media, constituted a compelling mainstream neo- liberal myth of citizenship incorporating values of individualism, consumerism, egalitarianism, social mobility, economic growth, prosperity and social equity.

 That the aspirational discourse, in particular that promoted by the Coalition prime minister, John Howard, following his election in 1996, countered the social disaffection and alienation triggered by the neo-liberal reform agenda through a reconfirmation of traditional socially conservative values and myths of national identity.

 That the aspirational discourse’s early association with the working-class of Western Sydney was strategically integral to neo-liberalism’s incorporation of the popular sectors and its articulation of egalitarian discursive elements related to fairness, equity and social equality.

 That the aspirational discourse represented a populist discourse that promoted a ‘unified’ and homogenous national identity and generated a range of social antagonisms in relation to which neo-liberal practices, rationalities and objectives were promoted.

 That the aspirational discourse promoted a re-evaluation of social entitlement and practices of social welfare, effectively facilitating a substantial increase in ‘middle class’ welfare which, though contradicting core principles of neo-liberalism, served the hegemonic task of suturing dislocations in the neo-liberal order.

Chapter one provides a preliminary description of the emergence and general traits of the aspirational as a class narrative. It begins with the initial identification of an aspirational class in Britain under Margaret Thatcher and her initiatives to promote the value of ownership to

8 the working-class. It then identifies its initial emergence in Australia as a means of explaining the Labor party’s loss of traditional working-class seats to the Coalition in the Federal election of 1996. Conveyed through a range of key signifiers or nodal points - ‘aspiration’, ‘prosperity’, ‘opportunity’, ‘social mobility’, ‘ownership’, ‘entrepreneurial citizenship’ - the aspirational class was routinely invoked as a rationale for the urgent implementation of neo- liberal reform. While it was most often employed as a means of representing the working- class embrace of these reforms and the rejection of the old politics associated with the social democratic welfare state, it was also typically invoked in relation to a range of other social identities, classes and demographics. The chapter reviews the limited literature on the subject, arguing that most analysis approached the subject from a rational/empirical perspective which failed to adequately capture its symbolic/figurative dimension and its ideological character.

Having identified the flaws in this analysis and the absence of any detailed study in relation to the political interests implicated in the production of the aspirational discourse, in chapter two I argue that discourse theory addresses these flaws and allows for a rigorous consideration of the political nature of the discourse and its promotion of hegemonic interests. I provide a summary of the evolution of the political discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe and their development of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, before outlining the principal theoretical concepts and logics around which this thesis is primarily structured: that of hegemony, structural dislocation, myth and social antagonism. I consider criticisms of the discourse theory approach relevant to this thesis and conclude with a summary of the utility of such an approach in a study of the aspirational.

Chapter three is concerned with contextualising neo-liberal hegemony in Australia (beginning with the first neo-liberal reforms introduced in 1983) in terms of the previous hegemonic order – which I have termed the Australian settlement/social democratic order. The ongoing saliency of discourses identified with this order, in particular values and practices related to egalitarian notions of fairness and social equality, in addition to the range of practices associated with the social democratic welfare state, constituted the principal discursive battleground in relation to which neo-liberal hegemony was established and maintained. The chapter traces egalitarian values back to the range of protectionist, state- centred practices associated with the ‘Australian settlement’ and emphasises the essential compatibility of the subsequent post-war social democratic state with the values and practices 9 associated with the traditional Australian egalitarian discourse. I then outline the core precepts and values of neo-liberalism, focusing on the political philosophy of the seminal neo-liberal theoretician, Friedrick Hayek. From this analysis three principal areas of discursive contestations are identified, the substance of which will inform my subsequent consideration of the dislocations in the neo-liberal order and the antagonistic political discourses to which it was subject. These contestations centred on concepts of the legitimate role of the state, the rights and expectations of citizenship and egalitarian values related to fairness and equity.

Having established the radical re-evaluation of the values and practices associated with the egalitarian social democratic order entailed by neo-liberalism, in the next two chapters I consider factors implicated in what I argue were the dislocations to the neo-liberal order that were becoming increasingly evident by the early 1990s. In chapter four I consider the means by which neo-liberalism was first introduced into Australia by the Hawke Labor government in 1983. I outline how neo-liberalism essentially emerged as a technical response to the stagflation and economic decline that had effectively dislocated the Keynesian social democratic model in the early 1970s. As such it was primarily instituted through elite policy making circles and was therefore not subject to significant popular democratic scrutiny. Further to this, the denigration of the previous Whitlam Labor government (1972-75) as economically incompetent induced a strong impetus within the Labor party, when it regained government in 1983, to prove its economic credentials, and in particular its capacity to control the trade unions. The Hawke and Keating Labor government’s4 introduction of neo- liberal reforms through the period 1983-1996 was therefore primarily conveyed through technocratic discourses which emphasised the managerial and administrative role of government. This was combined with an emphasis on corporate governance and ‘consensus politics’ which tended to pejoratively conceive of politics as conflictual and therefore inefficient and unproductive.

By the late 1980s the outcome was a growing disenchantment in the community as the effects of neo-liberal reforms began to be felt. In chapter five I give a general outline of a range of factors indicative of dislocations to the neo-liberal order, focusing on the first two decades following the introduction of neo-liberalism into Australia in 1983, including data in relation

4 Bob Hawke was the prime minister of Australia between 1983-1991. He was deposed in a leadership challenge by his treasurer Paul Keating, who was prime minister from 1991- 1996. 10 to social inequality, the changing working environment, labour market insecurity and personal and household debt. I also consider an array of social attitudes research indicating the embedded character of discourses (values, myths, political and institutional practices) associated with the social democratic/Australian settlement order. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the socio-economics of Western Sydney, the demographic initially identified with the aspirational discourse. I argue that the articulation of this traditional working-class demographic into a neo-liberal social imaginary was vital to the neo-liberal hegemonic project and that, as such, the aspirational discourse provided a highly selective and limited representation.

Chapter six focuses on the three prominent Australian political parties relevant to the articulation of the aspirational discourse - One Nation, the Labor party and the Coalition. This chapter seeks to capture the political dynamics triggered by the dislocatory factors identified in the preceding two chapters. I argue, in line with Mouffe (2005), that the suppression of social antagonisms, intrinsic to the conception of government as essentially managerial and administrative, creates the conditions for more exclusive, extreme and conflictual political discourses to emerge. The period following Labor’s landslide defeat at the 1996 federal election constituted such a period. The chapter provides a conceptual outline of populism and its division of the social space through the generation of relations of equivalence based on the construction of a ‘radical otherness’. I outline how the populist discourses of the right-wing One Nation party and that of the conservative Coalition prime minister, John Howard, constituted two different types of populism, the first counter- hegemonic in its strident rejection of the neo-liberal order, the latter hegemonic in its attempt to suture dislocations to this order.

Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party constituted the major expression of the disaffection, anger and social alienation generated through Labor’s implementation of neo-liberal reforms. I argue that the principal discursive contestation at the time was in regard to the widespread perception that the egalitarian character of Australian society had been sacrificed to these reforms. The subsequent response of both the Coalition and the Labor party, though reflective of the particular political circumstance, principles and strategic objectives of both parties, was essentially concerned with suturing these dislocations in the neo-liberal order by articulating discursive elements associated with Australian egalitarianism as part of the neo- liberal discourse. For the Howard Coalition government, this involved appropriating many of 11 the aspects of the populist Hanson discourse, in particular its anti-elite and anti-welfare discourses, while at the same time excluding economic interests associated with neo- liberalism from any such antagonistic framing. For the Labor party, having alienated a substantial section of its traditional working-class base through its implementation of neo- liberal reforms, the primary task was to reconcile its allegiance to neo-liberalism with its traditional egalitarian party platform based on the politics of social justice, equity and economic redistribution. As such, Labor’s articulation of the aspirational discourse, particular that promoted through the Western Sydney politician, Mark Latham, while substantively similar to that of the Coalition, involved a detailed re-conceptualisation of Labor’s traditional social justice principles that incorporated arguments associated with the ‘third way’ politics made popular in Britain by Tony Blair. For both mainstream parties the aspirational discourse and its mythology of citizenship and national identity constituted the principal means of addressing dislocations to the neo-liberal order.

The chapters that follow are concerned with analysing the aspirational discourse as a whole - that is, as articulated by the mainstream media and political establishment - in terms of the discursive logics employed. This includes the specific elements articulated as moments in its discourse, its populist construction of relations of equivalence and antagonism, and its generation of myths and social imaginaries as a means of suturing structural dislocations. In chapter seven I provide a broad summary of the discursive elements equivalentially articulated into the aspirational discourse. I argue that the aspirational both rearticulated core discursive elements in the neo-liberal discourse, for instance: individualism, the value of hard work, independence, the superiority of the free-market and small government, in addition to incorporating additional floating elements primarily associated with the traditional egalitarian social imaginary such as ‘egalitarianism’, ‘fairness’, ‘social equality’ and ‘community’. These additional elements, I argue, conformed to Derrida’s concept of the supplement, both enhancing the hegemonic identity and exposing its flawed character.

In chapter eight I consider the aspirational discourse’s political exploitation of the antagonistic identities produced through its populist division of Australian society into two poles. I describe how the production of the antagonistic identity allows for the failure of the hegemonic order to achieve the fullness of identity prescribed through its myths and social imaginaries to be attributed to antagonistic out-groups - in this case those identities equivalentially articulated as anti-aspirational. I also describe how the antagonistic identities, 12 as the constitutive limit of the social order, facilitate the articulation of this order. I then move onto to a consideration of two principal areas where antagonistic relations were generated through the aspirational discourse: the welfare and schools sectors. I outline how notions of ‘values’, ‘character’ and ‘community’ were employed as a means of ascribing anti- aspirational identies in regard to these two sectors.

The final chapter, nine, is concerned with providing an overview of the primary hegemonic function of the aspirational discourse as a neo-liberal myth of citizenship that sutured dislocations in the social order by providing a new space of representation that allowed for the inscription of unsatisfied demands and synthesised the dislocated elements. As such the aspirational functioned as a metaphor for an absent fullness which ‘could not be realised at present’ and which was subject to the blockage of identity constituted by social antagonisms. I outline the function of ideology and its generation of discourses of depoliticisation as a means of simulating the essential, natural and objective character of the social order. Five principal dimensions to the mythology conveyed through the aspirational discourse are identified: ‘the aspirational as a creature of the pure and anonymous market’; the value of the ‘self-interested individual’; the articulation of a modified version of Australian egalitarianism; the conceptualisation of the aspirational as ‘needy’ and ‘deserving’; and the promotion of myths and social imaginaries associated with consumerism.

The thesis affirms the political nature of the construction of social identity and the ‘permanent provocation’ through which power is exercised (Foucault, 1982: 222). In the context of a social order that is inherently unstable, the generation of compelling myths and social imaginaries that link the experiences, hopes, and values of the average citizen with the values and objectives of hegemonic interests is vital. It is thus the tenuous, dynamic and antagonistic context in which competing social interests seek to dominate the social order that provides the context for a substantive analysis of the aspirational discourse. Such an approach avoids imposing a linear, rational and monological framework on identities that are none of these things. In line with the discourse theory approach, the primary objective of this thesis is therefore not to prove or disprove the existence of the aspirational based on various objective criteria, but rather to interrogate the inconsistencies, gaps, contradictions and flaws evident within hegemonic representations that are a consequence of their failure to fully master the social.

Chapter One

Representations of the Aspirational

In this chapter I will describe the emergence of the concept of an aspirational class and its association with the Labor party’s loss of elements of its traditional working-class support base in the 1996 and subsequent 1998 and 2001 federal elections. Primarily on the basis of electoral data related to this shift in voting patterns and subsequent opinion polls, the aspirational class was popularly promoted as an emergent class reality the logic of which constituted an imperative for political reform. The aspirational was typically conceived as invested with objective class interests and a rational agency contiguous with the free-market. Despite the explicit political agendas evident in its articulation, most analysis failed to grapple with the complex intersection between social identity and the ideological production of such identity evident within its narrative, and instead approached the subject on a purely empirical level. Further to this, I will argue that the majority of critical assessments that rejected the aspirational concept also tended to approach it primarily from an empirical perspective (Davidson, 2002; Toohey, 2001; MacCallum, 2003), either implicitly accepting the existence of such a class, citing its ‘non-existence’ on the basis of the lack of substantive supporting evidence, or renouncing it on the grounds of its ideological character. In focusing on the ‘reality’ or ‘non-reality’ of the aspirational, or dismissing it as nothing more than an ideological construct, such analysis affirmed the possibility of a fully objective account of the social order and the possibility of a separation between socially constructed meanings and interpretations and objective political behaviour and action.

This chapter begins with an account of the emergence of the concept of an aspirational working class in Great Britain under Margaret Thatcher, before tracing its emergence in Australia following the rise to power of the conservative Coalition in 1996. I will outline the broad range of values, political prescriptions and identities articulated as integral to the aspirational class, including its progressive association with an Australian mainstream, before considering the limited amount of substantive research undertaken and the failure of the majority of this research to adequately deal with the subject.

Popular Accounts of the aspirational

Perhaps, in part, because of its definitional ambiguities and diverse rhetorical applications, there has been a distinct lack of serious social research on the aspirational, both as a ‘class’ and more generally as a signifier of the Australian mainstream. Since its emergence in Australia in the late 1990s it has remained an elusive concept, malleable to the imaginative outpouring of social commentary, compliant to the non-rigour and party political allegiances of polling companies, and the rhetorical flourishes of politicians, yet wholly resistant to the efforts of serious researchers to quantify and qualify. Scalmer, in reflection of this has referred to its “slipperiness”, describing it as a ‘grab bag’ of often contradictory associations (Scalmer, 2005: 6).

If we are to grapple with its ‘slipperiness’ in order to come to some understanding of the significance of the aspirational discourse, we need to acknowledge the political origins of the term. The first employment of an aspirational discourse can be traced back to the Thatcher government in Britain and its promotion of an ‘enterprise culture’. Thatcher’s neo-liberal reform agenda constituted an attack on the post-war social democratic welfare state and, as such, advanced programs of deregulation, privatisation, fiscal austerity, and labour market and welfare reform. In doing so, the primacy of free-market monetarism and the ethos of competitive market individualism was declared over the interventionist prescriptions of Keynesianism and the ‘paternalism’ of the welfare state (Seldon and Collins, 2000). In its most striking form this approach centred on a project to replace the avowed social ‘dependency’ engendered through the welfare state with “not just an enterprise but also a self- help culture” (Seldom and Collins, 2000: 71). Such an approach connected the details of personal conduct: values of individual responsibility, initiative, aspiration and ambition, with the structures of modern life: the retreat of the state and the increased pace of the globalised economy.

The two policies most often associated with this new enterprise culture as it related to the dissolution of the welfare state were the 1980s ‘right to buy’ housing legislation, which triggered the massive sell off of public housing to council tenants, and policies aimed at facilitating public share ownership, principally through the privatisation of public bodies such as British Telecom (Worcestor, 1994). These policies were targeted at working and lower

15 middle-class citizens in a way that specifically related individual ‘aspirations’ to market paradigms. This entailed a move away from welfare state dependency and toward an ideal of a “property owning democracy” in which ownership was morally equated with the “basic human instinct of self improvement” (Nigel Lawson cited in Riddell, 1989: 113).

This Tory concept of aspiration was appropriated by the Labour government of Tony Blair as an important component of its pitch to win back the large numbers of working/lower middle- class voters who had supported the Conservative party in the preceding decade. The politics of the ‘third way’, with its management oriented language of reconciliation and consensus, and its deterministic allusions to global free-market economic inevitabilities, sought to maintain the reformist language of the traditional political left while advancing an essentially conformist position in relation to free-market neo-liberal ideology (Callinicos, 2001; Watts, 1999). An important component of this was the construction of a new language of political engagement, much of which involved the rhetorical re-framing of the neo-liberal reforms initiated by Margaret Thatcher. These included privatisation (government and private sector ‘partnerships’), ‘anti-dependency’ approaches to welfare (‘mutual obligation’), and the withdrawal of state welfare programs (under the imprimatur of ‘social capital’ and ‘capacity building’) (Fairclough, 2000).

An important component of this was the adoption of the Thatcherite concept of ‘aspiration’ and its modification into the broad rhetorical symbolism of ‘aspirational Britain’. The rationale for this was summarised by Tony Blair as follows:

The Tories never did have the best vision for Britain. They just took the best words. Freedom. Opportunity. Aspiration. Ambition. I can vividly recall the moment when I knew the last election was lost… I met a self employed electrician. His dad always voted Labour he said. He used to vote Labour too. But he’d bought his own house now. He’ set up his own business. He was doing quite nicely ‘so I’ve become a Tory’ he said…. His instincts were to get on in life. And he thought our instincts were to stop him (Tony Blair cited in Johnson, 2002).

The aspirational politics pursued by Blair essentially involved an acceptance of the core neo- liberal view that the welfare state constituted a blockage to the capacity of the non-welfare dependent, that is, those with ambition and aspiration, to ‘get on in life’. In the broadest sense,

Blair was signalling a shift toward the individual values of ‘choice’, ‘opportunity’, ‘freedom’ and ‘ambition’, and away from the collective values of social justice, equality and fairness that had historically constituted a core component of the Labour Party’s social democratic political platform. As Julia Langdon observed:

Conservatism is meant to provide choice and the Labour Party has always rejoined by saying yes, but only for those with the freedom to choose. The difference now is that Blair intends to appeal in aspirational terms (Langdon, 1994: 6).

Blair’s appropriation of the ‘politics of aspiration’ reflected in significant ways the fundamental assumptions and values exhibited by the Tory employment of the concept: the association of aspiration with working/lower middle-class social mobility and private ownership; a conceptualisation of ownership and economic viability as synonymous with good citizenship and moral character; and a broad acceptance that the realisation of individual aspirations was best pursued through neo-liberal economic reforms and a scaling back of the social objectives of the welfare state. The significance of this appropriation was noted by the British commentator Charlotte Thorn:

New Labour’s adoption of the aspirational idea has been the secret of its electoral breakthrough – the recognition that people will vote for prosperity, for aspiration, for growth, but not for redistribution (Thorn, 2001: 25).

In Australia, though the rhetorical elements of the concept were retained, unlike its employment in the United Kingdom, the term was given a more concrete (and less obviously rhetorical) dimension through its identification on quasi-empirical grounds with a specific class/demographic. The concept of an aspirational class thus first emerged in response to the conservative Howard Coalition government’s electoral success in winning a raft of traditionally Labor party held working-class electorates on the suburban fringe of Sydney. Its initial articulation was framed by reference to the ‘hard data’ of electoral statistics - that is, the number of Labor voters embracing the Coalition and the political, social and economic implications of this data. A typical theme in the media was the Coalition leader, John Howard’s, mastery of the political forces unleashed by the ‘aspirational phenomenon’ which was contrasted with Labor’s failure to grasp the importance of this ‘new electoral reality’.

Thus Michael Millet, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, portrayed a “bewildered” Labor leader, Paul Keating, after the 1996 election loss, fulminating about the “people in brick veneers in the blue mountains voting against Labor” and wrote about how “central this group had become to the electoral domination of John Howard” who had no trouble understanding the importance of this block vote (Millet, 2002). Similarly Paul Kelly in The Australian talked about the need for the Labor party, in the light of the demands of the aspirationals, to ‘regenerate’ (Kelly, 2001a: 28), and Craig McGregor writing in the Sydney Morning Herald saw a possible “looming disaster” for the Labor party if it did not refashion its policies to deal with this “emerging demographic” (McGregor, 2002).

One of the principal promoters of aspirational politics was the federal Labor member for the outer suburban Sydney seat of Weriwa and leader of the Labor party from 2003 to 2005, Mark Latham. Latham was a key proponent of ‘third way’ politics and the need for the Labor party to abandon its adherence to ‘outdated’ class politics and embrace the dynamism of the global economy (Latham, 1998, 2003). Citing the outer-metropolitan suburbs as the “new middle ground of Australian politics”, Latham identified “working-class aspirants who are looking to the Labor party to reward their effort and provide rungs on the ladder of opportunity…to help them join the ownership revolution” (cited in Jones, 2001).

The concept was also identified with the electorally successful NSW Labor Party and its pragmatic, managerial approach to government. John Della Bosca, the NSW politician and ‘veteran poll reader’ was cited by the Sydney Morning Herald journalist Paul Sheehan as being one of the first politicians to use the term ‘aspirational politics’ and understand what it implied (Sheehan, 2002). As early as 1999 the Labor Premier Bob Carr was quoted as stating that the way for Labor to win federally was to “look for the aspirational voter” (cited in Shanahan, 1999: 8). An array of Liberal Party politicians also used the concept, most prominent of whom were John Howard and the member for the Western Sydney seat of Parramatta, Ross Cameron (Kirk, 2001; McIlveen, Morris, Nason, 2001).

The Labor party’s formal adoption of ‘aspirational politics’ was signalled when, immediately following the 2001 federal election, newly elected Labor party leader Simon Crean undertook a ‘listening tour’ of Western Sydney stating that a key objective for the Labor party was to convince people who “don’t see themselves in the traditional working-class mode but are

nevertheless working people. We’ve got to reach out and understand better how we can appeal to them” (Colvin, 2001).

Claims as to the objective existence of the aspirational class were further advanced through reference to the research of prominent market researchers and pollsters. This research lacked depth and rigour and was further compromised by the fact that such organisations are commercial entities that trade in the identification of demographic and electoral ‘trends’. Nonetheless their research findings functioned as an effective proxy for substantial social research. Thus Sol Lebovik, CEO of the polling agency Newspoll, stated that the demographics of the electorate were definitely changing in light of the rise of the aspirational class (Doogue, 2001). Similarly Rod Cameron from the market research firm ANOP was quoted as stating in 2002 in relation to the aspirationals that “something has happened in the last 12 to 18 months” (Mcgregor, 2002: 23), and David Chalke of Quantum Market Research talked about the fundamental change and the end of the “old politics of class war” attendant to the rise of the aspirational class (cited in Sheehan, 2000: 32).

Sheer frequency of assertion and re-enforcement through political and media commentary, most citing the opinions of the market researchers, consolidated further the popular validity of the concept. As Morton has observed, the notion of an aspirational class “acquired authority by simple repetition, rather than any basis in social reality” (Morton, 2001: 6). The speed in which the concept was adopted in the mainstream media was notable and illustrates this “bandwagon effect” (Goot and Watson, 2007: 219). As noted by Smith, Vromen and Cook:

Some commentators question whether aspirational voters really exist as a distinctive group and little research has been done to demonstrate their existence. Nonetheless, they exist as a powerful idea among politicians and commentators (Smith, Vromen, Cook, 2006: 11).

The idea of an aspirational class was soon integrated into a comprehensive political narrative through which a range of detailed subject positions were articulated. These subject positions represented variations on the central notion of a previously politicised working-class who, in accordance with the wealth generation and opportunities for prosperity offered through the free-market, had dispensed with their ‘ideological baggage’ and embraced consumer capitalism and the free-market. The journalist, Craig Mcgregor, offered a typical profile:

They believe in the private sector and being self reliant, they are individualist, competitive and materialistic; they belong to private health funds, own shares, they are heavily in debt to their mortgages, their credit cards and their cars, they love two car garages, pets and vasectomies (McGregor, 2002: 23).

Or, as Tom Morton described them:

Upwardly mobile men and women on the make, buying their name brand values off the shelf, devoid of any class loyalty, defined only by their purchasing power and their driving ambition to acquire the gadgets and the graces of the middle class (Morton, 2001).

This core association with consumer capitalism opened up the ground for the attribution of a broad range of values and characteristics. Mark Latham saw them as products of the “ownership revolution” and the “public housing estate class made good”, who, due to changes in the Australian economy had “experienced a taste of economic ownership and not surprisingly wanted more” (Latham, 2003: 67). According to this view, the aspirational was a symbol of unprecedented social mobility within Australian society. Paul Sheehan, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, saw them as individuals who did not want “vision”, “big ideas”, “big reforms”, but who “wanted to be left to get on with their own life” and “make their own decisions” (Sheehan, 2000). For the author, Tom Keneally, they were greedy individualists who represented “the end of egalitarianism” (cited in Burchell, 2002: 2). The Labor politician, Carmen Lawrence, saw them as “material consumers without any broader values” (Lawrence, 2001: 10), and for the social commentator, Mungo McCallum, they were self interested “up you jack punters…only concerned with gaining as much as possible as quickly as possible, and to hell with everyone else” (McCallum, 2001).

Most typically the aspirational’s embrace of the consumer prosperity claims of the free- market was conveyed through their adherence to a range of neo-liberal political perspectives, from negative views on trade unions, big government and the welfare state, to an endorsement of globalisation, free trade, privatisation, and deregulation. Thus Paul Kelly writing in the Australian asserted the need for the Labor Party, in light of the aspirationals, to “regenerate”, to “treat globalisation as an opportunity”, to “revise ties with the unions”, to “abandon the old

order of big government and centralized solutions” and pursue “result” oriented policies aimed at achieving “low interest rates, higher wages, lower taxes, more jobs, greater education, and strong economic growth” (Kelly, 2001a: 15). Alex Sanchez associated them with a culture of “conviction” rather than “complaint” and used them as a springboard for a neo-liberal based critique of Labor party policies in relation to trade tariffs, industry subsidies and dairy industry regulation (Sanchez, 2001: 11). Elsewhere the aspirational was associated with anti-welfare perspectives (NSW Premier Bob Car quoted in Shanahan, 1999: 8), tax cuts (Gratton, 2001), share ownership (Latham 2001: 69; Toohey, 2002), anti-trade unionism (Teece, 2001), law and order (Mcgregor, 2002: 23), privatisation (Howard, 2001), anti- elitism, and a lack of party political allegiance (Toohey, 2001).

Smith, Vromen and Cook offered the following succinct description of the core identity of aspirational voters and their prescriptions for government policy:

Aspirational voters, sometimes just called aspirationals, describe an apparent value shift among some Australians, associated with a change in voting behaviour. Ideas of class, equality and welfare are bound up in most explanations of the aspirational phenomenon. Aspirational voters want to move from unskilled jobs and older working-class suburbs to middle-class occupations and new suburbs. This has implications for government. Rather than imposing uniformity through state education, aspirational voters believe that government should provide opportunities for attainment by subsidizing non-government schools. Rather than spending on welfare programs in the hope of creating base line equality, governments should encourage people into self-reliance through work, while reducing taxes to allow people to spend more of their money as they choose (Smith, Vromen and Cook, 2006: 11).

While much of the initial focus centred on the Western Sydney aspirational voter, the use of the term progressively became associated with a national/mainstream ethos of citizenship. John Howard, particularly in the second half of his prime-ministership, typically invoked the aspirational in this generic sense, citing ‘aspirational values’ regularly in rhetorical representations of Australian national identity (Gratton, 2001: 10) and more specifically as a counter to criticisms of regressive government policies involving the non-means testing of government subsidies/rebates, the privatisation of government services and tax cuts for high income earners (Howard, 2001: 2). Similarly Mark Latham repeatedly alternated between 21

specific references to the social political and economic dynamics of outer Western Sydney, and populist allusions to the aspirational citizen constituting the “new Australian mainstream” (Latham, 2002: 11).

The progressive adoption of the aspirational as a representation of the Australian mainstream was reflected by its ubiquitous identification within traditional class schemas. While the aspirational was most typically located in the working/lower middle-class, the term was increasingly employed to denote a range of above average income earners who were increasingly opting for private sector services in key areas such as health and education (Wainwright, 2001: 1; Mcgregor, 2002: 23). Additionally, while some accounts represented them as synonymous with upwardly mobile aspiring working class battlers (McCallum 2001; Davidson, 2004) and the lower middle-class “rebadged” (Lawrence, 2001), others viewed them as the “working rich” (Harris, 2002) and the personification of “middle Australia” (Megalogenis, 2002).

This divergence in representation was further evident in the way the aspirational was commonly located on a spectrum between technologically savvy modern global workers and the working-class ‘battler’. In this respect they were either presented as the quintessential modern global citizen, transcending traditional class identifications: “a new breed of entrepreneurial risk takers linked to the dynamism of the new economy and service sector” (Morton 2001: 1), or more typically as synonymous with the ‘battler’ who had born the brunt of neo-liberal economic reforms (Rorris, 2002: 11).

Defining the aspirational in the literature

Perhaps due to the definitional ‘slipperiness’ of the concept, there was a distinct lack of empirical research undertaken. One of the few substantial analyses was undertaken by Murray Goot and Ian Watson using data from the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 20055 (Goot and Watson, 2006). The research aimed at identifying the accuracy of the term as a demographic or new-class signifier in order to determine whether there was something distinctive about the ‘working-class aspirationals’ in their political opinions and behaviour

5 A statistically representative national survey of Australians conducted by the Centre for Social Research at the Australian National University in 2005. 22

that was not simply the result of their age, education or income. This involved sorting through the plethora of characteristics, traits and values associated with the concept - what the authors term the “conceptual sloppiness that characterizes this whole discourse” (p235). In order to develop a workable methodology a very strict and narrow definition was employed, focusing on “working-class self employed” and “working-class respondents strongly oriented to getting ahead financially or in career terms” (p221). These definitions were run against independent variables such as age, education, demographic, consumption and voting habits, and a range of orientations typically associated with the aspirational identity related to law and order, political conservatism, right wing politics, support for private schools, and pro-market views in regard to the economy and consumerism. The results found no meaningful correlation between aspirationals as defined in the study and characteristics (‘orientations’) commonly associated with the concept:

On the evidence of the (survey) neither aspiration in the sense of self employment or the desire to be self employed, nor aspiration in the sense of orientation gets us very far... While there are certainly ways in which aspirational voters [as defined in the survey] differ from their counterparts - in terms of gender, among the self employed working class, and in terms of income… neither one sort of aspirational or the other is particularly distinctive in terms of their political attitudes or the way they vote. If our definition of the aspirational is the same used by either of the main political parties, and or reasoning about what makes them tick, or more precisely, doesn’t make them tick – is right, it follows that Labor, the Liberals or both have been pursuing the wrong quarry (Goot and Watson, 2006: 236).

Other quantitative research undertaken by Haydon Manning from Flinders University again highlighted problems associated with developing an empirical research methodology of sufficient definitional rigour and accuracy. Manning proved the following ‘objective’ definition:

A host of demographic, social and economic factors are bandied around to define the aspirational voter. Objectively they are middle income earners, upwardly mobile, and may be employed in either blue or white collar occupations (Manning, 2005, 1).

Such a definition was ‘objective’ in the sense that, faced with the plethora of significations associated with the aspirational identity, Manning reverted to a definition which was so broad as to be almost meaningless. “Middle income earners who are upwardly mobile” would, in most instances, describe a substantial component of the working and lower middle-classes. In pursuit of greater definitional rigour, Manning distilled the aspirational identity down to two variables - those earning between $30,000 and $70,000 per year and those respondents who favoured tax cuts over increased government spending on social services. Again, this definition would on face value be just as effective in identifying liberal/conservative voters as aspirationals.

Utilising the large scale Australian Election Study (AES) undertaken as part of the 2004 national census, Manning concluded that 16% of all respondents to the AES were aspirational. Although he acknowledged that the survey respondents tended to be slightly skewed toward conservative voters, Manning cited - unsurprisingly in light of the two definitional variables he employed - the fact that only 28 percent of the ‘aspirational’ respondents supported Labor and 63% favoured the Liberal Coalition. Significantly Manning found that only 14% of those living in the outer suburbs, that is, the demographic most associated with the aspirational, were defined as aspirationals according to his criteria. Of these 70% supported the Liberal Coalition.

Though Manning concluded from his study that the aspirational class was both real and had political significance, his results on their own terms did not bare this out. Given the wide scope of the definition of ‘aspirational’ employed, the fact that only 14% of all respondents in the outer suburbs could be defined as aspirationals would indicate that the aspirational citizen was largely insignificant. Furthermore, there was no indication as to why this social cohort represented a departure from previous suburban demographic profiles, given that there has always been a small but significant component of outer suburban residents who identify with right-wing, socially conservative politics (Davies, 1966: 120). Even applying its most narrow definition, the concept has little explanatory value in relation to the values and attitudes of the lower middle-class/working-class demographic with which it was commonly associated. What these studies indicate is that quantitative research of this kind involving the tenuous assertion of ‘core’ characteristics fails to provide any meaningful results. The essential difficulty, as defined by Goot and Watson in their qualitative study of the aspirational, was to avoid the kind of ‘loose’ definition that the essentially symbolic character of the aspirational 24

necessitated, and to remain “definitional” rather than “descriptive” (Goot and Watson, 2007: 20).

Despite this, a small number of academic papers unproblematically adopted both the emerging ‘reality’ of the aspirational class and, ipso facto, the key values and political perspectives attributed to it, without any consideration of the definitional problems associated with the term or an acknowledgement of the lack of any substantial empirical evidence supporting a preponderance of aspirational traits in the community. Confronted with the terms ‘slipperiness’ or ‘over-determined’ character and the difficulty that this presented for empirically based research, such studies settled for a simple clarification of the main or most significant ‘traits’ of the aspirational which, as with the research conducted by Manning, led to definitions which on their own terms lacked rigour, credibility and relevance. Duffy for instance described them as “people from working class backgrounds who want more” (Duffy, 2004); Gabriel oscillated between references to the “children of the working poor”, the “upwardly mobile working-class” and “the children of workers from economically depressed industrial towns” (Gabriel, 2003: 153); and Gwyther described them variously as: “flourishing families”, “well off working families with a mortgage” and “suburban optimists” (Gwyther, 2003: 189).

Such studies unreflectively processed a range of social trends data through the interpretive parameters of the discourse. Thus, the article, “Aspirationalism; the Search for Respect in an Unequal Society” by Michelle Gabriel (2003) uncritically conceives of the aspirational as a full and cohesive identity representing a “sizeable demographic group” bound to be “wooed by Australia’s two major political parties” (p147). A range of personal attributes, political perspectives and objective interests are attributed to this aspirational identity by way of considering the particular socio-economic circumstances and class tensions to which it gave rise. In the same way, studies by Gwyther (2008) and Burchell (2002) analysed political and demographic issues associated with Western Sydney in the context of this “new constituency on the urban fringe” and the various attributes popularly ascribed to it (Gwyther, 2008: 189). In doing so, in the words of Bastow and Martin, such studies help to “constitute the very objectivity of the world [they are] supposed to represent” (Bastow and Martin, 2005: 214).

Such representations tended to conceive of the working-class, outer-suburban drive for material wealth and societal respect as a development that was somehow peculiar to the aspirational. In effect, the political frisson around the aspirational was generated through its framing, in this context, as a ‘new class’ identity or ‘phenomenon’ that reflected profound changes in the Australian social and economic structure. As Mark Latham put it:

What is new is the nature of the aspirants themselves. The new economy is producing a new workforce and hence a new voting population…They represent a new class of aspirational voters. Anyone who denies the importance of this phenomenon is denying reality. The workers have had a taste of economic ownership and, not surprisingly, they want more (Latham, 2002).

Despite such claims, most of the key attributes and social trends associated with the aspirational can be seen to be historically enduring and unexceptional. The academic Norman Abjorensen pointed out that the aspirational concept could be traced back to the 1950s and the Liberal Party prime minister, Robert Menzies, who countered the idealistic ‘light on the hill’ social reformist agenda of the Labor party at the time with his ‘forgotten people’ narrative. Menzies talked about “putting value back on the pound, home ownership and education” to a people “weary of restrictions and controls” who “wanted to see some tangible and immediate benefits” (Abjorensen, 2000: 2). Additionally, the notion of ‘flourishing working families with mortgages’ was not a phenomenon confined to the mid 1990s. Judith Brett, in her study of the Australian Liberal party, invoked a range of ‘aspirational’ factors when she pointed to the post-war ‘new middle-class’, constituted by changes to the conception of the ‘individual’, the decline in the protestant ethic, the transition from duties to (economic) rights based values of citizenship, the rise of widespread affluence, and the expansion of credit (Brett, 2003b). Brett referred to the explosion in homeownership after the war; that is, ‘new homes built in new suburbs’, and the sense that working-class Australians were entering the middle-class. She argued that this was a trend that could be traced back to the 1920s:

But if we take a longer perspective, the homes built on weekends by strong and resourceful young couples can be seen to reach back over the cautious conservatism of the 20s and 30s to the energies and opportunities of the pioneering nineteenth century and to the resourceful application of the Australian Legend. And as Robyn Boyd’s well known description of suburbia as the

Australian ugliness testifies, the old middle-class did not experience the post-war housing boom as a welcome swelling of their own ranks so much as a general lowering of their own standards. Instead of seeing the post-war housing boom as the embourgeoisment of the working classes, it is more accurate to see it as the democratization of home ownership in which the aspirations of ordinary Australians are at last realized (Brett, 2003b: 125).

Similarly, in the 1950s and 1960s, a number of historians and commentators argued that Australia had experienced fundamental changes to the class structure similar to those identified in the aspirational narrative. The historian Ian Turner, for instance, writing in 1959 reflected on how the new affluence and conformity of the “Tbone and television’ generation was undermining Australian egalitarianism (Turner, 1982). In the same vein Brian Fitzpatrick argued that there was now parity between the income of the working-class and professional clerical workers (cited in Scalmer, 2005). Additionally, Davies, writing in the 1960s, observed the increased prosperity of the Australian working-class, and the fact that higher levels of consumption and home ownership, and the overlap in working and middle-class standards, would represent a threat to the Labor party vis-à-vis retaining its core constituency (Davies, 1966: 120). In a broader sense the aspirational can be seen as simply representing a manifestation of the kind of values, prejudices and ambitions traditionally assigned to the petit bourgeoisie. In Orwell’s memorable description in ‘Keep the Aspidistra Flying’:

We’re all respectable householders that to say, Tories, yes men and bumsuckers... we’re all bought, and what’s more we’re all bought with our own money. Every one of those poor downtrodden bastards, sweating his guts out to pay twice the proper price for a brick doll’s house that called Belle Vue because there’s no view and the bell doesn’t work (Orwell Cited by Morton, 2001).

The attempt to find clarity of meaning through empirical/rational assessments also had to account for the wide range of factors that were clearly relevant yet not incorporated in the popular aspirational narrative. Thus, for instance, factors such as the negative implications of debt, employment insecurity, overwork, social alienation and the erosion of the ‘public realm’, all of which were evident in social analysis and commentary at the time, were excluded from the aspirational narrative which, in accordance with the function of myth, presented a one-dimensional representation of citizenship immune to the broader and more

complex social context. All of these ‘negative’ factors, representing breakdowns or failures to various degrees in the promises of the free-market neo-liberal order, were simply not part of the representational system of the aspirational discourse.

In the face of its production of a full and rational identity, a study of the aspirational must account for the tensions evident in regard to the core values, rationales and practices articulated within the narrative. Thus the aspirationals emphasis on community values combined with a stringent and reclusive individualism and emphasis on law and order; their anti-welfarism combined with a strong sense of entitlement in relation to government support; their social conservatism combined with the embrace of a free-market system that was rapidly challenging the old social order, including traditional institutions of state, family relations and work practices; their determined pursuit of material prosperity combined with a belief in family values; and their endorsement of neo-liberal reforms in the face of job insecurity, long working hours and unprecedented levels of personal debt. The commentator Rod Cameron was one of the few to consider these excluded elements in his assessment of the aspirational class:

They are basically generation X… certainly not baby boomers, and dramatically affected by the global induced trauma of changes to the workforce: casual work, women at work, non-unionized, under pressure and lots of stress, believing the only way to survive is through individualism (Cameron cited in McGregor, 2002).

Cameron, in this instance, adopted the principal discursive elements of the aspirational discourse (individualism, consumerism and ambition), yet essentially stripped them of the positive framing offered through the popular aspirational narrative: individualism becomes alienation or a decline in collective organisations, material ambition becomes economic hardship and debt, the decline in union representation is connoted with powerlessness, and hard-work and responsibility are reconceived as “pressure” and “stress”. Any consideration of the social ‘reality’ that the aspirational discourse seeks to define needs to take into account this latent negative element which it seeks to repress.

Research into the aspirational should also account of the wide range of meanings and identifications signalled through its narrative. As this narrative increasingly evolved into a

mythology of ‘mainstream’ national identity, its definitional clarity and consistency became increasingly tenuous as more social groups and identities were drawn into its realm of signification. Thus for instance its identification with everyone from working-class battlers to technologically savvy ‘new economy’ ‘wired workers’, and its association with both small government/anti-welfare perspectives and, particularly in the second half of the Coalition’s period in government, middle-class welfare. Given its capacity to accommodate such a wide range of meanings and associations, it is clear that any study into the aspirational discourse must account for its efficacy in incorporating diverse social groups/identities, while retaining salience as a signifier of social identity and coherence in terms of its essential meanings.

Any assessment of the aspirational must also account for the primacy of its political narrative. In this sense it was the focus of both derision and rhetorical mythologising, was integrated into the ‘culture wars’6 between the progressive left and conservative right that took place during the period of the Howard Coalition government (1996-2007), and was the subject of a vast array of political commentary. In the most basic sense, the aspirational’s status as objective class reality and emergent mainstream was employed as a rationale for a highly prescriptive neo-liberal political agenda. In this way the range of political perspectives assigned to the aspirational were conceived as organic to its identity.

In these representations the invocation of an ‘anti-aspirational’ discourse, usually in the guise of an elite and culturally sophisticated intelligentsia who were portrayed as hypocritically denigrating the aspirational’s alleged materialism, philistinism and crassness, was an important component of the populist political dimension of the narrative. Burchell in his assessment of the ‘aspirational class’ offered a typical take:

The poor, it sometimes seems, so long as they stay poor, are worthy Christian objects of Labor’s pastoral care. But woe betide them if they should put away money for a mortgage or buy a business, or sell up their old inner city shack for a sprawling brick structure in the outer suburbs. Then their consumer preferences become an eyesore and their ungenerous social attitudes become an affront (Burchell, 2002).

6 The Howard Coalition’s ongoing project to attack embedded aspects of the Labor’s progressive agenda under the Hawke and Keating governments, including, for instance, aspects associated with their alleged ‘political correctness’, ‘historical revisionism’ and ‘moral relativism’, was popularly conceived as the ‘cultural wars’ (Flint, 2003; Sheehan, 1998). 29

Indeed, as I will argue in chapter eight, this appropriation of the aspirational citizen as a framework for an anti-elite discourse in which cultural snobbery and greed were offered as counter identities to the simple, hard working aspirational, was one component of a range of anti-aspirational identities that were articulated through the narrative, all of which represented a simple transposition of core neo-liberal political perspectives. These anti-aspirational identities included welfare recipients, special interest groups, trade unions, and those reliant on public services and facilities.

Despite this highly prescriptive political agenda, there is a dearth of research that has sought to identify in any detail the ideological character of the aspirational narrative, its efficacy as a subject position and mythology of national citizenship, and its role in contemporary Australian political dynamics. Indeed a large portion of ‘left-wing’ criticism tended to focus on the objectionable character and values of the aspirational identity, rather than assessing it in terms of the political interests and agendas that the articulation of such an identity reflected. Such critiques typically explained the aspirational class as representing a particularly vulgar and irrational materialistic turn in the Australian national character, a turn that accorded with the progressive political left’s critique of the Howard Coalition government. Mungo MacCallum’s commentary was typical:

The aspirational voter is not a joiner unless a free ride is involved. But nor is it in any sense a rugged individual; to stand out in any way is to invite suspicion from other aspirational voters. It is something of a contradiction in terms: a herd animal without any real interest in the welfare of the herd (McCallum, 2003).

Another body of criticism tended to dismiss the aspirational class narrative on empirical grounds, that is, on the basis of the lack of any supportive body of research (Davidson, 2002; Toohey, 2001). In the absence of any consideration of the social interests implicated in its production, such analysis could therefore be seen as adhering to the possibility of a fully conceived social/demographic identity and objective class interests. Only a small number of commentators critiqued the aspirational narrative as manifestly political (Keneally in Henderson, 2001; Mackay, 2001; Morton, 2001). However, in the main, such critiques provided little by way of explanatory analysis and instead relied largely on pejorative references to ‘political rhetoric’ and ‘electoral marketing’. Morton (2001) for instance

referred to the aspirational as a “slick bit of repositioning, a con job, a marketing makeover” and provided an excellent account of its historical precedents and the cultural factors implicated in its production, without providing any explanation for the saliency and effectiveness of this ‘con job’, the political and social dynamics it was addressing, and the specific interests it was promoting. Hugh Mackay similarly questioned the division of Australians into those ‘who want to do better and those who want to do worse’ as constituting a gross distortion of a complex social reality, without any consideration of the political interests and logics implicated in perpetrating this ‘gross distortion’ and how such a ‘distortion’ had achieved such prominence in Australian political commentary and analysis (Mackay, 2002).

Articles by Scalmer (2005) and Scanlon (2004) focused on the class implications of the aspirational narrative and drew attention to its ideological function and the way in which it promoted and excluded certain forms of citizenship. While their analyses were insightful, suggesting the way in which the populist aspirational narrative both served to interpellate the citizenry and to effectively depoliticise the social structure, as short articles they lacked sufficient detail and depth of analysis.

Conclusion

In this chapter I have outlined how the concept of an aspirational class was first used in the United Kingdom to describe the Thatcher government’s appeal to elements of the British working-class, and subsequently emerged in Australia as a demographic/class concept, associated in particular with Western Sydney and the decline in traditional working-class support for the Labor party. This shift in voting patterns, validated through reference to electoral data, served to establish the ‘objective’ status of the ‘aspirational class’ and, ipso facto, its broad range of identities, values and political perspectives. Despite the fact that there was a distinct lack of substantive research supporting the concept, the aspirational class became prominent in mainstream political and social analysis, and quickly expanded beyond its initial association with outer-suburban Western Sydney to be regularly invoked as a signifier of the Australian mainstream and Australian national identity.

In accordance with this, the aspirational was presented as an emergent expression of citizenship predicated on the validity of the free-market as a generator of prosperity. The

31 aspirational as ‘phenomenon’ and ‘new social reality’ effectively constituted an interpretive framework that generated its own logic, values and political prescriptions. As I have argued, the interpretive framework offered through the aspirational narrative was both ahistorical, in that it implied a full break with social/class/demographic trends of the past, and one- dimensional in that it excluded negative assessments of the free-market and neo-liberal reforms.

In reviewing the literature on the aspirational, the predominant feature is the absence of a substantive body of research commensurate with its widespread adoption in Australian social analysis and political commentary. While this might have reflected a tendency for it to be either taken at face value or dismissed as simply empty rhetoric, it is clear that there was little consideration given to the ideological interests implicated in its production. The majority of analyses conceived of the aspirational identity as imbued with rational agency and objective interests. As such there was little problematisation of the complex intersection of social identity and political symbolism intrinsic to its representations. Such approaches were also manifestly inadequate on their own terms in defining in any rigorous sense what the aspirational class represented, identifying social/demographic factors supporting the ‘existence’ of such a class, and accounting for the wide range of values, identities, meanings and practices both ascribed within and excluded from its narrative.

When we acknowledge the lack of any empirical validation for the aspirational as an objectively conceived class reality and rational agent, and indeed the impossibility of any such conception of social identity, we are forced to confront the political as constitutive of the social order and to effectively account for the range of social interests and articulatory practices implicated in the production of this identity. In this sense rather than approaching the complex and ‘over-determined’ aspirational identity from the futile perspective of whether it ‘exists’, we can more relevantly ask: ‘under what conditions and in relation to what discursive logics and political interests was the aspirational identity articulated?’

In the following chapter I will argue for the utility of a discourse theory analysis in addressing the deficiencies that I have identified in the limited body of research on the aspirational. Discourse theory offers a means of interrogating the discursive logics that allow the aspirational discourse to cohere as an accessible and meaningful system of representation, in

32 addition to identifying its political character; that is, its affinity with the political dynamics related to hegemonic struggles for power.

Chapter Two

Discourse Theory

The employment of a discourse theory analysis addresses the failure in the existing body of research to consider the aspirational narrative as constituting a political discourse concerned with the maintenance of dominant social relations. A discourse theory approach interrogates the capacity of the aspirational discourse to generate compelling subject positions and political logics, in addition to its function as a populist discourse that constitutes its identity through the invocation of a polarity of antagonistic relations. To approach the aspirational discourse from this perspective is to interrogate its function as a complex discursive ensemble of divergent and often opposed identities and interests that retain a degree of political, if not rational, consistency.

This chapter traces the development of the post-structural discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe and their conception of the social order as derivative of relational systems of meaning and practice reflecting contingent political interests. Such a theory both incorporates and develops the work of other key theorists - in particular Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, and Ferdinand de Saussure, in addition to more contemporary theorists associated with the post- structural movement such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Slavoj Zizeck. According to this theoretic, hegemonic discourses seek to impose a partial fixation of meaning in a radically contingent social order in which a variety of antagonistic political projects compete for hegemony. The chapter outlines Laclau and Mouffe’s rejection of the class determinism in traditional Marxism and the essentialist residue in Gramsci’s theory of political hegemony, and their embrace of a purely discursive conception of the social order. In this context the aspirational narrative can be viewed as a political discourse which, as such, is not grounded in any essential objective social/demographic ‘reality’, but which rather acts to constitute the identity of subjects and objects by providing a range of subject positions and interpretive frameworks that accord with hegemonic interests.

Having identified the utility of a discourse analysis in addressing failures in the hitherto predominantly empirical/rational analysis, the chapter identifies the key political concepts and logics identified through the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe and employed in this thesis - most importantly those of hegemony, social antagonism, structural dislocation and mythology. It then goes on to give a preliminary account of the way in which the aspirational discourse reflected particular contemporary Australian political dynamics and relates these to Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of discourse. The chapter considers elements of the criticism directed at discourse theory, primarily stemming from its adoption of a fully discursive conception of the social order, and concludes with a methodology.

Toward a Discourse Theory Analysis

As I have argued, given the malleability of the aspirational as signifier, to attempt to pull it apart to its constitutive or ‘essential’ parts invariably leads to a definition so generalised and unexceptional that it verges on the inane. Thus to define aspirationals according to ‘ambition’ or ‘social mobility’ abandons the relational dynamic that encompasses the wider scope of significations produced through the discourse. When subject to a realist or positivist epistemology, identifying and isolating the core values and characteristics is intrinsic to the methodological approach. As I have argued, it leads to research that is both inadequately conceived and manifestly inconclusive.

This suggests the impossibility of attempting to reduce essentially symbolic representations, characterised by an excess of meaning, into literal and quantifiable elements. “Aspirational’ is a figurative term denoting some unspecified space between desire and attainment, manipulated into a concrete noun denoting an actually existing subject position and social class. It represents a more extreme instance of the constitutive inability of the signifier to fully define the signified. The ‘aspirational class’ operated as a surface of inscription that served to organise and orientate a discursive space by facilitating the incorporation of a wide range of social identities, practices and values, none of which had any essential rational or interest based compatibility. What instead we are looking at are complexes of elements - that is, values, identities, political perspectives and demographic ‘realities’- in which relations played the dominant constitutive role. The aspirational discourse was only meaningful in regard to the equivalential relations between its internally inscribed values and identities, and 35 those ‘external’ elements that it actively rejected. Attempts to impose definitional clarity for ‘objective’ research purposes are therefore inadequate since they bypass significant elements of the broader narrative - the complex and elusive ensemble of elements which determines its diverse meanings and significations. The key objective therefore is to interrogate the articulatory logics and political dynamics in relation to which diverse discursive elements and social identities are forged into precarious discursive formations.

In this context, the promotion of an aspirational class conformed with processes related to the discursive production of neo-liberal hegemony. The aspirational discourse provided a framework for the interpretation of a range of specific values and actions in accordance with neo-liberal values and interests: for instance, those related to the legitimate role of government, the welfare state, trade unions and social collectives. While reference to the aspirational as representative of ‘upwardly mobile working families’ was clearly unremarkable, reference to such families and the array of explicitly neo-liberal political perspectives and values ascribed to them gives some indication of the ideological character of this representation of citizenship, its role as a carrier of an immanent political logic. This is a point that a minority of commentators recognised:

The very definitional excess that accompanies the term – the incoherent lumping together of consumption, work, attitudes and groupings is actually an expression of its tactical importance. Like ‘the community’, ‘the people’ or ‘the battlers’, representing the ‘aspirationals’ can be a powerful ideological claim (Scalmer, 2005: 6).

What we are therefore looking at is essentially the positing, by the dominant political order, of a narrative of authentic citizenship that correlated with its own values and prescriptions and which, in the face of aberrant social events and political narratives, sought to re-establish its dominance through the invocation of an idealised social horizon that was threatened by an anti-identity. This narrative, validated initially through its identification with working-class interests, progressively incorporated a divergent range of identities, values and perspectives in order to become a populist signifier of the Australian mainstream. The process in which a particularity becomes the bearer of a universal signification is synonymous with political hegemony.

The discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe addresses the core problem evident in empirical/rational analysis of the aspirational; that is, the distinction between the objective social order and the subjective/interpretive realm adhered to in such analyses (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). In accordance with Laclau and Mouffe, discourse, as a relational system of significations, constitutes the social order without any recourse to an essential or privileged determining principle. Popular notions of hegemony focus on the achievement of a degree of ideological dominance and political leadership by specific social interests. The discourse- theory analytics of Laclau and Mouffe provide a flexible conceptual framework that seeks to interrogate the logics through which political and social meanings are generated as a means of facilitating hegemonic relations. As such it allows for a focus on the constructivist component of hegemonic domination. Hegemony rests on the construction of a ‘surface of inscription’ which allows for a range of social identities and interests to be discursively articulated within an ordering principle with universal pretensions.

Such an approach offers a means of capturing the political character of the aspirational narrative; that is, its role in relation to contemporary political dynamics and struggles for hegemony, the social interests and historical factors implicated in its production, and the means by which it cohered as a representational system. I will now consider the development of Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory as an extension of Gramsci’s theory of political hegemony, and some of the key theoretical concepts in relation to which this thesis will be structured.

Laclau and Mouffe’s adoption of a fully discursive conception of the social order

A post-structuralist discourse theory emerged in the 1970s largely as a means of addressing the growing awareness of the link between linguistic structures and political agency in a way that sought to challenge the economic determinism and class reductionism of traditional Marxism. As such it sought to interrogate the ideological production of meaning in the context of political contestations for power. Such an approach challenged the dominant institutional concept of politics as constituting the practices of politicians and political institutions, in order to conceive of the political as central to all social relations and practices. Integral to this was the gradual progression within discourse theory to a fully discursive conception of the social order whereby all social relations, objects and practices are conceived 37

as discursively constructed relational systems of meaning which are not conditioned by extra- discursive factors (Torfing, 2005: 5). This move to a focus on the discursive production of meaning rejected the objectivism and universalism of the mainstream social sciences, and the drive to identify essential laws and theories utilising the same epistemology and methodology as that applied in the natural sciences. It was reflected and was informed by other developments in related disciplines which similarly rejected the dominant positivist tradition and instead employed interpretive and critical modes of analysis. These included ethnographic, psychoanalytic and hermeneutical approaches (Howarth, 2000: 127).

Discourse theory’s fully discursive conception of the social order, in addition to its theorisation of particular discursive logics and rules, distinguishes it from other forms of discourse analysis - in particular the critical discourse analysis (CDA) associated with Norman Fairclough (2000), and the Gramscian discourse theory of Stuart Hall (1983, 1988), both of which posit an extra-discursive context located in the social structure. Such an extra- discursive dimension is also identified in the early archaeological writings of Michel Foucault which asserted the non-discursive conditioning of the ‘discursive rules of formation’ (Foucault, 1985). In considering the key philosophical assumptions behind this reversion to a purely discursive conception of the social order and its ontological and epistemological implications, it is instructive to consider Laclau and Mouffe’s theory in the context of its development of various strands of post-Marxist thought.

Laclau and Mouffe’s adoption of a fully discursive conception of the social order and their development of a political theory of discourse builds on Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony (Gramsci, 1971). Gramsci’s theory effectively addressed problems with the classical Marxist approach which failed, variously, to reconcile the historical fragmentation of the working-class (in late capitalism), the apparent separation between political and economic struggles, and the failure of the working-class to constitute a revolutionary body. Gramsci’s theory of hegemony encompassed the struggle for both a political and moral/intellectual leadership and involved two main components: ‘force’ through which powers of domination and exclusion are enacted, and the organisation of consent through which ideological prescriptions are promoted (Smith, 1998: 162). The concept of hegemony was therefore introduced into the Marxist theoretic in order to incorporate a conception of contingent (political) developments which were not easily assimilated to the scientific determinism of traditional Marxism (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). 38

Gramsci’s emphasis on the establishment of a ‘moral and intellectual’ consensus moved away from the theorisation of hegemony as strategic political allegiance and toward the construction of a collective unity or ‘historical block’ with a ‘national popular’ character (Gramsci, 1971: 181-82). As Laclau and Mouffe observe:

Whereas political leadership can be grounded upon a conjunctural coincidence of interests in which the participating sectors retain their separate identity, moral and intellectual leadership requires that an ensemble of ideas and values be shared by a number of sectors or… that certain subject positions traverse a number of class sectors (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 67).

Gramsci therefore emphasised the contingent nature of hegemonic articulations - that is, their intrinsic political nature - through which are employed a range of ideologies and myths in order to achieve a degree of consensual dominance. In prioritising the political as a primary determinant of social identity, Gramsci broke with the determinism of classical Marxism which, in its adherence to the essential principal of economism - ie, the fundamental structuring laws of economic relations - effectively eradicated the contingent political dimension as a determining social factor. That is, deterministic approaches, in their adherence to an essential ‘structuring principle’ that structures the social totality while at the same time escaping structuration itself, assert the limit of politics in the constitution of the social order (Derrida, 1978, 278). In classical Marxism this ‘end’ is achieved through the proletarian revolution which constitutes the final act in the historical process.

While the structural Marxism of Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar sought to overcome the epiphenomenalism and reductionism of the classical model and assign a degree of ‘relative autonomy’ in the relationship between the economic base and the ideological and political superstructure - in Althusser’s case by a theorisation of the reproductive function of the superstructure through the “ideological state apparatuses and the interpellative effects of ideology” (Althusser, 1971) - they were unable to escape class reductionism and economic essentialism in a way that adequately theorised an active political dimension (Tofing, 1999: 20). In the case of Althusser, his attempt to move beyond Marx’s notion of false consciousness (as constituting an ideological distortion of ‘reality’) through his concept of ideological ‘interpellation’, was undermined by his assertion that ideology is derivative of a

“certain position within the relations of production at the economic level” (Mouffe, 1981: 171).

Unlike Althusser, Gramsci’s insights, while maintaining a degree of economic determinism (in the last resort), more effectively accounted for the ethico-political dimension and, in doing so, laid a platform for the non-essentialist post-structural theoretics of Laclau and Mouffe to escape the limitations of epiphenomenalism and class reductionism. Gramsci’s emphasis on the ‘integral state’ as composed of a highly political civil society, effectively denotes the high point of hegemony, which is determined by the transformation of ruling class to ‘integral state’, rather than the seizure of economic power (Gramsci, 1971:52). In this, the construction of a ‘collective will’ which effectively incorporates civil society is essential (Gramsci, 1971: 125-33). The integral state achieves this collective will not through the imposition of the dominant ideology on the other classes, but through educative, formative processes which achieve a degree of moral and intellectual leadership. This moral and intellectual leadership “has to be linked with a program of economic reform” (Gramsci, 1971: 133). The achievement of hegemony is thus not predicated on the dominance of one realm (the economic for instance) or on an essentialist logic, but on a contingent political articulation which incorporates the relational ensemble of state, economy and civil society. This articulation will have a national-popular character in order to fulfil the hegemonic function of symbolically expressing the wishes of the nation as a whole.

The emphasis on political articulation necessarily extracts the role of ideology from its secondary role in classical Marxism (as constituting a superficial ancillary to the economic base characterised by ‘false consciousness’) and brings it to the fore as a primary constituent of hegemonic domination. Gramsci rejected the idea that ideology is “distinct from the structure” and “pure appearance, useless, stupid, etc” (Gramsci 1971: 376) and asserted that: “to the extent that ideologies are historically necessary they have a validity which is psychological; they organize human masses and create the terrain on which men move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle, etc” (Gramsci, 1971: 377). As Stuart Hall, observes:

Ruling or dominant conceptions of the world do not directly prescribe the mental content of the illusions that supposedly fill the head of the dominated classes. But the circle of dominant ideas does accumulate the symbolic power to map or

classify the world for others; its classifications do acquire not only the constraining power of dominance over the modes of thought but also the inertial authority of habit and instinct. It becomes the horizon of the taken for granted: what the world is and how it works, for all practical purposes (Hall, 1988: 44).

Laclau and Mouffe develop Gramsci’s theory in two main areas: they elaborate a more exact explanation of how hegemony may be established through the articulation of antagonistic identities, and they avoid the residue of economic determinism evident in Gramsci in which the fundamental classes are theorised as having an ontologically privileged role in the struggle for hegemony (Nash, 2001: 1). Laclau and Mouffe break with the essentialist remnant in Gramsci in which the economy acts as an ‘ontological anchorage point’ and move toward a purely discursive conception of the social order. They achieve this firstly by reference to the structural linguistics originated by Saussure which emphasises the relational constitution of social identities and the fact that “there are no positive terms in language, only differences – something is what it is only through its differential relations to something else” (Laclau, 2005: 68). It follows that objectivity and relational identity are synonymous and “only two types of relation can exist between signifying elements: combination and substitution” (Laclau, 2005: 68). Terms such as democracy and capitalism, for instance, only have meaning in relation to the discursive formation in which they are articulated and their relationship to other related terms: fascism and communism, for instance.

Laclau and Mouffe also incorporate the deconstructionism of Derrida and his identification of unsustainable conceptual oppositions in Saussure’s theory that clashed “with his overriding intention to develop a purely formal account of language as a system of differences without positive terms” (Howarth, 2000: 37). Derrida argued that the essential centre of a social formation is shown to involve a range of displacements and substitutions all of which constitute attempts to atone for the fact that the full presence of the centre (as an entity governing the structure yet itself escaping structuration) is unachievable (Derrida 1978: 279). The absence of a transcendental signified (i.e. centre) thereby leads directly to a purely discursive conception of social identity in which the ‘play of meaning’ becomes the principal social determinant (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 111). Thus Derrida’s notion of the ‘supplement’: a “plenitude enriching another plenitude and the compensation for a certain internal lack” which “insinuates itself in the place of, …fills the void” (Prozorov, 2004: 3). The discursive ‘play of meaning’ is fundamental. There is no meaning beyond the play of

41 differences, no ground that would, a-priori, privilege some elements of the whole over the others. This radical contingency extends to both individual identity and the social order. “Whatever centrality an element acquires, it has to be explained by the play of differences as such” (Laclau, 2005: 69).

The eradication of the essentialist residue leads to a fully discursive conception of the social order. As such, discourses constitute ‘articulatory practices’ undertaken in a fundamentally undecidable terrain which seek to dominate a field of representation by partially fixing meaning around a range of key signifiers or ‘nodal points’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 113). As such discourses entail both linguistic and non-linguistic elements and make no sharp distinction between ideas and their material conditions (Howarth, 2000: 116). All objects are conceived through purely discursive means rather than according to any extra-discursive conception of ‘reality’. The primacy of the ‘play of difference’ outside of any ontologically privileged ordering principle leads directly to an affirmation of the primacy of the political in the constitution of the social order. This is enacted through the political articulations of hegemonic forces which aim to dominate the social order through the establishment of a moral and intellectual leadership. Hegemonic projects seek to dominate a social field through the provision of a “credible principle upon which to read past, present and future events, and capture people’s hearts and minds” (Torfing, 2005: 15).

Key theoretical concepts

Hegemony, as theorised by Laclau and Mouffe, is therefore related to processes whereby a purely differential system of elements (floating signifiers) are articulated into meaningful discursive moments in order to represent an (unachievable) fullness. Discursive elements articulated as ‘moments’ within discourse are structured and ordered in relation to ‘nodal points’ which act as ‘knots of meaning’ that generate ‘chains of signification’. Laclau has introduced the concept of the ‘empty signifier’ to conceive of the means by which the ‘unachievable fullness and universality’ that constitutes the social ideal is discursively represented (Laclau, 1996: 41; 2005: 105). Empty signifiers constitute spaces of representation for this absent fullness (or ‘lack’) and as such are the focus of hegemonic contestations in which competing political forces attempt to “present their particular objectives as those which carry out the filling of [the] lack” (Laclau, 1996: 41). Hegemonic 42

orders will therefore be constituted through affective modes of apprehension, that is “attributive, performative” processes through which identification with this “more universal signification” will be achieved (Laclau, 2005: 97).

The inability to fix discursive elements into a permanent and full social identity leads to the concept of structural dislocation which describes those instances whereby this inability becomes visible (Laclau, 1990: 39-40). Dislocation involves those events that cannot be symbolised and integrated as moments within the hegemonic representational system. Such events expose the failure of the hegemonic order to achieve a deterministic fullness and necessitate a mobile set of tactics and ‘rearticulatory interventions’ in order to re-hegemonise the dislocated elements. Dislocations therefore both threaten identities and are the grounds on which new identities are forged (Laclau, 1990: 39).

In this context individual identity is a product of hegemonic practices concerned with the construction of subject positions within discursive formations. Unlike structural theorists such as Althusser who conceived of individual subjectivities as being wholly determined through fixed processes of ideological interpellation, Laclau and Mouffe instead assign a degree of self-determination through the capacity of individuals to adopt a range of ‘subject positions’ within different discursive structures (Howarth & Stavrakakis, 2000: 12). Thus due to structural dislocation and the resulting inability of the hegemonic agent to fix discursive elements into a permanent and full social identity, the capacity to interpellate individual subjects into the hegemonic social order is limited.

The always only partial fixation of meaning within discourse - its inability to constitute a ‘full presence’ - leads to the concept of social antagonism as the ‘limit’ of any objectivity’:

The limit of the social must be given within the social itself as something subverting it, destroying its ambition to constitute a full presence. Society never manages fully to be society, because everything in it is penetrated by its limits which prevent it from constituting itself as an objective reality (Howarth and Stavrakakis, 2000: 10).

Thus social antagonism functions as the ‘constitutive outside’ of any discourse, since the subversion of identity that the antagonism represents, that is, its role as the limit of any social

43 objectivity, also offers the social identity a means of addressing internally its own incapacity to achieve a full identity (Laclau, 1990: 17-18). Thus the antagonistic identity must be experienced as a negative force to which the constitutive failure of the hegemonic order to achieve this full identity can be assigned. Relations of social antagonism facilitate a logic of equivalence within a discursive formation as differential identities are overridden by the mutual rejection of the antagonistic identity. Laclau distinguishes between equivalential relations of difference involving democratic demands that are legitimate in their diversity and particularities, and popular demands of equivalence in which the interests of one group “identifies itself with the whole”. This involves a “radical exclusion” and the “identification of all links in the popular chain with an identity principle which crystallizes differential claims around a common denominator” (Laclau, 2005: 82).

Given the lack of an objectively realised centre and the contingent and precarious nature of the social order, hegemony must be continually renewed through a reproductive process of struggle both in relation to externalities and internal contradictions/tensions. In the face of structural dislocations and antagonistic political projects which seek to exploit these dislocations, hegemonic orders are therefore involved in a constant process of establishing and maintaining social legitimacy in order to address unmet demands, re-articulate dislocated elements and generate new objectivities. These hegemonic responses to the precariousness of the social order are predicated on the capacity to generate compelling myths and social imaginaries that atone for the ‘lack’ in the social structure attendant to dislocation. Laclau and Mouffe’s concept of ideology has, as its principal point of departure from the classical Marxist model, a rejection of the reductive essentialism intrinsic to Marx’s notion of false consciousness. In line with the post-structuralist rejection of the social structure as a unitary and intelligible whole, society is viewed as always having an excess of meaning that evades attempts to fully rationalise and ground social processes (Laclau, 1990: 90). In the same sense, attempts to conceptualise individual agency as imbued with objective interests are prone to fail to account for the “same excess of meaning, the same precarious character of any structuration that we find in the domain of the social order” (Laclau, 1990a: 92).

In this sense a criteria on which the consciousness of the subject can be deemed to be false is unsustainable, since the “extra-ideological reality, which is distorted in ideological representations, is always already ideological” (Torfing, 1999: 113). This however does not mean that the concept of ideology should be abandoned, but rather that it should denote the 44

“non-recognition of the precarious character of any positivity, of the impossibility of any ultimate suture” (Laclau, 1990a: 92). Ideology is thus the “means to totality of any totalizing discourse” (Laclau, 1990a: 92), that is, the hegemonic drive to disguise its fundamentally contingent, tenuous and precarious nature.

The hegemonic employment of myths and social imaginaries represents the principal means through which this ideological function is carried out. Myths seek to suture dislocations and interpellate the individual through the invocation of compelling symbolic representations - “metaphors for an absent fullness” (Torfing, 1999: 115). In doing so they offer a “new objectivity by means of the rearticulation of the dislocated elements” (Laclau, 1990: 61). Social imaginaries constitute myths that have fulfilled the ‘filling’ function and inscribed additional dislocations and demands in order to become disassociated from the literality of the original dislocation. As a result they are transformed into an imaginary horizon that becomes the “unlimited horizon of inscription of any social demand and any possible dislocation” (Laclau, 1990: 64). To analyse the mythical representations of a hegemonic order is therefore to seek to understand both the political factors impacting on its viability and the means by which it seeks to consolidate its tenuous order in the face of its constitutive incapacity to completely define and control the social world.

In summary, in asserting the lack of any ‘truth’ claim based on an essential structuring principle, discourse theory focuses on the relational, contextual and historical character of identity formation and social orders. As relational systems of meaning, discursive relations of equivalence and difference are forged through the articulation of empty signifiers and nodal points, and the construction of a ‘constitutive outside’ of social antagonisms which both stabilise and represent the limit of the discursive system. Discourse theory offers a means of interrogating the intrinsically unstable, dynamic and complex political character of the social order in the context of hegemonic struggles to establish political and moral-intellectual leadership. This involves interrogating hegemonic attempts to generate compelling ideological truth claims or ‘reading principles’ that interpellate social agents into the hegemonic order through the simulation of a homogenous and full space of representation. The purpose of discourse theory is to identify the discursive logics and relations of power evident in the articulation of this space of representation and to expose its necessarily flawed character.

Given the always partial fixation of meaning, the social agent will adopt an amalgam of various subject positions, all of which are vulnerable to the antagonistic articulations of alternative political projects. The hegemonic drive to interpellate social agents as part of a tenuous and contingent social order captures the essence of the political dimension. It is this dimension which is poorly conceptually appraised or neglected in positivist, rationalist or other essentialist accounts which seek purely to assess the ‘objective reality’ of any given social formation, identity or political perspective and which “presume that social actors have given interests and preferences” and that “social systems are similarly rationally determined” (Howarth and Stavrakakis, 2000: 6). Discourse theory involves a consideration of the “conditions of possibility for our perceptions, utterances and actions”, rather than an analysis based on the “factual immediacy or hidden meaning of the social world” (Torfing, 2005: 10). These ‘conditions of possibility’ are derived through the structural logics through which discourses are constructed in a fundamentally contested social terrain.

Common Criticisms and responses

As a theoretical framework that rejects the objective and universal orientation of mainstream social science, the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe has been subject to a number of criticisms, particularly from realist and positivist perspectives. The most common of these relate to the implications of their adoption of a purely discursive conception of the social order (Geras 1987, 1990; Mouzelis, 1990). For the purposes of this thesis I will consider three aspects of these criticisms; that is, those relating to the alleged idealism and relativism of Laclau and Mouffe’s approach, in addition to criticism citing the lack of a normative and therefore critical dimension to their theory.

Critics citing the ontological idealism of discourse theory argue that its fully discursive conception of the social order entails a rejection of the possibility of an independently existing reality (Geras, 1987, 1988; Woodiwiss, 1990). Such criticism reveals a common misconception in so far as it fails to grasp the distinction between the notion of objects existing independently of our capacity to conceive them, and the idea that such objects can be objectively conceived, that is can be interpreted in ways that bypass any process of discursive signification. Laclau and Mouffe have explained succinctly the difference between an

externally existing reality and the truth claims that constitute the discursive means of apprehending this reality:

That fact that every object is constituted as an object of discourse has nothing to do with whether there is a world external to thought, or with the realism/idealism opposition. An earthquake or the falling of a brick is an event that certainly exists, in the sense that it occurs here and now, independently of my will. But whether their specificity as objects is constructed in terms of ‘natural phenomena’ or ‘expressions of the wrath of God’, depends upon the structuring of a discursive field. What is denied is not that such objects exist externally to thought, but the rather different assertion that they could constitute themselves as objects outside any discursive conditions of emergence (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 108).

In this sense, as Torfing has argued, discourse theory is both realist and materialist in its adherence to the idea of an independently existing reality and its separation of form and matter (Torfing, 2005:18).

The second principal criticism argues that in the absence of the ultimate validity of any truth claim among competing discourses, discourse theory posits a nihilistic, relativist ‘gloom’ in which competing discourses are equivalent vis-a-vis their inability to substantively defend their positions. The most notable adherent to this view has been Norman Geras (1997, 1998) who has argued that Laclau and Mouffe are unable to identify criteria “for identifying and measuring exploitation and oppression” and as such discourse theory could “support any kind of politics” (Geras cited in Townshend, 2004: 274). However, rather than ruling out valid grounds for political discrimination as such criticism suggests, Laclau and Mouffe adhere to the truth-falsity distinction, yet situate it within contingent and limited discursive paradigms. That is, social agents are always interpellated by specific discourses or paradigms that condition values and perspectives in regard to the status, truth or desirability of any given subject. However this does not mean, as such critiques suggest, that discourses are closed homogenous systems, since if this were the case there would be no scope for agonistic dialogues with competing truth claims. In other words, in accordance with the philosophy of Wittgenstein (1953) and Heidiegger (1962) “we have to share some criteria about the meaning of objects and practices before we can make knowledge claims about [them]” (Howarth, 2000: 114). In this sense truth claims must ultimately be qualified, yet, in accordance with the

47 common and accepted standards that constitute the social context in which they are articulated, they are nonetheless valid. Critics of this non-essentialist approach would infer that the only precondition on which social actors can make judgements is in relation to the validity of the essential and objective truth claims of any given discourse, and that in the absence of this their can only be ‘nihilism’. Such a perspective implicitly endorses the possibility of an ultimate objective social order immune to political contestations, antagonisms and conflicts, an order that would in a political sense be synonymous with authoritarianism.

Following from this, discourse theory has also been accused of lacking a normative dimension, and on this basis having no capacity to effectively critique the discourses it analyses (Norris, 1993). As argued by Eagleton (1991) the rejection of an extra-ideological dimension necessarily entails an incapacity to critically identify the source of social ideas. However as argued by Howarth (2000) and Torfing (2005), the critical edge of discourse theory derives from its conception of ideology as the “non-recognition of the precarious character of any positivity” and its axiomatic analysis of the means by which discursive formations and hegemonic orders seek to atone for their inability to fully suture the social order. Discourse theory facilitates a critical approach that focuses on a deconstructive analysis of the closure in the structure in the context of the failure of its system of representation to sustain its internal logic. As Laclau has stated:

A realistic analysis of socio-political processes must... abandon the objectivist prejudice that social forces are something, and start from an examination of what they do not manage to be (Laclau, 1990: 38).

The critical dimension of such an analysis derives from assessing this failure in the context of the principle of fullness through which the totalising closure is produced. As Torfing has argued: “we can criticise the eminently deconstructable law in the face of the indeconstructable justice, which is always a justice to come” (Torfing, 2005: 20).

In this sense the critical orientation of discourse theory stems from its anti-essentialism. As argued above, discourse theory rejects the notion that any social entity can be assessed according to universal abstract laws. In accordance with this, any discourse analysis will be subject to the particular discursive frameworks (values, priorities, social norms, practices, etc)

to which the discourse theorist is subject. However, with these qualifications in mind, a normative dimension can be assigned to the political implications of the anti-essentialist approach. Rather than a rigid ideological social order characterised by prescriptive imperatives and naturally posited ‘inevitabilities’, the recognition of the tenuous and contingent nature of the social allows for the problematisation of the social structure and facilitates a more open, democratic and humanistic form of politics subject to critical contestations. Zygmunt Bauman has captured the value of this ‘permanently open’ conception of politics:

Politics is the on-going critique of reality…. A perpetual (and forever unfinished) chase after the elusive ideal, a mechanism for the pursuit of an essentially contested concept of justice which is bound to remain permanently open ended (Bauman, 2002: 54).

The radical plural democracy of Laclau and Mouffe posits a liberal individualism predicated on the contingent and partial character of the social order and subjective identity, and the resulting potential for this to facilitate a recognition of social difference (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 190; Mouffe, 1993, 2000). As argued by Howarth in response to Critchely’s (1992) criticism of the ‘normative deficit’ in Laclau and Mouffe’s theory and the risk it runs of ‘collapsing into a voluntaristic Schmittian decisionism’, this value of social difference is presupposed in Laclau and Mouffe’s conception of hegemony since it requires “both the modification of identities and interests... as well as the institutionalisation of a more universal democratic and pluralistic ethic among social actors themselves” (Howarth, 2000: 124).

Though they conceive of social antagonism as an ineradicable dimension of the social order, Laclau and Mouffe reject Karl Schmitt’s (1976) view that the we/they distinction must always be the locus of a friend/enemy distinction, a belief that is evident in the contemporary trend to reject politics as inherently destructive/unproductive and substitute it with consensual or non- adversarial modes of governance. Instead they have argued that their political theory is compatible with the normative value of an agonistic (rather than actively antagonistic) approach to the political. As Mouffe has argued:

Conflict, in order to be accepted as legitimate, needs to take a form that does not destroy the political association. This means that some kind of common bond

must exist between the parties in conflict, so that they will not treat their opponents as enemies to be eradicated, seeing their demands as illegitimate, which is precisely what happens with the antagonistic friend/enemy relation. However, the opponents cannot be seen simply as competitors whose interests can be dealt with through mere negotiation, or reconciled through deliberation, because in that case the antagonistic element would simply have been eliminated. If we want to acknowledge on one side the permanence of the antagonistic dimension of the conflict while on the other side allowing for the possibility of its taming, we need to envisage a third type of relation. This is the type of relation which I have proposed to call ‘agonism’. While antagonism is a we/they relation in which the two sides are enemies who do not share any common ground, agonism is a we/they relation where the conflicting parties, although acknowledging that there is no rational solution to their conflict, nevertheless recognise the legitimacy of their opponents (Mouffe, 2005: 20).

In this sense, the agonistic approach preserves the adversarial relations that are the life blood of functional democracies while at the same time establishing the legitimacy of alternative political perspectives and maximising the potential for the recognition of difference.

The utility of discourse theory for a study of the aspirational

In accordance with Laclau and Mouffe, given the precarious character of any hegemonic order (or positive representation) based on its inability to homogenise its representational system, the resulting overdetermination of social identity facilitates perpetual contestations between hegemonic projects. In this sense, neo-liberalism, rather than representing a unified, rational or consistent set of principles and practices, instead represents an amalgam of divergent values, interests, and practices, the order and priority of which is contingent on the particular environment and circumstances in which it is articulated. The partial, tenuous and contested conception of the social order that emerges indicates the primacy of political interventions concerned with the maintenance of hegemonic relations.

In light of the opportunistic and performative character of neo-liberalism as a hegemonic order, discourse theory offers a means of grasping its failure to achieve a degree of fixity and ‘foundational logic’ in its representational system, and the means by which its seeks to atone

for this failure. The principal context for this study is the dislocation of the neo-liberal order in the late 1980s and first half of the 1990s, and the ideological drive of neo-liberal hegemonic agents, in response to this dislocation, to affirm its legitimacy through the articulation of compelling myths that articulated dislocated elements back into its social order. The aspirational discourse therefore did not maintain an ordered and consistent set of meanings and practices but was constituted through performative articulations concerned with the maintenance of power.

In approaching the aspirational this way, discourse theory captures a range of factors implicated in the production of the aspirational discourse that have either been ignored or insufficiently accounted for in the limited number of studies conducted. These include the dynamics related to the particular political environment in which it was articulated, the nature and extent of breakdowns in neo-liberal hegemony in Australia from the late 1980s onwards, the broader social, cultural, economic and historical factors impacting on its articulation, and the ongoing relevance of previous hegemonic formations and embedded discursive moments. It also facilitates a substantial analysis of the politics of identity and the centrality of myths of citizenship as a means of ordering and promoting specific hegemonic priorities. The popular rendering of the aspirational as a demographic ‘reality’ and its conformity with free-market determinism, accords with the ideological project to simulate a fully ‘totalised’ essential order, immune to political contestation. The potency of hegemonic myths as the symbolic expression of this ‘fullness’ and as a means of depolicising the social order, as Barthes remarked, is related to its capacity to “immediately be frozen into something natural”, which is “not read as a motive but as a reason” (Barthes, 1972: 129).

Given the hegemonic reliance on the “open ended horizon” of symbolic forms of representations as a means of capturing popular subjectivities (Laclau, 1989: 81), the transition from one hegemonic order to another involves an ongoing project to disrupt the articulation of embedded empty signifiers as moments in the ‘old order’ and to articulate them under its various nodal points as stable moments in its own hegemonic formation. While the ‘crisis’ in the Keynesian economic model in the early 1970s provided the dislocatory opportunity for neo-liberalism, this thesis will argue that the predominantly technocratic nature of the early phase of the neo-liberal hegemonic project in Australia failed to adequately generate compelling myths of national values and identity. In the face of the social-economic effects of neo-liberal reform and the economic recession in the early 1990s, this failure meant

51 that popular subjectivities remained captive to subject positions associated with the pre-neo- liberal order - the two principal components of which I have identified as represented by the ‘Australian settlement’ and the post-war social democratic welfare state.

The character of the aspirational discourse was essentially constituted in relation to the political imperatives generated through these dislocations and the emergence of alternative political projects, in particular that of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party, which referenced various embedded discourses of national identity in its assault on neo-liberal hegemony. In line with its extended significations and divergent ensemble of social identities, interests and meanings, the aspirational discourse filled the lack opened up through dislocations in the neo- liberal order and acted as a surface of inscription for a range of social demands. This involved the re-articulation of pre-existing discursive elements into new discourses of citizenship, values, and interests, and the generation of myths that both accounted for the ‘lack’ in the social structure attendant to dislocation and addressed and promoted hegemonic interests in the context of contemporary socio-political dynamics. The populist character of the primary articulation of the aspirational discourse through the mainstream media and political establishment was reflected in its essential division of society into oppositional poles and its construction of a ‘mainstream’ through the forging of equivalential relations based on the antagonistic framing of anti-aspirational identities, including those ‘privileged identities or elites’ associated with the social democratic/political left.

The divergent values and identities incorporated within its narrative derived their equivalential sameness from their common positive relation to the dominant signifiers/nodal points, and their mutual opposition to various antagonistic groups. In rather mundanely defining the aspirational as ‘working-class aspirants’ or ‘upwardly mobile working Australians’, the most pertinent signification was in the axiomatic invocation of a non- aspirational class - those without aspirations. Connoted within the aspirational narrative with the ‘sclerotic’ and ‘inefficient’ welfare state, ‘parasitic’ social and cultural elites, and a range of minority and special interest groups, the anti-aspirational functioned both to constitute the identity of the aspirational and to effectively block the full achievement of ‘aspirational’ desires and ambitions.

In line with a discourse theory approach, this thesis seeks to critically interrogate that version of citizenship and social identity represented by the aspirational discourse in terms of the 52 inconsistent character of its internal logic, the hegemonic interests and political dynamics that inform its representational system, and its function as an ideological representation that served to promote the essential/objective character of the neo-liberal order. In the face of contemporary concerns in relation to the decline of democratic governance and its increasing substitution with the deterministic shibboleths of neo-liberal free-market globalisation (Giroux, 2004; Brown, 2006; Nenwood, 2003), the critical edge of such a discourse theory analysis is therefore based on its adherence to principles of democracy, social pluralism, social justice and transparency, pursued not as end points, but as part of a perpetual critique of ‘reality’ that remains vigilant to the appropriation of these values as empty signifiers within more autocratic, depoliticised and undemocratic hegemonic orders.

This thesis is structured around the core discursive logics offered by Laclau and Mouffe and as such focuses on the political interests and factors implicated in the production of the aspirational discourse, and the necessary discursive conditions for its production. Chapters three to six deal with the concepts of political hegemony and structural dislocation in order to explore the broad political factors that informed the production of the aspirational discourse. The discursive logic governing the aspirational discourse’s production of meaning, in particular its generation of relations of equivalence and antagonism, and its articulation of myths, is the principal focus of the second half of the thesis: chapters seven to nine. I provide an elaboration on the key theoretical concepts and logics at those points in the thesis where they are relevant.

Methodology

In accordance with the conception of discourse as constitutive of the social order, this thesis endeavours to capture a wide range of data and information relevant to the diverse values, practices and interests that both constitute neo-liberalism as a hegemonic order in Australia, and informed the articulation of the aspirational discourse. To this end a range of texts, media reports, speeches, policy documents, social and political research, and information in regard to relevant social, cultural and political trends and events were referenced in order to capture both the formative factors and the various meanings and applications of the aspirational discourse.

Given the prominent status of the aspirational discourse in Australia for close to a decade, a primary focus of this thesis is on its articulation by both the Labor party and the Coalition. Though the subject of the aspirational is approached as a neo-liberal discourse and, as such, primarily identifies common discursive moments integral to its popular articulation, the thesis remains responsive to the character of its specific articulations as reflected by the political priorities and circumstances of the hegemonic agents implicated in its production. In this sense, the aspirational discourse of the Labor party and Coalition, though reflective of the basic hegemonic necessity to suture dislocations in the neo-liberal order, exhibited a degree of variation in terms of their emphases, accents and key discursive moments, in line with the particular institutional identities and political preoccupations of both parties. The thesis therefore focuses on a range of relevant material, including policy documents, transcripts of speeches, articles, and opinion pieces in the media in order to identify the specific priorities of both parties. Relevant information was also accessed through parliamentary Hansard, the websites of parliamentarians identified as holding seats in the relevant class/demographic, and publications released by key political figures, in particular the Labor MP, Mark Latham.

The hegemonic status of the aspirational discourse was reflected in its prominence in the Australian media and in particular the political commentariat, in addition to sections of the business community. Given the global corporate status of various dominant media organisations in Australia, the promotion of the aspirational discourse, particularly through Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited newspapers, could be viewed as closely according with neo- liberal hegemonic purposes. As such, a range of News Limited publications were accessed for this thesis, most prominent of which were the Australian and the Sydney Daily Telegraph. Additional media representations were accessed through the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), and the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper.

In line with neo-liberalism’s active promotion of market logics and practices beyond the economic realm, the dominance of the discourse was also evident in a range of institutional practices and government policy initiatives – in particular those related to social welfare practices and the education sector. In accordance with this, relevant government data and policy documents were accessed.

On-line research was undertaken in order to access a range of political and policy journals, e- magazines, discussion papers and qualitative/quantitative research. Additional on-line 54

research was undertaken at the Australian Electoral Commission website, the Australian Bureau of Statistics website, and the Parliament of Australian website.

Data presented in relation to the section on dislocations was accessed through social research, primarily undertaken in the period in question, concerning the social and economic effects of neo-liberal reform in Australia. This includes studies by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS), the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling (NATSEM), and a range of individual social and demographic researchers working in the field. In relation to the analysis of Western Sydney, core demographic information was accessed through the Urban Frontiers Program at the University of Western Sydney.

Chapter Three

From ‘egalitarian’ social democracy to ‘aspirational’ neo-liberalism

The employment of mythologies of citizenship such as that of the aspirational reflect not just the need to manage contemporary political dynamics but also the ongoing hegemonic task of disrupting the articulation of discursive elements and empty signifiers as moments within alternative political discourses. This chapter will seek to provide context to my analysis of the aspirational discourse through a consideration of the two hegemonic formations in relation to which it was primarily articulated: that of neo-liberalism and the post-war social democratic order - elements of which maintained a strong legitimacy and association with Australian egalitarian values and the historically enduring values and practices associated with the ‘Australian settlement’.

The hegemonic transition to neo-liberalism in Australia in the early 1980s involved a fundamental reordering and restructuring of the historic emphasis throughout the 20th century on interventionist government, collective forms of social and political organisation, and redistributive welfare policies. The hegemonic project for neo-liberalism was to effect this transition through the articulation of compelling myths of national identity, values and purpose which generated a range of neo-liberal subject positions and ‘filled the lack’ opened up through the dislocation of the Keynesian social democratic order in the early 1970s. The core concept in this regard is that of overdetermination: the process by which the lack of fixity in the structure causes a ‘displacement’ of discursive elements: values, meanings, identities, etc, between different social movements (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 122). As Buenfil Burgos has put it, overdetermination: “shows that no identity is pure and uncontaminated, but always involves traces of other identities, thus displaying the relational character of the social” (Buenfil Burgos, 2000: 88). In this context, the composition of the aspirational discourse reflected, in the broadest sense, dynamics between these two hegemonic formations centring on contestations for a range of empty signifiers such as ‘prosperity’, ‘well being’, ‘progress’, ‘growth’, ‘freedom’, ‘fairness’ and ‘equity’, the articulation of which was essential to the establishment and maintenance of neo-liberal

hegemony. This chapter seeks to give a preliminary outline of the broad conceptions of the role of the state, forms of social and political organisation, and conceptions of social fairness and equity intrinsic to both the Australian settlement/social democratic order and neo- liberalism, in addition to the primary values through which they have been articulated - in particular those related to egalitarian and individualist mythologies.

The ‘Australian settlement’ and post-war social-democracy

If we are to attempt to synthesise the discursive formation that dominated prior to the ascendency of neo-liberalism, what emerges in the broadest sense are a set of values and expectations that revolved around specific notions of individual and state, values of social equity, social solidarity and collective identity. Going back to early colonial times these values and expectations can be best represented through the centrality of the social imaginary of Australian egalitarianism: the principal mythology through which Australians have historically identified themselves, their conceptions of national identity and their expectations of government (Horne, 1968; Archibald, 1968; Thompson, 1994). The Australian egalitarian discourse incorporated values of social equality that were in turn associated with the value of a strong, interventionist state and the importance of collective forms of political organisation. These values were consolidated through post-war Keynesian social democratic governance with its emphasis on the mixed economy, protectionism, economic redistribution, and social welfare and equity programs (Smythe and Cass, 1988).

Up until the period of the first neo-liberal reforms in Australia in the early 1980s, Australia had embraced a unique brand of social democracy in which the private sphere was subject to the strong regulatory interventions of the state. As outlined by Kavanagh, this form of social democracy involved support for a mixed economy (which involved an acceptance of government interventions in the market), a validation of the legitimate role of established non-capital interests such as trade unions, and an economic framework structured around the pursuit of full-employment (Kavanagh, 1990). It was also characterised by a strong public sector; economic redistribution through progressive tax systems; centralised wage determination according to ‘relative wage justice principles’; compulsory conciliation and arbitration of industrial disputes; the maintenance of an unconditional needs based welfare

system including sickness, old age and unemployment benefits; and the provision of non- cash benefits in relation to health, education and housing (Castles, 2001; Argy, 2003).

The genesis of Australian state interventionism and the values that underpinned it had strong historical roots. Paul Kelly,7 in his highly influential analysis of the Australian transition from what he calls the ‘Australian Settlement’ to the free-market economy, outlines five principal ideological/policy frameworks adopted by successive Australian governments in the period from federation in 1927 up until the first neo-liberal reforms of the early 1980s (Kelly, 1992). These elements consisted of the following: policies aimed at ensuring “cultural homogeneity” and a predominantly “white Australia’”; “industry protection”; “wage arbitration”; “paternalism”; and “imperial benevolence”. In Kelly’s terms white Australia reflected a concerted government effort to restrict immigration based on notions of racial ‘purity’ (Kelly, 1992: 2); industry protection reflected the desire to protect Australian jobs and to build a diversified economy (Kelly, 1992: 4); wage arbitration, guaranteed through the commonwealth institutions of arbitration and conciliation, sought to promote equity and fairness in wages and conditions and to promote industrial peace (Kelly, 1992: 7- 9); and imperial benevolence reflected the fact that Australia perceived itself as a subject of the British empire and thus subject to its direction and protection (Kelly, 1992: 11).

Though there has been a degree of contention in relation to Kelly’s schema (Stokes, 2004), it offers a useful conceptual framework for considering the pre-neo-liberal hegemonic order, not the least because, as a prominent proponent of neo-liberalism in Australia, Kelly’s conception of the transition to neo-liberal hegemony is indicative of the key neo-liberal narratives that served to effect this transition. The key paradigm for Kelly is that of the dominant role of the state as a market actor, nation builder and guarantor of various standards, a role which he conceives as largely antagonistic to the interests of the market economy. While acknowledging the positive nature of some aspects of the ‘Australian settlement’, Kelly’s analysis is structured around his employment of ‘state paternalism’ as a nodal point for a range of anti-market values. In accordance with this he portrays ‘settlement’ Australia as imposed, sclerotic and static.

7 The ‘editor at large’ at the Rupert Murdoch owned the Australian newspaper, and one of the most influential proponents of neo-liberal reforms in Australia. Kelly has authored a number of books on Australian politics. 58

For Kelly, retrospectively invoking the key free-market prosperity myths of neo-liberalism, state paternalism reflected “the dominant Australian tendency for the individual to look first to the state as his protector and to make government responsible for individual happiness and wellbeing” (Kelly, 1992: 11). While he portrays this tendency in a decidedly post hoc, neo-liberal sense as reflecting a pursuit of “illusory security” that left “a young nation with geriatric arteries” (Kelly, 1992: 11), the dominant role of the state in Australia reflected to a significant degree various practical measures necessitated by its unique colonial origins. Australia’s geographical isolation, early foundation as a British penal colony and the British declaration of the country as ‘terra nullius’ effectively guaranteed the colonial state’s capacity to dominate the social and political conditions of its existence. The Australian colonial state, as an absolutist state, constituted the principal context through which social relations and individual subjectivities were constructed (Lattas, 1985).

The state was the dominant actor in most aspects of economic development due to the high levels of risk involved in early national projects and the fact that private and corporate interests were not up to the tasks of building the wealth of the nation (White 1992; Butlin, 1982: 10-18). As Mcintyre has noted “the makers of the settlement were proactively engaged in processes of nation building”. As such they:

...modified the operation of the market to wield a thinly peopled continent with significant regional differences into a secure whole, and they regulated its divergent interests to serve national goals. This was not simply a protective or defensive project; it was an affirmative and dynamic one (Macintyre, 2004: 32).

The dominance of the state can be seen to have forged what Donald Horne has called a ‘cult of national development’ based on the promotion of economic development, a recognition of the social responsibility of the state to its citizens and an emphasis on partnerships and cooperation between government, business and the trade union movement (Horne, 1982). To this end, the colonial and post-federation governments embarked on a range of interventions in the market including labour immigration programs, the creation of monopoly public enterprises, the provision of public education, the imposition of trade tariffs, and labour market and industry regulation (Stokes, 2004: 15). The overarching ethos was to promote economic development while at the same time regulating and moderating its social effects.

This involved a strong emphasis on social equity, predicated on the value of what the historian, Marian Sawyer, has termed giving citizens a ‘fair go’ (Sawyer, 2003: 22).

This ‘fair go’ ethos was illustrated in Australia’s unique system of industrial relations arbitration in which the state, through the proxy of quasi-judicial tribunals, mediated the wage claims of both employers, employees and trade unions, having taken into account the relative legitimacy of these claims vis-à-vis the national interest. This system of arbitration represented a key element of the Australian ‘social laboratory’ whereby the state, in accordance with principles of social justice and nation building, imposed itself as an agent in a process that was previously confined to private negotiations between labour and capital interests. This involved an explicit recognition of the inequities of market based industrial bargaining and of the importance of trade unions as both a practical means of promoting worker’s rights and also as ‘schools of citizenship’ which effectively facilitated the political engagement of working people (Sawyer, 2003: 36). The famous Harvester Judgment of 1907 by Justice Higgins enshrined the notion of the ‘social wage’ and the fact that wages ought to be “based upon human need, not on profits or productivity” (Kelly, 1992: 8). In Higgin’s view, the minimum wage was therefore based around the capacity of a (male) wage earner - that is a “human being living in a civilized community” - to maintain his family in “frugal comfort” (Stokes, 2004: 16). As a result, Australia, in comparison to other western countries, had high levels of income equality and lower levels of ‘waged poverty’ and thus relied less heavily on the provisions of state welfare (Castles, 1994).

The social liberal ideas that informed early Australian public policy were also evident in the tariff system which sought to protect the wages and conditions of workers from unfair foreign competition, aged pension provisions and the later development of the Australian social security system. As Castles has argued, though Australian welfare from the early 20th century was means tested, the provisions were relatively generous with restrictions on payments only being enforced for those whose income or wealth was substantially above the average (Castles, 1994). Up until the 1980s, all aspects of Australia’s cash benefit system reflected Australia’s rejection of the Poor Law tradition and its expression of the idea that welfare was a citizen’s right rather than an act of charity (Castles, 1994: 541). The predominant rationale for the welfare state was therefore the prevention of exploitation of the weakest members of an unequal society (Goodin et al, 1999). As argued by Sawyer in “The Ethical State”, social liberal ideas sought to promote active citizenship through the 60

creation of “institutions and discourses of equal opportunity that provided leverage for the more inclusive citizenship demands of the late twentieth century” (Sawyer, 2003: 36).

In the wake of the great depression in the 1930s, the awareness of the dangers inherent in the free-market system had informed the foundation of the post-war social democratic welfare state with its ‘mixed economy’ model, the ‘balanced’ constitution of which had also been influenced by the working-class ethic of solidarity and mutual aid (Titmuss, 1968). The dominance of Keynesian economics from the early 1940’s onwards entailed a rejection of the main tenets of ‘classical economics’ vis-à-vis the notion of free markets as self-moderating mechanisms. Keynesian economics argued that unemployment was a persistent feature of modern capitalist economies and this was due to deficiencies in aggregate demand which could only be addressed by stimulatory government intervention; that is, the undertaking of government funded public works to stimulate demand and promote full-employment (Blaug, 1990: 11; Burgess & Campbell, 1998). Post-war governments in Australia up until the late 1970s focused primarily on promoting full-employment, embarking, from the time of the Chifley government (1945-48), on national development projects in relation to public infrastructure, education, hospitals, housing and social welfare, and the development of public enterprises including the establishment of the Snowy Mountains Hydro Electricity Scheme, the Commonwealth Shipping Line, the national airline Qantas, and public industries in whaling, aluminium, and telecommunications (Maddox, 1978: 242). The Whitlam Labor government (1972-75) presided over a notable expansion of the public sector in accordance with social equity principles, including substantial increases in health, education and welfare expenditure, the establishment of a public health medical insurance scheme, the abolition of tertiary education fees, support for equal pay, and the implementation of urban and regional development programs (Kuhn, 1989: 149).

The strong national myth of egalitarianism tended to reflect the dominant role of the state and the collectivist ethos that arose through the Australian settlement and was consolidated through the post-war welfare state (Kewley, 1973; Burgess and Campbell, 1998). As will be examined in more detail in chapter nine, Australian egalitarianism was based firmly on the myth of Australia as a ‘classless’ society and on the related values, of: ‘sameness’, ‘equality’, ‘fair play’, ‘mateship’ and the ‘fair go’ (McIntyre, 1985; Smith, 2001; Thompson, 1994). With its mediated relationship between capital and labour and its emphasis on fairness, egalitarian mythology informed a range of regulatory mechanisms that served to 61

protect the worker from the vagaries of the market. The practical dimension of Australian egalitarianism was therefore predicated on the strong role of the state as a guarantor of egalitarian outcomes. Kapferer and Morris (2003) have pointed to the “internality of the state within the formation and use of egalitarian thought and practice” and cited the views of the popular liberal historian of the 1930’s W.K Hancock. As argued by Kapferer and Morris, Hancock believed that:

… the state had an essential role in the creation of Australian egalitarian society. He recognised the identity of state interest with the promotion of egalitarian individualist value. Hancock articulated the state formation of the individual subject as a self-governing entity as being vital to government control and social coherence. For Hancock the prevailing ideology of Australian democracy was simple: justice, rights, and equality rested on the “appeal to government as an instrument of self-realisation (Kapferer and Morris, 2003: 89).

The political circumstances in which the ascendancy of neo-liberalism was achieved in Australia will be discussed at length in the next chapter. What I have sought to identify in a preliminary sense is the general thrust of Australian policy and governance in the period prior to the neo-liberal market reforms of the early 1980s, the dominance of the state as an organiser, regulator and planner, and the prominence of egalitarian notions of social equality, equity and the ‘fair go’. These elements were significant in relation to the constitution of discourses of national identity and citizenship and, as such, were alternatively confronted, jettisoned, appropriated or redefined for hegemonic purposes within the aspirational discourse. In this context, I will now consider the core prescriptions of neo- liberalism.

Neo-Liberalism

Given the affinities between Keynesian economics and government policies promoting egalitarianism, the dislocation of the Keynesian model in the 1970s and the subsequent rise of neo-liberalism entailed significant changes to Australian society. The three principal economic developments of the 1970s that can be seen to have opened up the political ground for neo-liberalism were the United States conversion in 1971 from the gold standard to a

floating exchange rate as a response to its worsening trade deficit, OPEC’s raising of the price of oil in 1973 which precipitated a global surge in inflation, and the onset of stagflation; that is, coinciding rising inflation and unemployment which effectively dislocated the fiscal demand management of Keynesian economics (Whitewell, 1986). In Australia, the onset of this economic dislocation took place shortly after the election of the progressive Whitlam Labor government, which came to power at the end of the extended post-war economic boom. In the political discourse that ensued, the Whitlam government was largely identified as responsible for the economic recession that commenced in 1974 and subsequently lost the 1975 federal election in a landslide (Tucille, 1989; Kelly, 1983).

The problem of stagflation was not restricted to Australia and its onset and effective dislocation of the Keynesian economic model opened up a discursive space for alternative hegemonic projects. It was in this context that neo-liberalism first gained a degree of prominence in the early 1970s through the monetarist, small-government prescriptions of Milton Freedman and other economists associated with the Chicago School of Economics. In accordance with this there was a progressive move in most advanced industrialised societies toward a monetarist model in which interest rates were used as the primary means to regulate inflation and unemployment, fiscal policy was dedicated to the maintenance of budget deficits, the role of government was progressively minimised (if not always in practice, then in principle), and an onus was placed on the citizen as individual consumer within a market economy (Friedman, 1975; Marginson, 1992; Mcknight, 2005) .

By 1983 the ascendancy of neo-liberalism was such that much of its core reform agenda was implemented by the Hawke and Keating Labor governments in the period from 1983 - 1996. This agenda involved the adoption of core neo-liberal economic policies including financial and labour market deregulation; user pays approaches to public services; the introduction of less progressive tax systems; restrictive access to welfare; fiscal conservatism; tariff cuts; the implementation of national competition policy; and privatisation of key governments assets. These reforms led to significant changes in Australian society over the subsequent two decades and significantly modified the nature of Australian egalitarianism (Pusey, 1991; Stillwell, 2000).

The adoption of a neo-liberal framework has been instrumental in over-turning the post-war social democratic welfare state and many of the key assumptions on which it was based, and 63

instituting a social, political and economic paradigm founded on the primacy of competition, free-markets and individual autonomy (Marginson, 1992; Yeatman, 2000). It has achieved a dominant horizon of authority, leadership and influence in Australia and much of the western world (Cahill, 2000: 151; Turner, 2002: 62). As Torfing has observed, neo- liberalism constitutes a hegemonic discourse:

... to the extent that it has managed and redefined the terms of the political debate and set a new agenda. Repeated attacks on the centralist and bureaucratic ‘nanny state’, celebration of individual entrepreneurship and appraisal of the market as a privileged steering mechanism are all important moments in the neo-liberal discourse (Torfing, 1999: 104).

As with any discursive formation, neo-liberalism should be conceived as a non-static and non-uniform set of principles, values and practices which are interpreted and applied in a variety of ways (Battin, 1991; Winter, 2000; Albo, 2002). This loose set of articulatory practices is characterised by a range of core elements coalescing around free-market and anti-collectivist/social welfare assumptions. Drawing heavily on neo-classical and neo- mercantilist economic theory, neo-liberalism is based around the belief that markets, when subject to the dictates of unregulated competition, will produce optimal social outcomes. Key elements include: hostility to big government drawn largely from 17th Century liberalism; a contradictory commitment to libertarian economic philosophy combined with a moral conservatism and appeal to nationalism; an emphasis on individual initiative as derived through competitive market processes; and hostility to social welfare which is seen to wreak enormous damage on its beneficiaries and cripple the enterprising self-reliant spirit (Hartman, 2005: 59; Giddens, 1998: 11). Gamble has offered the following definition:

[Neo-liberalism asserts that] as many costs as possible should be shifted from the state and back on to individuals, and markets, particularly labour markets, should be made as flexible as possible...The presumption is always in favour of recreating the widest possible conditions for markets to flourish, which means removing as many restrictions on competition as possible, and empowering market agents by reducing the burdens of taxation (Gamble, 2001).

Neo-liberalism’s genealogy can be traced from 17th century liberalism and the classical political economy of Adam Smith (1937), via the neo-mercantilist critique of the modern welfare state, the free-market monetarist theories of Friedrick Hayek (1962, 1967, 1989) and Milton Friedman (1975), the ‘public choice’ and ‘rational choice’ theories of James Buchanan (1989), the ‘minimal state’ theory of Robert Nozick (1975), to the social and economic policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Many of the core tenets of neo-liberalism emerged out of a critique of the social regulatory policies of post- war Fordist capitalism and the Keynesian economics of the ‘New Deal’ in the United States (Plhwe, Walpen, and Neunhoffer, 2006: 211).

The hegemonic prominence of neo-liberalism has given rise to a diverse range of interpretations as to its character and effects. Positive appraisals have focused on such factors as “improved economic outcomes, greater efficiencies in arenas in which markets operate, reduced public expenditure, diminished reliance on state provided social welfare and increased individual choice” (Western et al, 2007: 402). Negative assessments have ranged from the destructive social and institutional effects of its brand of ‘economic rationalism’ (Pusey, 1991); the increased social and spatial polarisation resulting from its reform agenda (Boston, Martin, Pallot, Walsh, 1996: 40); its devolution of accountability for society on to communities and individuals (Graham, 2007: 4); its essential class interest in “distributing capital and wealth upwards” (Giroux, 2004: 4); and its destructive effects on local communities, traditional identities and ‘civic virtues’ (Hamilton, 2003; Nenwood, 2003).

Given the hegemonic status of neo-liberalism, there has been a range of debate about what aspects of neo-liberalism constitute its essential and distinctive character in comparison to earlier neo-classical, free-market approaches. Larner, for instance, has referred to neo- liberalism’s emphasis on economic efficiency and international competitiveness as constituting “new forms of globalised production relations and financial systems” which are “forcing governments to abandon the welfare state” (Larner, 2000: 6). Brown has identified neo-liberalism’s unprecedented projection of economic relations within society as constituting its most distinctive feature:

The extension of economic rationality to formerly non-economic domains and institutions extends to individual conduct, or more precisely, prescribes citizen-

subject conduct in a neo-liberal order. Whereas classical liberalism articulated a distinction, and at times even a tension, among the criteria for individual moral, associational, and economic actions… neo-liberalism normatively constructs and interpellates individuals as entrepreneurial actors in every sphere of life. It figures individuals as rational, calculating creatures whose moral autonomy is measured by their capacity for “self-care” - the ability to provide for their own needs and service their own ambitions (Brown, 2003: 4).

Neo-liberalism has also been typically uniquely identified with developments in practices related to modern global capital, in particular in relation to the operation of multinational corporations. As such, neo-liberal concepts have been shaped through their association with a global managerial class and the technical/administrative discourses associated with such a class; thus the formation of a ‘transnational high-tech capitalism’ supporting the liberalisation of trade, a global regime of floating exchange rates, and the abolition of capital controls (Beiling, 2006: 211). The domination of this technocratic global managerial class has undermined the capacity of nation states to act independently of the global neo-liberal hegemonic order. Domestically this manifests in the ‘economic reform agenda’ to “deregulate and flexibilise market relations, to limit state intervention, to privatise public infrastructure and social service provision, to restrain the influence of trade unions, and to enforce monetary stability and sound budget policies” (Beiling, 2006: 211).

As a hegemonic discourse, neo-liberalism has involved the generation of a number of myths and social imaginaries centred around the fetishisation of the free-market and mythologies of consumer choice, prosperity, individual freedom, and growth. Much of the core ontology of neo-liberalism is derived from what can be termed ‘methodological individualism’: that is, the notion of self-interested, rational individuals within the market place who, in striving to maximize their own personal interests, must necessarily promote the greater public good (Arrow, 1994). In relation to this Adam Smith’s theory of the ‘invisible hand’ has been employed as a central metaphor:

Every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it… By directing (his) industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to 66

promote an end which was no part of his intention. By pursuing his own interests he frequently promotes that of the society more effectively than when he really intends to promote it (Smith, 1937: 423).

Evident here are concepts which are integral to neo-liberal discourse; that is, an explicit focus on a libertarian individualism in which the social realm is defined as constituted by and contingent on the pursuit of individual gain; the normative and practical prioritisation of the market mechanism over the public/governmental realm as the primary determinant of the social order; and the notion that political intervention in the market is contrary to the public interest. In this context the expressed purpose of government is to facilitate market relations that advance the interests of the individual citizen.

Neo-liberals conceive of the market as constituting the most efficient and effective means of distributing resources over and above all forms of collective co-operation. Interventions in the market on the basis of social equity and redistribution are considered to be damaging to the integrity of the market and distort outcomes to the detriment of society as a whole. In line with this, neo-liberal theorists argue that political and social institutions should be restructured in order to conform to the dictates of market competition (Brown, 2003; Plant, 2010).

As a result, neo-liberal concepts of citizenship tend to focus on civil rights rather than social or political rights: that is those rights guaranteed by law associated with “liberty, freedom of speech, thought and faith, the right to own property and conclude valid contracts” (Marshall cited in Pierson and Castle, 2000: 32). These rights are germinal to much of the broad cannon of neo-liberal ideology. Values of equality and social justice are, accordingly, derivative of the universal application of these civil and by extension political rights. Such rights are viewed as constituting a collective point of departure, the social outcomes of which will ultimately be subject to the distributive mechanisms of the market and the application of individual responsibility, duty and merit. As Higgins and Ramia remark:

In a pure liberal model it is assumed that if all individuals enjoy equal rights the requirements of equality have been met. If everybody receives equal treatment and respect everyone has also received social justice (Higgins & Ramia, 2000: 142).

The primacy of the market mechanism is consolidated through the antagonistic framing of a range of non-market identities and associated ideologies - interventionist governments, special interest groups, trade unions, and other social collectives which are posited as distorting the ‘perfect knowledge’ of the market and its capacity to reach ‘equilibrium’. The welfare state, and the range of pathologised identities identified with it, is therefore viewed as constituting an impediment to the productive capacity of the economy and to the prosperity aspirations of the mainstream.

In line with the ideological function to deny the contingent nature of the social order, the free-market constitutes a value free or neutral order which “allows no moral imperative in its pattern of production and distribution” (Hogg, 2002: 240) and requires only “a legal framework and government non-interference to deliver uninterrupted growth” (Marginson, 1992: 9). Quiggin has given an account of that point in which the discourses of the ‘new right’ attained hegemonic status, referring to the way in which these early economic arguments were:

... gradually replaced by a dogmatic, indeed quasi-religious faith in market forces and in the supreme importance of ‘efficiency” and ‘competition’. More and more, economic analysis was based on deductions from supposedly self-evident truths, which were effectively immune from any form of empirical testing. Thus economic rationalism now has very little to do with rational debate… and is anything but reasonable (Quiggin, 1997: 4).

Given the range of values, principles and practices associated with neo-liberalism and its centrality to the construction of the aspirational identity, it is instructive to consider in more detail some of the seminal assumptions evident in its theoretic. To do so I will focus on the views of the theorist widely believed to be the most significant in the formulation of early neo-liberal thought as a counter to post-war social democratic hegemony, Friedrich Hayek.

Hayek and neo-liberal conceptions of government, citizenship and power

Friedrich Hayek was the key intellectual figure in the articulation of a ‘pure’ market theory constructed through a critique of the ‘distortions’ of the Keynesian social democratic model. In the post-war period Hayek was one of the few advocating strongly for a brand of liberalism founded on anti-government individualism and the free-market. Hayek’s views went strongly against the orthodox socio-economic views of the time in which the adoption of a ‘mixed economy’ welfare state model had achieved bi-partisan support from both conservatives and social democrats based on largely pragmatic grounds. In relation to the conservatives, this support was made possible by a “fusion of traditional conservative instincts for stability, cohesion and a strong state, with a version of liberalism commonly referred to as ‘social liberalism’ which favoured government intervention to achieve social cohesion” (McKnight, 2005: 54). One of the stated aims of Hayek was to challenge this brand of liberalism (Hayek, 1960). The substance of his theoretical framework was founded on three core values all of which comprise enduring components of modern neo-liberal thought and represent key moments in the aspirational discourse: that is the notion of the ‘spontaneous’ free-market, the value of individual liberty as derived exclusively from market participation, and the delegitimisation of market interventions.

In his construction of a deterministic market order Hayek cited the British moral philosophers of the 18th century as having “built up a social theory which made the undesigned results of individual action its central object and in particular provided a comprehensive theory of the spontaneous market order” (Hayek, 1967, 98-99). The key notion for Hayek was the fact that social orders arise as the aggregate of individual choices, and, as such, are the “product of human action but not human design” (Hayek cited in Sandifur, 2009: 6). Though such orders do not arise through rational human construction, they exhibit a form of co-ordination and efficiency based on the routine interactions of individual self-interest. This spontaneous order is analogous to the process of evolution (Hayek, 1967: 101). In the context of the struggle for market survival in an environment of limited resources, there is a constant process whereby more successful institutions and practices replace less successful ones (Johnsen, 2002: 15).

In line with the neutralisation drive of ideological representations, Hayek’s positing of an essential market order detached from any identifiable determining agency, effectively eradicated any substantive theorisation of power relations. In line with Carl Schmitt’s critique 69 of liberalism (1976), this was achieved in part through a reductive rendering of the ‘free- individual’ as the fundamental limit of any theorisation of society. The central element of the neo-classical model - the conglomeration of individual free-will which constitutes the market order is, by definition and in an a-priori sense, excluded from any conception of power relations and thus from any substantive conception of the political. The market, as an aggregate of individual knowledge and interpersonal dynamics, is efficient in sending pricing signals and allocating resources, yet so vast that it precludes any attempt at large scale theorisation or economic/social planning. Thus any consideration of structural or institutional notions of ‘power relations’ and political agency is essentially bypassed through a formal adherence to the prescriptive tenets of strict individualism and market efficiency. Indeed for Hayek, the free-market was synonymous with free society; personal and political freedoms existing in a democratic state were viewed to exist not as the result of political struggle, but rather as a derivative of ‘freedom in economic affairs’; that is, as ancillary to the self- interested actions of individuals in the market (Hayek, 1962: 10). This depoliticisation of the social order through the reductive rendering of the individual as the limit of the political was intrinsic to neo-liberal thought. Milton Friedman for instance, in his development of a positivist methodology, went to great lengths to theorise the market and power relations as separate entities, arguing that the two were mutually exclusive since markets, as an aggregate of individual free-will, were intrinsically voluntary and did not involve coercion. Conversely, he argued, governments did not use “bilateral voluntary trades” and hence exercised power (Friedman cited in Aarons, 2003: 74).

It therefore followed that the efficiency of the market as an allocatory mechanism and aggregate expression of individual free-will essentially must lead to the de-legitimisation of state intervention in that system, since it can only constitute a ‘multitude of delusions’ and lead ultimately to illegitimate, imposed and authoritiarian forms of government (Hayek, 1962). For Hayek the incapacity of social science to effectively theorise the social order led to his notion of ‘limited rationality’. As the political theorist Morris Wilhelm has noted, for Hayek,

The problem of the social order is predominantly a problem of how we can best cope with our constitutional ignorance of most of the facts that guide human action. The social scientist who recognizes the need to rely on an evolved order of abstract rules will avoid that ‘intellectual hubris’ to which, Hayek believes, so

many succumb. He will anticipate neither a universal determinism – a degree of perfection in the social sciences that would permit the accurate arrangement of social institutions in accordance with ‘discoverable laws’- nor would he yield to the strong human instinct for engineering and the consequent temptation to apply engineering techniques to the social order (Wilhelm, 1960:159).

This concept of limited rationality was derivative of Adam Smith’s conception of the market as impenetrable to “human wisdom” and “knowledge”:

The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty, in the attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable delusions and for the proper performance of which no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient; the duty of superintending the industry of private people and of directing it towards the employments most suitable to the interest of the sovereign (Smith, 1937: 651).

The role of government is therefore seen as fundamentally restricted to maintaining the market order and any intervention geared to redistributive or social justice ends is viewed as misconceived and ultimately counterproductive. While Milton Friedman, through his adherence to abstract market theorisations, did not share Hayek’s scepticism as to the possibility of developing predictive economic models, he was similarly resistant to the notion of a constructive government presence in the market. As with Hayek, Friedman’s view was that governments should be limited to preserving “law and order, to enforce private contracts and to foster competitive markets” (Friedman cited in Marginson, 1992: 61). The principle of individual freedom, defined as freedom from coercion in this context, necessarily led to a diminished conception of the public realm and democracy itself. As Viner has observed in regard to Hayek:

Freedom is supported because it best supports all kinds of desirable growth. Democracy is, after a weighing of pros and cons, unenthusiastically supported as a means rather than an end. Society is to be left substantially to its own spontaneous forces except for the enforcement of a justice which is substantially… the justice of the competitive market place where the essential equality is in the objective value of things voluntarily exchanged between honest persons unbound to each other by any other ties than those of fair exchange of

considerations. These spontaneous forces will best promote the various types of growth, all of which are desirable (Viner, 1991: 231).

In Hayek’s view, the essential foundation of social justice was the operation of orderly rules governing commercial exchange. The spontaneous market force, facilitated by the multitude of expressions of individual liberty, generates a social dividend in terms of economic growth, market efficiency and social equity that is ‘desirable’. In this vein Hayek stated: “equality of general rules of law is the only equality…we can secure without destroying liberty” and that, therefore, any objection to ‘inequality’ must constitute a market distorting intervention which “countenances envy camouflaged as social justice” (Hayek, 1960: 85). The principles of solidarity and altruism therefore give way to property and contract:

For those now living within the extended order gain from not treating one another as neighbours, and by applying… rules of the extended order such as those of property and contract – instead of the rules of solidarity and altruism. An order in which everyone treated his neighbour as himself would be one where comparatively few could be fruitful and multiply (Hayek, 1989: 13).

For Hayek, there was no ‘natural harmony of interests’ founded on innate instincts for social co-operation. Rather “man’s imprudent and selfish nature” was only corrected in the social process “when he is forced by his self-seeking decision” not only to co-operate with others but to “recognize the importance of personal responsibility and to develop such traits as initiative and self-reliance” (Hayek cited in Wilhelm, 1972: 171). In the words of the ‘public choice’ theorist James Buchanan, developing this strand in Hayek’s thought and echoing Margaret Thatcher’s famous dictum, individualism “presumes no social entity” and those acting in the public interest or on altruistic grounds were in reality “rent seekers” acting in the same way as those in the private sector - according to rational self-interest (Buchanan cited in Plant, 2010: 136).

In summary, the free-market liberalism of Hayek, in comparison to the more pragmatic ‘mixed economy’ approach identified with post-war social democratic societies, was predicated explicitly on the (ideological) eradication of the political in deference to a free- market posited as essential, spontaneous and therefore natural. Legitimate expressions of citizenship were limited to expressions of market agency and the function of the state reduced

to the facilitation of such agency. Hayek’s positing of the market as external to the political and his assertions as to the intrinsic foundational principle of (negative) ‘liberty’ allowed him to conceive of his own theoretical perspective as distinct from other rational projects. He therefore dismissed the ‘universal determinism’ of such projects, having already constituted and (effectively quarantined) his own rationally derived essentialism. In effect, as with all ideological essentialisms, Hayek’s principle of ‘fullness’, the free-market, constituted the ‘real’ and legitimate expression of the social order. All non-market ‘rational projects’ were therefore illegitimate and misguided ‘ideological’ interventions.

I will now consider the core discursive tensions and contestations between neo-liberalism and the Australian settlement/social democratic order, the substance of which influenced the articulation of the aspirational identity.

Discursive contestations

As I have noted, notwithstanding my identification of various ‘core’ principles typically associated with neo-liberalism, given the precarious and contingent nature of any hegemonic formation, neo-liberalism must not be seen as a static set of principles and practices but rather a dynamic discursive formation, the character of which is dependent on the particular circumstances and environment in relation to which it is articulated. The ascendancy of neo- liberalism in Australia was predicated on the effective integration and/or negation of discursive moments associated with the ‘old order’- the most salient ones of which, as I will elaborate in chapter six, related to the myth of Australian egalitarianism. In conceiving of neo-liberalism as a hegemonic discourse it is therefore important to identify the principal areas of tension with the previous social democratic/Australian settlement hegemonic order. These tensions, as they related to the constitution of the aspirational as a suturing hegemonic myth, centred on concepts of governance, the rights and expectations of citizenship, and values of social justice and equity.

As early as 1983 commentators such as Dahrendorf were proclaiming the end of the social democratic century citing the change in ‘themes’ evident in public debates from the old themes of ‘growth’, ‘equality’, ‘work’ ,’reason’, ‘progress’, ‘state’ and ‘interventionism’, to the new agenda focusing on ‘globalisation’, ‘competition’, ‘risk’ and ‘flexibility’ 73

(Dahrendorf cited in Beiling, 2006: 210). The profound character of this hegemonic transition has been captured well by George:

In 1945 or 1950 if you had seriously proposed any of the ideas and policies in today’s standard Neo-Liberal tool kit, you would have been laughed off the stage or sent off to the insane asylum… The idea that the markets should be allowed to make major social and political decisions, the idea that the state should voluntarily reduce its role in the economy, or that the corporations should be given total freedom, that trade unions should be curbed and citizens given much less rather than more social protection – such ideas were utterly foreign to the spirit of the time. Even if someone actually agreed with these ideas, he or she would have hesitated to take such a position in public and would have had a hard time finding an audience (George 1999: 2).

In my provisional identification of neo-liberalism, following Belsey (1996), five key values and nodal points can be identified in relation to which neo-liberalism has achieved hegemony in western nations: individualism, freedom of choice, the free market, liassez- faire, and minimal government. Such nodal points served to organise both its technocratic/managerial dimension - that is as expressed through the new institutional economics (‘public choice theory’, ‘supply-side economics’, ‘monetarism’ and ‘transaction- cost theory’), in addition to its core mythologies. The articulation of such values will, in large part, be dependent on hegemonic contestations for social domination in the face of dislocations which perpetually threaten the coherence and viability of the hegemonic order. In the context of the core values, beliefs and practices that I have identified with the (pre- neo-liberal) Australian settlement/social democratic order, three primary contested discursive terrains can be identified relevant to an analysis of the aspirational discourse and central to the ongoing viability of neo-liberalism as hegemonic order: that is those related to the legitimate role of government, individualist and collective concepts of social and political organisation, and concepts of ‘fairness’ and ‘equity’.

Firstly, the minimal state conceptions of neo-liberalism ran counter to the historically strong interventionist role of the state in Australia. As I have outlined, the strong role of the state reflected both the circumstances of early colonial settlement and a recognition by the state of the legitimate and contested interests of labour and capital. Thus egalitarian values of social

74 equality and equity, in addition to embedded values such as prosperity and progress, were predicated in significant ways on the strong role of the state. In this sense, neo-liberalism, in promoting the efficiencies of the unregulated and competitive market, had to account for strong public support for the role of the state in ‘nation building’, the provision of public services and utilities, and the enforcement of regulatory provisions designed to check power imbalances and inequities in the market, particularly in the areas of industrial relations and trade. While this in part would be achieved by discursive projects that promoted the idea of the interventionist state as an impediment to individual prosperity, freedom, consumer choice and economic efficiency, the degree to which public views and expectations remained subject to the state interventions of the old order necessitated the generation of counter mythologies of citizenship. Thus the employment of aspirational mythology in the contest for key empty-signifiers – ‘prosperity’, ‘fairness’, ‘progress’, ‘growth’ and ‘community’.

The articulation of these discursive elements into a compelling neo-liberal mythology of citizenship also required the promotion of an individualist ethos of citizenship over the kind of collectivist ethos exhibited, for instance, through the Australian trade union movement and the public institutions and services of the welfare state. The libertarian individualism of neo-liberalism and its negation of collective forms of social organisation, ran counter to the historical tendency, originating in colonial times, for Australians to value the importance of group bonds, social solidarity and collective social and political associations. Such a collective ethos informed a range of embedded discursive moments - from egalitarian values of governance and good citizenship, to concepts of ‘Australian mateship’ and the ‘fair go’ (Thompson, 1994; Sawyer, 2003).

The other significant area of discursive contestation revolved around the value of social justice, equality and fairness and centred on the historically enduring myth of Australian egalitarianism. As will be elaborated in chapters seven and nine, neo-liberalism, with its greater symbolic emphasis on individualism, competition and meritocracy, its dismantling of many of the redistributive mechanisms of the welfare state, and its production of greater social inequality, required mythologies that countered the egalitarian emphasis on social equality and fairness. To do so would involve appropriating the signifier ‘egalitarianism’ and articulating it as a moment in the neo-liberal discourse, whilst at the same time modifying its meaning through its identification with neo-liberal nodal points and its 75 equivalential articulation with neo-liberal discursive moments - for instance ‘competition’, ‘individualism’, ‘small government’, ‘choice’ and ‘opportunity’. An important dimension of this would be an emphasis on the value of social ‘sameness’ promoted through traditional egalitarian mythology, bolstered by ‘anti-elitist’ narratives that focused on social and cultural differentials rather than economic/wealth differentials.

Conclusion

This chapter has sought to give context to a study of the aspirational discourse by providing an overview of the character of neo-liberalism and what I have called the Australian settlement/social democratic order. In doing so I have identified the primary discursive tensions and contestations between the two orders, the substance of which influenced to a significant extent the subsequent articulation of the aspirational discourse. Given the significant differences in values, policies and practices, the transition to neo-liberalism necessitated persuasive re-descriptions of the social order which variously contested, appropriated and modified embedded discursive elements articulated as moments in the previous order, in particular in relation to roles of government, modes of social and political organisation, and concepts of fairness and equity. As I have argued, the competitive individualism of neo-liberalism, its emphasis on individual rather than collective forms of socio-political organisation and a reduced role for the state, were at odds with the egalitarian/collective ethos and the state interventionism that had dominated the post-war period and can be traced back to the range of practices associated with the ‘Australian settlement’.

In this context, I will argue that the initial failure of neo-liberal hegemonic agents to link its central economic prosperity claims to a persuasive mythology of citizenship impaired its capacity to stably maintain its hegemony in the face of the socio-economic effects of its reform agenda, the economic decline beginning in the late 1980s, and the antagonistic political projects that arose as a consequence. The next two chapters will examine the factors implicated in the dislocation of the neo-liberal order in the period leading up to the emergence of the aspirational discourse in the second half of the 1990s. In chapter four I will identify problems with the Hawke-Keating Labor governments’ implementation of neo- liberal reforms, and in chapter five I will consider a range of empirical data and social 76 indicators reflecting, in the broadest sense, dislocations in the neo-liberal hegemonic order predicated on the ongoing prevalence of social democratic and egalitarian subjectivities.

Chapter Four

Technocratic governance and political malaise; the Labor party and the implementation of neo-liberal reforms

In the context of the discursive tensions and contestations identified in the previous chapter, in this chapter I will argue that the means by which neo-liberalism was first introduced to Australia (in the period 1983 and 1996) failed to generate compelling myths and popular subject positions in order to sufficiently interrupt the articulation of key signifiers as part of the old order. This failure thereby laid the grounds for the dislocations that would become evident by the mid 1990s. I will argue that the primarily elite circles through which neo- liberalism first emerged in Australia, and the technocratic managerial discourse through which the Labor party implemented neo-liberal reforms, effectively alienated large sections of the public. In this respect, the Labor party’s massive defeat in the 1996 election was, in part, symptomatic of its inability to breach the disjuncture between its traditional egalitarian party platform and its range of neo-liberal economic reforms. It was also symptomatic of the combined effect of its repression of social antagonism, integral to its technocratic and consensual approach to government, and the ‘logic of difference’ evident in its morally posited progressive and pluralistic social agenda. The chief outcome was what amounted to a sterilisation of the political realm and a bourgeoning alienation of large sectors of the Australian community - in particular elements of the traditional working-class who had borne the brunt of the negative effects of the neo-liberal reforms. As will be outlined in chapters five and six, there were indications of widespread unease about the economic, social and cultural changes being made to Australian society at the time, and a widespread perception that ‘average’ Australians were being disenfranchised from the political process.

This chapter begins with an outline of the circumstances through which neo-liberalism first rose to prominence in Australia. I will then move on to an analysis of the means by which Labor transitioned Australia from the ‘egalitarian’ social democratic hegemonic order to the neo-liberal hegemonic order.

The elite vanguard of neo-liberalism

When it first rose to prominence in Australia in the early 1980s, neo-liberalism primarily constituted a technical response to the economic problems that had defined the 1970s. As such its ascendancy was a product of global and domestic elite economic policy formulation, in large part driven domestically by a quantum of ‘economic rationalists’ in the federal public service and a small number of politicians, intellectuals and media commentators aligned with right-wing political think tanks (Pusey, 1991). While this elite vanguard accorded with Gramsci’s notion of the ‘organic intellectual’ as the ideological organiser of hegemony, the arcane technocratic discourses through which neo-liberalism initially advanced in Australia meant that it was subject to limited popular scrutiny. As Gramsci observed, the function of the organic intellectual is to provide the hegemonic social group with “homogeneity and an awareness of its own function, not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields” (Gramsci, 1999: 5). The absence of a sufficient political and social dimension made it ultimately highly vulnerable to dislocation. The dislocations that would become evident by 1996 were attributable to the failure of neo-liberal hegemonic agents to engage in the political battles and to forge the myths of identity in relation to which essential discursive elements (empty signifiers) – values, principles, ideals, etc - are won and lost. This ultimately meant that when the negative effects of neo-liberal reform began to be felt, large sections of the Australian community failed to recognise themselves in the new social order.

As I have outlined, the dislocation of the Keynesian social welfare state was precipitated by international economic factors in the early 1970’s, including OPEC’s raising of the price of oil in 1973 and the onset of stagflation, the effect of which led to a substantial deterioration in Australia’s fiscal position (Junor, 1995: Whitwell, 1986). In this context, the monetarist economic theories of Milton Friedman, with his core advocacy of a reduced, non- interventionist role for government and promotion of a ‘fight inflation first’ approach (which essentially accepted the onset of higher unemployment), was a key focus of the new economic debate which occurred in Australia in the early 1970s. Friedman’s hugely successful visit to Australia in 1975 was seen by many to be a watershed moment and to constitute the main impetus for the “paradigm shift to neo-liberalism” (Courvisanos and Millnow, 2006: 133). Friedman’s stated aim was to “heighten public awareness of the dangers of inflation and to point to possible cures consistent with the maintenance of individual liberty and free enterprise” (Friedman, 1975: 5). Foremost of these ‘cures’ was an 79 end to Keynesian fiscal demand management, the promotion of reduced government spending and taxation, and the direct manipulation of the money supply to guarantee economic stability (Friedman, 1975).

Friedman’s visit and the nature of his reception was indicative of the fact that, as McKnight has argued, neo-liberalism was primarily initially advanced in Australia through the machinations of “policy advisors and elite opinion” (Mcknight, 2005: 60). Indeed one of the pioneers of the ‘New Right’, David Kemp, acknowledged both the technical and economic basis of early neo-liberal ideas, attributing their success to “analytical rigour and the broader context of changes in the Australian and international economy” (Kemp, 1988: 353). This initial penetration of neo-liberal ideas on an elite technocratic level was also a feature outside Australia. As Beiling has noted:

It is of no surprise that even if radical Neo-Liberal approaches and political concepts (were) not immediately instructive to political decision making, their most fundamental objectives - market led restructuring and monetary stability - were pervasive. In other words they represented the basic features of a passive revolution’, ie of the self-adapting transformation of capitalist societies from above; and as long as emerging social and political criticism articulated by different groups and intellectuals was not able to question neo-liberal objectives directly and practically, it was neutralized (Beiling, 2006: 210).

The importance of winning over elite opinion was a point recognised by Friedrich Hayek early on in his career. In his inaugural address to the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947 Hayek stated:

Our goal…must be the solution not of the practical task of gaining mass support for a given program, but to enlist the support of the best minds in formulating a program which has the chance of gaining general support (Crocket, 1995: 104).

The technical thrust of neo-liberal ideas at a time of economic dislocation was consolidated by the effectiveness of the organisational structures of its proponents and their capacity to create alliances with powerful vested interests. As Cogill noted in 1987, citing the ‘new right’ as a “serious threat to Australian’s who are concerned with Australia fair”, the threat of the

new right was based “not on its effectiveness as an ideology, nor the validity of its policy prescriptions, but primarily on the advantage of its strategic position: its organisation, planning, and the support it received through elements of the media and powerful vested interests” (Coghill, 1987: 143). Thus the forces for neo-liberalism constituted a strategic alliance of elite capital interests - from the corporate sponsored think tanks, to strategic business interests and influential media commentators. The Rupert Murdoch owned national broadsheet The Australian was at the forefront of these voices, calling for the government to slash public expenditure and welcoming the “new evangelical idealism of Thatcher” and its implications in a world “hungry for new ideas” (cited in Mcknight, 2005: 56).

This shift in elite opinion was reflected in a dramatic reconfiguration of the ethos of the public service, which ran ahead of any simultaneous paradigm shift in broad community expectations or values. Courvisan and Milnow (2006) have pointed to the influence of Friedman’s ideas on the Australian Treasury in the late 1970s. Similarly Pusey, in his influential study on the ascendancy of neo-liberalism in the federal bureaucracy through the 1980s, pointed to a cabal of young technocrats concentrated in the ‘central agency’ departments of prime minister and cabinet, treasury and finance, most likely to have a training background in neo-classical economics and who’s views were to the right of centre (Pusey, 1991). The rapidity of the paradigm shift was such that a large proportion of these bureaucrats conceived of themselves as social democrats while at the same time supporting measures that were impossible to reconcile with a social democratic perspective. Thus among Pusey’s bureaucratic respondents who viewed themselves politically as ‘left of centre’ he found that:

Nearly half wanted to see more individual initiative and less state provision and, similarly… that half of them wanted to dismantle a state adjudicated wage setting system that has, as everyone agrees, been the mainstay of social democracy in Australia since before federation in 1901. Indeed only about one in six of them would fit even a very elastic profile of social democracy (Pusey, 1991: 5).

An important component of this was the depoliticisation intrinsic to a technocratic form of government and the associated range of ‘neutral’ managerial nostrums that effectively allowed many of the new reforms to bypass popular political scrutiny. Such scrutiny may have anticipated many of the adverse social effects and challenges to traditional Australian

values that were to become more evident in the following years, and, in doing so, facilitated a more rigorous and compelling articulation of the neo-liberal social order. However, beyond the nascent and obscure corporate funded right-wing think tanks such as the Institute of Public Affairs and Centre for Independent Studies, there was little penetration of these arguments and their broader social implications into the popular sectors and thus little public awareness of the new set of governmental paradigms and values. As the academic Boris Frankel noted:

Dominant neo-liberal policies and institutional arrangements were imposed upon the populace rather than being forged through class compromise... Bipartisan support for Neo Liberal policies may have been won inside parliament... [however] it would be difficult to find anyone who enthusiastically supported the cuts and changes (Frankel, 2001: 208).

Thus, when Hayek, recently awarded the Nobel Prize for economics, visited Australia in 1976 and referred to the “atavism of social justice” and the “fundamental immorality of egalitarianism” (Mcknight, 2005: 57), his articulation of a range of similar moral, ethical, philosophical and economic positions excited limited public interest outside the small and elite band of free-market intellectuals and corporate interests. The extremity of his views were alien to the mainstream notion of Australian values and, as such, were likely to be rejected by the Australian public. Despite this, Hayek met the Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, and the chief justice of the High Court, Sir Garfield Barwick, during his visit.

Thus while the economic prescriptions of neo-liberalism promoted by this ‘intellectual vanguard’ set about reconfiguring the modes of interaction within the Australian economy, progressively through the 1980s and 90s introducing a range of neo-liberal reforms under the imprimatur of ‘modernisation’, ‘globalisation’ and ‘technical’ ‘reform’, there was, crucially, not a simultaneous and effective articulation of new values of society and citizenship which fully popularised the changes being made at the economic level. The core values and practices associated with traditional notions of Australian national identity, governance and citizenship - those most generally represented through the social democratic state - and the subject positions that they generated, retained their popular legitimacy to a citizenry that was largely unaware of the radical changes being made at the elite decision making level.

The reasons for this failure can be attributed, to a significant extent, to the means by which the Hawke and Keating Labor governments implemented neo-liberal reforms, and in particular its failure to generate new myths of identity, citizenship and nation. I will now examine these dynamics more closely.

The Labor government and neo-liberal reforms

To substantiate the key contention that the neo-liberal ascendancy was achieved with insufficient incorporation of the popular sectors, it is instructive to focus on both the reform agenda of the Hawke and Keating Labor governments and the political dynamics that characterised its period of government. What emerges is a dislocation in the political identity of the Labor party as its comprehensive embrace of neo-liberal policies during its 13 year period of government effectively alienated large sectors of its core constituency and made its traditional egalitarian party platform difficult to sustain. The Labor party’s embrace of a technocratic and managerial form of governance that emphasised economic management and ‘consensus politics’ failed to connect with the passions, values, principles and convictions of the public, and disenchanted large sections of its traditional constituency. Further to this, Labor’s political gravitation toward elements of the culturally progressive left and its embrace of social and cultural pluralism meant that, in the absence of compelling narratives and myths, there was a failure to sufficiently promote neo-liberal subjectivities as they related to discourses of national identity. This disenchantment with the mainstream political process would effectively open the ground for more populist political discourses in the second half of the 1990s, of which the aspirational discourse would constitute the most prominent.

In considering the Labor party’s implementation of neo-liberal reforms and the means by which it was undertaken, it is important to identify the centrality of the previous Labor government led by Gough Whitlam (1972-75) to the Labor discourse, and Whitlam’s fracturing of the notion of Labor as a competent economic manager and a legitimate party of government. During its brief period in office, the Whitlam government instituted a comprehensive range of progressive social and economic reforms in Australia following 23 years of conservative Coalition government. At the time of its ascendency Australia was at the tail end of an extended economic boom characterised by ‘full’ employment, long term economic growth, and relatively healthy fiscal and trade finances (Whitewell, 1986). The 83

favourable economic outlook, combined with the demand for more progressive social policies following the extended period of conservative rule, allowed the newly elected government to pursue its broad egalitarian, human rights agenda and expansionary social program. This included increased spending on education and welfare, the provision of a public health insurance scheme, free university education, equal pay for women, and the pursuit of a multicultural immigration policy and aboriginal reconciliation (Kuhn, 1989; Kelly, 1983).

As I have outlined in the previous chapter, the reformist zeal of the Whitlam government was curtailed by the onset of stagflation that followed the OPEC oil price rise in 1973. This was followed by a blow-out in the size of government outlays, attributed in large part to the Whitlam’s expansionary social programs, an increase in wage related cost pressures, and a credit squeeze, the effect of which led to recession in 1974 (Junor, 1995; Whitwell, 1986). Under fiscal pressure and still pursuing a range of expensive programs, Labor subsequently sought to borrow from the large petro-dollar surpluses that had become available on the international money markets following the OPEC oil price rise. Despite treasury objections citing a flood of Middle Eastern ‘funny money men’ offering loans that subsequent investigations found they could not obtain (Foster, 1978: 81), a London based Pakistani commodities dealer, Tirath Khemlani, subsequently arrived in Canberra to discuss a four billion dollar loan. Though the loan was subsequently not taken up, the affair led to a public scandal with the media and Coalition exploiting it as a ‘shonky’ and possibly corrupt deal reflecting Labor’s economic incompetence and ‘lack of fitness to govern’ (Brown, 2002: 102). As the Whitlam speech writer Graham Freudenberg later observed, "The only cost involved was the cost to the reputation of the Government. That cost was to be immense - it was government itself” (Freudenberg, 2006: 348). The ‘Khemlani affair, followed by the resignation of two senior ministers following instances of impropriety, and the ongoing economic recession, led to a Coalition decision in 1975 to block supply in the (Coalition controlled) Senate by deferring consideration of appropriation bills (Kelly, 1983: 267). In the most dramatic political event in Australian history, Whitlam was controversially dismissed from office by the Governor General in 1975 following the budget impasse (Kelly, 1995: 269). In the subsequent election the Whitlam government was subjected to an unprecedented negative media campaign by the Murdoch media and lost in a landslide (Tucille, 1989: 41)

Despite its good reputation with the progressive left as the most reformist government in Australian history, in the popular discourse the Whitlam government left an enduring question mark over the legitimacy of Labor as a party of government. Subsequent conservative attacks on the prolificacy of Whitlam’s ‘socialist’ agenda, references to the ‘flamboyant’ character of several of his senior ministers, and the aura of scandal that surrounded the government meant that ‘Whitlamism’ quickly evolved into an pejorative signifier of economic incompetence, socialist excess and erratic governance; an antagonistic nodal point in relation to which the early advocates of neo-liberalism in Australia effectively defined and promoted their reform agenda. The effect on Labor, as with the social democratic order with which it was closely associated, was a major dislocation of its organisational identity and political rationale. As Paul Kelly noted:

The economic crisis of 1974 was a frontal assault upon Labor ideology, its belief in the full employment economy and the welfare state. Then the political crisis of 1975 left labor demoralised, cancelled much of its faith in itself and created a malaise still evident in 1983... The subsequent lesson learnt by Bob Hawke was that only a new ruthlessness and professionalism within the ALP could combat the conservatives (Kelly, 1983: 423).

The approach of the Hawke-Keating Labor governments should be viewed in the context of these attacks on the legitimacy of Labor, both in terms of its traditional egalitarian policy platform and its capacity to govern, particularly in relation to economic management. The result when Labor was returned to office eight years later in 1983, as I will outline later in this chapter, was a reversion to dry technocratic/managerial mode of governance in which ‘competent’ economic management became the primary framework around which government affairs were conducted. This was combined with a willingness to jettison key elements of the traditional egalitarian Labor discourse. As David Day has argued, Bob Hawke’s main priority in coming to government was to “concentrate on restoring Labor’s tattered reputation for economic management without worrying overly much about fulfilling Labor’s wider agenda” (Day, 2003: 402).

The Labor party under Bob Hawke (1983-1991) has been acknowledged as a ‘third-way’ prototype, seeking in the words of Paul Keating to create “a more efficient Australian economy moulded with a Labor heart” (Pierson, 2007: 568). As such it was subsequently

drawn heavily upon by the British Labour party in the mid 1990s as an exemplar of a party of the left that had managed to reconcile its traditional social democratic and progressive party platform with an embrace of neo-liberalism (Johnson & Tonkiss, 2002; Pierson & Castles, 2002). As Mouffe has argued in relation to the ‘renewal’ of the British Labour party, such an alignment was problematic since:

...it is clear that this supposed renewal consists of making the social democratic project basically resign itself to accepting the current stage of capitalism. This is a drastic move since the aim of social democracy has always been to confront the systemic problems of inequality and instability generated by capitalism (Mouffe, 2005: 60).

In this context, the alignment of a social democratic ethos with a neo-liberal policy approach can only be achieved by effectively jettisoning key parts of the social democratic rationale - in this case, to “confront systemic inequality and capitalist instability”. The viability of a hegemonic political order will be predicated on the capacity to articulate its ‘wholeness’ or ‘unity’ in the face of such tensions and to make those articulations politically effective. In the case of the Labor party’s adoption of this ‘third way’ type approach, the social dislocations resulting from its free-market reforms were not effectively addressed or ‘sutured’ by the generation of compelling new myths seeking to interpellate disaffected sectors of the community. In addition, political articulations seeking to engage with the public on a meaningful level and entailing democratic contestation were, in deference to the essential character of the free-market order and in accordance with Labor’s desire to prove itself as an economic manager, bypassed for the depoliticised managerial language of neo-liberal economic doctrine and ‘consensus politics’.

Labor’s implementation of neo-liberal reforms in Australia draws out two key points that will be referenced through this thesis; that is, the primacy of the ‘political’ element as a determinant of the social order, predicated on the ineradicable dimension of social antagonism, and, as argued by Mouffe (2005), the danger inherent in hegemonic attempts to suppress social antagonisms and the political expressions that they give rise to, in favour of the neutral, rational and objective nostrums of the dominant ideology. As will be detailed in chapter six, Labor’s suppression of antagonism in this light can be seen to have ultimately

facilitated the rise of populist political projects seeking to exploit the social anxiety, anger and confusion that can be seen to typically arise from such suppression.

Technocratic reform and consensus politics

The neo-liberal reform agenda of the Labor party was based on a range of changes to macro- economic management that sought to align the Australian economy with the global economy. Of these, the 1983 floating of the Australian dollar, reduction in tariff protection for Australian industries, and the deregulation of the financial sector were the most significant (Pierson, 2007; Cahill, 2000). These were combined with a raft of micro-economic reform measures aimed at heightening economic efficiency and competitiveness: reform of the public sector, national competition policy, the privatisation of public institutions, the move to a less progressive (more incentive based) tax system, more restrictive approaches to welfare provision, and reforms which began to dismantle the historically entrenched institutions of industrial relations arbitration in favour of a more deregulated ‘supply side’ labour market policy (Cahill, 2000; Kelly, 1992; Maddox, 1989).

As part of this process, traditional notions of ‘public administration’ were substituted with organisational practices derived from practices of private sector managerialism - particularly those based on abstract concepts of ‘efficiency’, ‘cost cutting’ and bureaucratic ‘delayering’. As such the public service was restructured along the lines dictated through the concept of the ‘New Public Management’ (NPM) developed by such theorists as Barzelay (2001) and Greer (1994), which sought to restructure public administration in an explicitly managerial fashion. In 1995 the administrative principles that drove these reforms would be consolidated through the statutory implementation of a national competition policy (Butler 1996). The policy envisaged that “uniformly applied rules of market conduct should apply to all market participants” (Fairbrother and Althaaus, 1996: 6). As such the institutions of the old public service became ‘government business enterprises’ and the public who received services from these institutions became ‘clients’ and ‘consumers’.

The implementation of this reform agenda reflected the increasing influence of neo-liberalism within the departments of Treasury and Finance and the receptivity of the young Labor

treasurer Paul Keating8 to its reform agenda. As Edwards noted, during the course of the 1980s the Labor government was effectively hijacked by a cabal of ministers, focused around Keating and supported by senior policy officials in the treasury and the increasingly independent Reserve Bank (Edwards, 1996). This cabal, in the words of the Hawke government minister Neil Blewett “were pursuing fiscal and deregulatory policies alien to Labor culture” (Blewett, cited in Bramston and Ryan, 2003: 77). Such a reform agenda reflected “an emerging consensus among political and economic elites that neo-liberal transformations were beneficial, inevitable and needed to be extended” (Cahill, 2000: 328). Labor’s technocratic and managerial implementation of these reforms reflected the elite character of the neo-liberal ascendency that I have previously outlined. As Jennet and Stewart noted at the time:

What is notable… is that these changes have occurred in policy arenas which did not require the mobilization of mass support. Keating’s... market liberalization policies have been in areas – financial deregulation, industry policy, alteration of business taxation – which are highly technical and marked by elite insularity. He has been backed by a powerful trinity, the treasury, reserve bank and the ACTU, rather than sizeable groups of voters (Jennet and Stewart, 1990: 7).

The Labor party’s embrace of neo-liberal reforms reflected the increasing shift to a conception of government that presented economic management and the promotion of economic growth as the primary and most important function of government. The succession of economic and social ‘reforms’ that emerged from this managerial approach to governance were couched as both globally determined and inevitable. According to this approach, the neo-liberal reform agenda was about ‘modernising’ the Australian economy through a series of ‘reforms’ that would make it ‘competitive’ and bring it in line with ‘externally imposed global imperatives’. The core objectives of government were aligned with what amounted to a tendency to fetishise economic data - particularly macro data related to economic growth and fiscal policy, and to conceptualise traditional notions of social justice and equity as derivative of, and ancillary to broad macro-economic objectives. In this way the interests of capital; that is, the range of efficiency and productivity enhancing mechanisms used to promote increased economic production, could be seen to be compatible with the interests of

8 Paul Keating was treasurer from 1983-1991 and prime minister from 1991-1996. 88 the public as a whole. Paul Keating, attempting to discursively align these neo-liberal practices with the traditional Labor political rationale, summed up this view as follows:

Both Curtin and Chifley [highly rated former Labor prime ministers] fully appreciated that growth and jobs were central to any attempt to make Australia a fairer and more effective society for all... in continuing to pursue this growth objective, the Hawke Labor Government is operating completely within the tradition of the labour movement. In adopting practical pragmatic measures to create growth and jobs, the Labor Party is doing nothing out of the ordinary… (Keating cited in Pierson, 2007: 572).

The business of government was thus about ‘practical’ and ‘pragmatic’ technical processes (the neo-liberal ‘reform agenda’), which generated greater production (growth and jobs). Equital social outcomes were a natural bi-product of this productive process. In effect, the argument was redolent of the basic rationale promoted through the ‘supply side’ or ‘trickle down’ economics associated most closely with Ronald Reagan, which projected an ‘ultimate’ social dividend and a strengthening of distributive justice and social equity from policies squarely aimed at enhancing the profitability of capital (Thompson, 1990).

In accordance with this, Labor tended to economically frame many of its core social policies in order to emphasise their market value. Thus republicanism was presented as a chance to enhance global economic relations, and multi-cultural policies were conceived as a means of opening up new markets in order to exploit the creative and productive capacity and “industry and entrepreneurship” of different ethnic groups:

We very often talk about our cultural diversity as if it were purely cultural – as if it were primarily a matter of food and festivals. Yet, whether they were British and Irish migrants in the 19th Century, or central and southern European migrants in the last half of the 20th century, the real measure of their contribution is in their energy and vision – in their industry and entrepreneurship. We have with us … people from all over the world who live and run businesses in Australia. Who all pursue their personal ambitions and serve the Australian national enterprise. That’s the key, the key to multiculturalism and the key to Australia’s future (Keating address cited in Johnson, 1996: 32).

Keating’s tendency to confine his political discourse to matters of economic performance, that is, the ‘Australian national enterprise’ and his often impatient dismissal of social factors which he saw as largely irrelevant to the core task of government, significantly impacted on his capacity to sell neo-liberal reform. His dismissal of issues such as those related to immigration in such terms, opened the ground for more populist political discourses to emerge in the 1990s that exploited tensions in the community attendant, in part, to this dismissal:

It does seem a remarkable thing to me: here we are in the last half decade of our first century as a nation, 18 million of us on a continent almost the size of the United states, one of the oldest and most stable democracies in the world, sitting adjacent to the most extraordinary economic revolution in the history of the world, and what appears to concern some of us most is the colour of people’s skins (Keating, 1996).

In accordance with a managerial approach, the primary ethos of governance promoted was one of interest mediation and ‘consensus’ politics. The Hawke government came to power in 1983 under the slogan of ‘Bringing Australia Together’, offering a brand of ‘consensus politics’ which rejected the ‘adversarial politics’ of the past and sought ‘reconciliation’ in order to forge productive relations between business, employers and the government in pursuit of the overriding ‘national interest’. In response to this, traditional Labor party principles tended to be pejoratively dismissed as ‘old ideology’, redundant in the face of the tangible realities facing a modern government. These ‘realities’ were discursively constructed around the global economy, the demands of which necessitated a kind of disinterested economic nationalism. This was implicit in Hawke’s corporatist approach to governance. The need for competitive advantage was posited as overriding traditional sectoral or class interests in the name of the ‘national interest’. Rather than the ‘ideological’ conflicts of the ‘political’ and its associated plethora of ‘unproductive’ and ‘destructive’ antagonisms, it required a pragmatic and cooperative approach to government. In the words of Hawke, there was “ultimately a desire for harmony rather than conflict” in the community and “the resolution of conflict should be Australia’s goal” (cited in Maddox, 1989: 60). This pursuit of ‘harmony’ was reflected in Hawke’s view of the parliamentary process, as expressed by the Hawke Government minister, Neil Blewett:

Hawke had little time for parliament, finding the atmosphere, particularly the adversarial nature of the debates, uncongenial and antipathetic to his consensual approach and negotiating skills… Under Hawke, parliament’s steady decline as an information forum accelerated (Neil Blewett cited in Maddox, 1989: 91).

The corporate model of consensus politics was perhaps best exemplified in the unprecedented ‘Prices and Incomes Accord’ of 1984 between the government, the trade union movement and employer groups. The accord arose out of the National Economic Summit which followed the election of the Hawke government. The summit brought together a broad representation of economic interests in order to construct guidelines for the reform of the Australian economy. In doing so it promoted a brand of trade unionism in which the sectoral interests of the trade-union movement were substituted with a nationally and globally situated conception of labour interests (Dow and Lafferty, 2007: 554). A succession of accords arose out of this process in which the union movement agreed to explicitly link income and conditions of employment demands with both the consumer price index (CPI) and productivity increases associated with the government’s adoption of the neo-liberal micro- economic reform agenda. As part of this trading off process, emphasis was placed on government undertakings to improve the social wage (ie, the provision of public goods such as education and health services) in order to compensate for moderate union wage demands linked to increases in the CPI (Hogan and King, 1999).

The trade union movement supported the accords, in part, due to their historically strong ties with the Labor party, which, in the context of antagonistic relations with the previous conservative administration and the failures associated with the Whitlam government, led them to view the survival of the Labor Government as essential to the promotion of their own interests (Pierson, 2007: 571). Trade union support for the accord also reflected the penetration of Hawke’s administrative and consensual discourse of governance and its rejection of partisan or sectarian politics. Nonetheless in supporting the neo-liberal reform agenda through their adherence to the accords, the unions were widely seen to be effectively supporting the interest of capital over labour. As Dabschek observed:

The ALP used its special relationship with the ACTU to secure the union movements pursuit of a pro employer/business/capital agenda, the result of which

was to undermine the role of unions and their ability to defend and protect the rights and interests of workers (Dabschek, 2000: 103).

As Bramble and Kuhn have argued:

In many cases union activists from national leaders to job delegates effectively became the front line of employer efforts to convince workers that redundancies and major changes to work practices were inevitable (Bramble and Kuhn, 1999: 37).

The co-optation of the union movement under the “cult of consensus” and “social ventriloquism” (Dow and Lafferty, 2007: 557) has been cited as a factor in the substantial increase in the profit share of national production (Kuhn, 1993). It has also been related to the decline in trade union membership (from 48% in 1983 to 31% in 1996) as unions lost the critical independence that would allow them to act as a key democratic presence (Kenyan and Lewis, 2000). This complicity served to facilitate the embedding of core neo-liberal policies and practices as neo-liberal hegemony among the ‘policy elites’ was not challenged to any degree in a popular sense by the primary non-capital organisations which would otherwise have been expected to promote public awareness and critical debate (Beeson cited in Dow and Lafferty, 2007: 557). The extent of this muting of the labour movement can be seen in internal trade union measures aimed at silencing the dissent of those union leaders who questioned this agenda (Brown, 2004; Hampson, 1996).

The dislocation of the Labor party discourse

As I have argued, Labor’s enthusiastic embrace of free-market economic reform was determined to a significant extent by its desire to regain the economic management legitimacy that was seen to have been lost through the alleged ‘socialism’ and ‘economic incompetence’ of the previous Whitlam Labor government (Head, 1988). In coming to office, the challenge for the Labor government was therefore to establish its economic management credentials; that is, in the neo-liberal context, its affiliation with, and competence in promoting the interests of capital, while at the same time maintaining the support of its core working-class constituency. The technical economic approach to government that it

subsequently adopted ostensibly addressed both these imperatives, since it dealt in a language of neutral nostrums; instrumental approaches determined by apolitical global imperatives that transcended traditional class or sectarian political dynamics. In effect the national scoreboard of macro-economic data (‘gross domestic product’, ‘trade accounts’, ‘economic growth rates’), with its arcane technical and instrumental language, was substituted for a rigorous political articulation of traditional Labor party values. This included the role of entrenched power interests, class relations and the politics of economic re-distribution. The combination of a technocratic/corporatist approach to government and the adoption of a ‘consensus’ rhetoric that characterised the political realm, along the lines outlined by Hayek and other neo-liberal theorists, as obstructionist, conflictual, unproductive, inefficient and irrational, led to a suppression of the antagonistic dimension of the political and the essential democratic contestations through which it is properly articulated.

Where it existed, the Labor party’s adherence to its traditional platform was insinuated through an essentially superficial and muted rhetorical retention of the main discursive elements of its traditional social democratic/egalitarian platform - that is, as a rhetorical supplement to its primary neo-liberal economic agenda:

When this government introduced a market economy, when it opened us up to the world and implemented programs of micro-economic reform, every step we took towards a more competitive Australia was a step towards a fairer Australia (Keating address to Australian Council of Social Services, 1992).

The rhetorical formula evident in Paul Keating’s notion of a “more efficient Australian economy moulded with a Labor Heart” (Pierson, 2007: 568), was more formally rendered in the 1987 election slogan: “Restrain with Equity”. In effect, a formal and cursory conception of social justice as ‘equity’ - was presented as secondary to the primarily managerial and prudential value of ‘restraint’.

In the absence of a rigorously ‘political’ and values oriented articulation of the neo-liberal reform agenda, the Hawke and Keating government’s viability was wholly vulnerable to movements in the key economic indicators and the social effects of that reform agenda. As the reform agenda was progressively implemented, the limitations of this technocratic discourse became more evident as Australia’s economy deteriorated in the late 80s and early

90s. In the view of its critics the Hawke and Keating governments constituted a thorough abandonment of Labor traditions in their promotion of a “deregulated and globalised economy, fully engaged in a race to the bottom with the low-wage, low-tax economies of South East Asia” (Wiseman, 1996: 98). By the late 1980s the dislocatory social effects related to this agenda (outlined in the following chapter) were beginning to become manifest, exacerbated in 1991 by an economic recession which Keating, in a comment redolent with managerial pretensions of control and order and a complete absence of political sensibility, famously called “the recession we had to have”. The political dividend of these reforms, compounded by the absence of a sustaining and compelling political narrative, was the alienation of large sections of Labor’s traditional constituency who had repeatedly been asked to make short term sacrifices in exchange for longer term gains. Labor’s political incapacity to reach these sections of the community was summed up by Jennet and Stewart:

Labor did not lose seats it had held for 85 years because party membership had fallen. Rather, the losses occurred because the societal costs of Labor’s policies had resulted in increased unemployment, stagnation and hard times in working class electorates. An internal party inquiry is unlikely to alter either federal government policy or provide strategies for mobilisation of popular support. This is because Labor has relied heavily on policy derived in a narrow forum based either on advisory mechanisms, commissions, tripartite groupings or sophisticated public relations rather than on a broadening of participation... Promises of micro-economic reform… are a poor substitute for broadening the decision making base and encouraging genuine debate and are unlikely to substitute for the distributional costs being borne by lower and lower middle class households (Jennet and Stewart, 1990: 9).

Despite this fracturing of its core support base, the Labor party was able to hold government for 13 years largely due to the Coalition’s incapacity to provide a viable political alternative. Throughout the term of the Hawke/Keating government, the neo-liberal agenda was strongly supported by the Coalition. As the Coalition found its natural political platform largely adopted by the Labor party, it was engaged for much of the 1980s in internal conflict centring around the more economically moderate and socially progressive elements of the party (the ‘Wets’) and the hardline free marketeers (the ‘Drys’). In the 1970s, the Drys had set up a small faction within the party: ‘The Society for Modest Members’, which advocated for more efficient, smaller government and tax cuts. By the 1980s this economic vanguard centred on 94

the ‘HR Nichols Society’, dedicated to the free-market and such reforms as a fully deregulated labour market, privatisation of the public sector, and welfare reform (Hyde, 2002). By the early 1990s this internal division within the Coalition was progressively settled in the favour of the Drys, one important signpost being the election to the party leadership of the economics academic and hard line neo-liberal advocate, Dr John Hewson. Hewson went to the ‘unlosable’ 1993 election with a package advocating a further range of neo-liberal reforms including a consumption tax, budget cuts, public sector reforms and more restrictive welfare policies. In doing so he extended the technocratic managerial style pursued by the Labor government to such an extent that the government was able to harness the backlash against its own style of government to portray him as a “dogmatic zealot” with “little competence outside of economics” (Brett, 2003: 166). Largely due to widespread fears of Hewson’s economic agenda, and in particular his introduction of a goods and services tax, the Labor Government was returned in 1993.

The loss of genuine debate was compounded by the broad convergence of the two mainstream political parties in matters related to social and cultural policy. The Labor party in government maintained the broad thrust of the kind of inclusive and progressive social policies pursued by the previous Whitlam government, particularly in relation to immigration, refugees, ethnic affairs, aboriginal affairs and minority rights. Indeed the socially progressive appeal of Labor included moves toward the abolition of the monarchy and the creation of a republic, closer relations with the Asian region, aboriginal reconciliation, policies promoting equal opportunity and human rights, and strong support for the arts and cultural activities (Catley, 2005; Brett, 2003). Indeed multicultural policies were often explicitly associated with the ‘economic rationalism’ and globalisation of neo- liberalism (Archer, 1997: 33). As Kapferer and Morris pointed out:

The Keating government made the clearest linkage, on the one hand, of a policy of economic rationalism associated with globalisation with, on the other hand, the presentation of a new kind of national identity that stressed cultural heterogeneity rather than homogeneity (Kapferer and Morris, 2003: 82).

This inclusive, pluralistic shift within government indicated the domination of a differential logic in which a range of social identities were accepted as legitimate (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 129). Up until the 1996 election the broad thrust of these reforms was largely

unchallenged by the Coalition, which had maintained most of the socially progressive policies of the previous Coalition government led by Malcolm Fraser (1975-1983), particular in relation to human rights, multiculturalism, immigration and aboriginal affairs. In fact in 1988 when the Coalition leader, John Howard, made comments questioning the level of Asian immigration, the ‘bipartisan’ nature of the issue led to broad condemnation across the political spectrum as Howard was seen to be “playing politics” (Smith, 2001: 235).

However, in the absence of a rigorous political articulation of the value of such pluralist and inclusive conceptions of national identity, the discursive ground was opened up for the emergence of more exclusive and populist political projects to exploit disaffection and promote divisions in the community. The political consensus in regard to Labor’s social agenda and the tendency for this agenda to be quarantined on a ‘moral’ basis from political debate, served to bolster the view that Australia was being transformed by ‘stealth’ through a range of top down ‘elite’ and undemocratic political forces that were effectively censoring public debate on national identity through the implementation of a stultifying ‘political correctness’ and bureaucratic censorship (Sheehan, 1998; Flint, 2003). Denying “any superior legitimacy to the host culture” (Hirst, 1978), multiculturalism, through its allocation of public funds to maintain distinct cultural identities, was viewed as “offensive to the liberal and egalitarian values of our (Anglo-Celtic) culture” (Jupp, 1997: 137). In the absence of any compelling alternative political narrative, as the economic effects of neo-liberal reform increasingly alienated large sectors of the community, this discourse of ‘dispossession by stealth’ became increasingly powerful.

Conclusion

The technocratic/managerial form of government pursued by the Labor party as a substitute for its traditional egalitarian platform failed to win broad popular support, particularly in relation to its core working-class constituency. Reforms that were radically pertinent to the Australian way of life were instituted by an elite body of policy makers without any corresponding substantive consideration, debate and contestation in relation to their broad social effects. This economic reform agenda was accompanied by a similarly bipartisan move towards more culturally inclusive and pluralistic notions of national identity, founded on strong immigration policies and the values of multiculturalism. 96

Without a compelling political narrative that addressed the changes in Australia being precipitated by this hegemonic shift, the differential logic of the new order was subject to the success or otherwise of its core economic projections, the indicators of which extended from the heavily fetishised macro-economic data to the individual citizen’s general sense of security and wellbeing. Labor’s subsequent landslide defeat in the 1996 election and its unprecedented loss of significant sections of its traditional constituency reflected significant dislocations in the neo-liberal hegemonic order as the effects of its reform agenda, combined with a flat economy, served to alienate large sectors of middle Australia.

As will be discussed in chapter six, in a political realm which had become stagnant and marginalised by the shibboleths of free-market economic doctrine and (apolitical) social ‘tolerance’, the ground was opened up for populist projects to exploit social disaffection through the articulation of ‘authentic’, ‘unified’ and homogenous discourses of nationhood, predicated on the stigmatisation of a range of ‘illegitimate’ and ‘threatening’ antagonistic groups. This would involve the re-articulation of discursive elements closely associated with the ‘old order’- in particular those related to the Australian egalitarian mythology - elements of which had not been sufficiently articulated as moments within the neo-liberal discourse. The aspirational discourse would ultimately constitute the principal means through which neo-liberalism would seek to articulate these elements as part of a broader mythology of citizenship. Under the Howard Coalition government, this would most crucially involve the disassociation of neo-liberalism from the cultural pluralism and progressive social agenda that had constituted a core component of the Labor discourse.

In light of the inadequate hegemonic articulation by the Labor party of the first wave of neo- liberal reforms, I will now move on to a consideration of the character and extent of dislocations to the neo-liberal order as indicated in key social, economic and social attitudes data. These dislocations relate to the inability of neo-liberalism to reconcile its key prosperity discourses with the expectations and values of those sections of the community subject to the effects of neo-liberal reforms. I will also consider that demographic initially most associated with the aspirational discourse, Western Sydney, in the context of these dislocations.

Chapter Five

Dislocations in the Neo-Liberal Order

By way of conceiving of the circumstances leading to the employment of the aspirational discourse, I will now consider various social and economic indicators that suggest the extent of the dislocations to the neo-liberal order that were becoming evident in the mid 1990s. These dislocations can be associated with the failure of the Labor party to hegemonise its neo-liberal agenda through the articulation of myths that countered the more adverse social and economic impacts of its reform agenda. As I have argued, the technocratic form of government pursued by the Labor party and its preoccupation with economic management, meant that it was vulnerable when the economy deteriorated, as it did in the late 1980s. Without any substantive hegemonic framing that could counter this economic decline, particularly in relation to values of national identity and citizenship, the neo-liberal order was vulnerable to the articulation of key empty signifiers: ‘egalitarian’, ‘prosperity’, ‘quality of life’, ‘fairness’, ‘equality’ and ‘community’, as moments within alternative political discourses.

In this chapter I will first discuss the key aspects of Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of dislocation, before moving on to a consideration of a range of socio-economic factors indicative of dislocations in the neo-liberal order. These dislocations are reflected in a range of national indicators related in particular to social inequality, changes in the labour market and financial pressures resulting from unprecedented levels of debt financed ‘prosperity’. In light of this, I will also consider a range of social attitudes data indicating the saliency of discourses and subject positions identifiable with the pre-neo-liberal order; that is, a resurgence in traditional egalitarian values, and a rejection of some of the major tenets of free-market economics and self-interested individualism. The chapter will conclude with a consideration of one of the key demographics associated with the aspirational, Western Sydney, and argue that this demographic exhibited a range of characteristics that did not accord with the representations of the aspirational.

Dislocation

Dislocation is defined as a destabilisation of a discourse which results from the emergence of events which cannot be domesticated by, or integrated into, the hegemonic order. Such events reveal the contingent limitations of the discursive structure which is prevented from realising a deterministic fullness (Laclau: 1990: 41). Even as normalisation of the hegemonic order has become fully established, “alienation will reassert itself, necessitating an endless mobile set of tactics on the part of the hegemonic forces to manage the social” (Smith; 1998: 168).

The unevenness of the social that dislocation represents thus opens up the ground for decisions which are not simply directly prescribed by the dominant social order. Dislocation is “the very form of possibility” opening up the need for “re-articulatory interventions” that demand “a higher awareness of historicity” and the “constitutive contingency” of discourses (Laclau, 1990: 30-50). It is only through the ‘identity crisis’ in the subject induced by dislocation – that is, the failure of the structure to impose a full identity on the subject - that social agency is possible. As such it provokes an eminently political response in which the subject exercises a degree of externality to the social structure (Laclau, 1990: 50) and society will begin to appear “more like an order constructed by men” (Laclau, 1990: 39). As Laclau observes:

Every identity is dislocated insofar as it depends on an outside which both denies that identity and provides its condition of possibility at the same time. But this in itself means that the effects of dislocation must be contradictory. If on the one hand they threaten identities, on the other, they are the foundation on which new identities are constituted” (Laclau, 1990: 39).

In focusing on dislocatory factors evident in the period leading up to the articulation of the aspirational discourse, an outline is provided of a range of factors that do not accord with the largely technocratic neo-liberal articulation of prosperity, growth and well-being. Many of these dislocatory factors can be broadly associated with fundamental social, economic and political changes engendered by the withdrawal of the state and the accelerated penetration of market relations and commercial values within society. Laclau refers to the accelerated tempo of dislocatory experiences in late capitalism associated with processes such as commodification, bureaucratisation and globalisation, all of which “can be seen as the

contemporary manifestations of what the Marxist tradition labelled ‘combined and uneven development’” (Howarth, 2000: 111). A broad analysis of data in relation to both the effects of neo-liberal reform on Australian society and community responses to such reforms is instructive in identifying these dislocations.

Changes in Australian society

As previously indicated, neo-liberalism has effected significant changes on Australian society and the experiences of individual Australians (Pusey, 1991, 2003; Stillwell, 2000; Argy, 2003). A key component of neo-liberalism as a hegemonic project was to associate its reform agenda with substantive improvements in the quality of life and prosperity of Australians as a whole. Thus by the beginning of the 21st Century, the pervasive idea promulgated principally by the political establishment and media was that Australia had reached unprecedented levels of national prosperity due to neo-liberal reforms and that ‘Australians had never had it so good’ (Duncan, Leigh, Madden, Tynan, 2004). A typical example of the neo-liberal economic prosperity narrative was the following piece by Paul Kelly writing in the Australian:

Many intellectuals opposed the pro-market, low-protection, competition policy revolution, the defining policy transformation in their lifetimes. This is either because they misread the economics, misinterpreted the 1991 recession or relied on the false precept that markets are immoral… Since then Australia has seen the longest economic expansion in its history. As Treasury secretary, Ken Henry, has pointed out when reviewing the past 15 years, Australia's gross domestic product per person has risen from the bottom third to the top third of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's ratings such that "the standard of living in Australia now surpasses all G7 countries except the US". Australia's intellectual class is probably unique in coining the term "economic rationalism" to discredit the bipartisan framework pursued by Hawke, Keating and Howard that has transformed the lives and opportunities of so many Australians (Kelly, 2007).

As is indicated by Kelly’s citing of GDP figures as contiguous with ‘standards of living’, the key indicators for what was called the ‘miracle economy’ was a range of macro-economic

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growth data. In this respect, as I have argued in relation to the Hawke and Keating discourse, concepts of social wellbeing, equality, equity, progress and social cohesion were conceived as primarily derivative of economic growth. The adoption of a primarily economic/technocratic discourse meant, however, that neo-liberal hegemony was, to a significatnt extent, dependent on the vagaries of the economic cycle. While a booming economy would be automatically attributed to the technical prescriptions of the hegemonic order, a flat economy in which public awareness of social inequality, debt and social breakdown was widespread would require the generation of new hegemonic myths.

In this respect, the neo-liberal prosperity narrative in Australia can be divided into two distinct phases. In the latter part of the 1980s and early 90s, the neo-liberal order was subject to the dislocatory forces engendered by a relatively flat economy, combined with a raft of negative social effects popularly associated with the neo-liberal reform agenda. The early promise of neo-liberal reforms had developed into the record high interest rates in the late 1980s and a recession in 1991/92. By 1996, disaffection with the reformist Labor government had reached a peak, culminating in the federal election landslide victory for the John Howard led Coalition.

The second phase can be identified with the economic boom, beginning in the early period of the third term of the Howard government in 2002, and running through to approximately 2007. During the period, Australia’s annual GDP growth of 3.75 percent per annum was the highest in the OECD. This growth was the primary citation in commentary espousing the success of neo-liberal reforms (Bramble, 2004: 2). Several largely negative or incidental economic factors however underpinned this growth, none of which could be directly related to neo-liberal reforms and much of which stemmed from the global credit boom (and related economic boom in most western economies) arising from the Unites States treasury’s decision to radically slash interests rates following the events of September 11, 2001 (Felsenthal & Lawder, 2007). In Australia, the period immediately following this period was characterised by a strong growth in business profitability and the profit share of national income, increases in consumer spending, in part reflecting the reduction in interest rates, an explosion in household debt, and a housing price bubble (Uren and Newman, 2004; Bramble 2005: 6). GDP growth in Australia was also facilitated by one of the highest rates of population growth in the world and an unprecedented increase in Australian resource exports to China and India, which led to a surge in government finances (Richardson, 2009). In the 101 last two terms of the Howard government the windfall increase in government finances due to the resources boom facilitated significant increases in government subsidies, tax concessions and income supports to the middle classes, the effects of which further validated the neo-liberal/aspirational prosperity discourse (Gittins, 2009).

As will be elaborated in the following chapters, the first phase of the initial employment of the aspirational discourse represented a remedial response to the underperforming Australian economy, disaffection with the social effects of neo-liberal reforms, and the initial failure of neo-liberalism to generate compelling myths to suture these dislocations. It was targeted specifically at that demographic that was seen to have borne the brunt of economic reforms - the outer suburban working-class and lower middle-class. The second phase of aspirational mythology, facilitated by strong growth in the global economy, represented the nominal validation of neo-liberalism’s ‘prosperity’ discourse and the subsequent articulation of the aspirational as a social imaginary of national identity. This transition highlighted its opportunistic and performative character.

Throughout both these stages, a range of micro-economic data and social indicators were, however, suggesting an all together more complex picture than that accounted for by the heavily fetishised macro-economic data and associated ‘prosperity’ mythologies. These indicators went to the effects that neo-liberal reforms were having in relation to core egalitarian values of social equality and fairness, in addition to quality of life issues such as work-life balance, leisure time, family and community relationships, the environment, and access to health care, housing, education, welfare and work. The extent of the fracturing of the egalitarian mythology of national identity was captured by an editorial in the ‘Australian’ in 2000:

Our research confirms that at the heart of discontent is the shattering of the myths of the classless society, the egalitarian society, the ‘fair go’ society. These perceptions may have always been myths but they are powerful and central to our sense of identity. They were tied into our view of ourselves as the classless society - long a comfortable myth but entirely unsustainable now (Weekend Australian Editorial, June 17, 2000).

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Importantly, the data following the first wave of neo-liberal economic reforms pointed not only to rising levels of inequality and poverty vis-à-vis the most disadvantaged sectors of the community, but also to increased pressures and demands on the Australian middle-class. As Craig McGregor commented in 1997,

…the weight of evidence is that what we are seeing is a fracturing and subdividing of this vast middle-class which never was homogenous and certainly isn’t now… The middle-class is suffering incredible pressures because of… economic restructuring, globalization, the sorts of trauma that Australian society is going through…disenchantment with the political process, along with personal, social and class trauma, can lead people to search for very weird alternatives to the current system…(McGregor, 1997: 66).

More recently commentators such as Mark Davis (2008) and Marko Beljak have fundamentally challenged the neo-liberal prosperity claims of commentators such as Paul Kelly:

Kelly tells us that "prosperity abounds". There certainly can be little doubt that prosperity abounds in his social circle, that's the whole point of the economic reforms that he celebrates and demands everybody else celebrate (Beljak, 2008).

In the following section I will outline various social and economic indicators and social attitudes data that suggest the nature and extent of dislocations to the neo-liberal order, particularly in the period leading up to the emergence of the aspirational discourse in the late 1990s. While such empirical evidence is only meaningful in the context of the discursive paradigms and frameworks through which it is interpreted, it constitutes evidence of a non- correlation between neo-liberal prosperity, growth and well-being narratives, and a range of social-economic outcomes and community attitudes. It also indicates the ongoing popular relevance of egalitarian discourses related to the social-democratic/Australian settlement order as a means of interpreting the social order. Given the status of dislocation as a condition of possibility for the emergence of new forms of political agency, the factors cited in this chapter serve to preview the hegemonic priorities evident in the articulation of the aspirational discourse.

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Socio-economic factors

Inequality

There is a substantial body of evidence suggesting that neo-liberal reforms precipitated a marked increase in social inequality in Australia. Research by Robert Gregory from the Australian National University indicated that for the bottom 70 percent of collection districts, average household incomes had fallen in absolute terms and were lower in 1991 than in 1976. In the same period the income gap between the top five percent and the bottom 50 percent had widened by 92 percent, with the top 30 per cent of households controlling approximately 60 percent of household income and the richest one percent of Australians owning 15 percent of the nation’s wealth (Gregory, 1996: 5). Another study by Anne Harding from the National Centre for Economic and Social Modelling (NATSEM) showed that for the period 1982 to 1994 the number of workers on medium wages declined markedly. The study indicated that the bottom half of the population saw their income fall while the top 10 per cent saw an increase in wealth from 23 per cent to 26 percent (Harding, 2002). In response to similar data supporting these conclusions, Wheelright observed in 1992 that “Australia is one of the most unequal societies in the developed world, that the rich are getting richer and its poor, although they may not be getting poorer, are becoming more numerous” (Wheelright, 1992: 46).

This inequality was reflected in an overall decline in the growth rate of wages from the two to three percent annual growth experienced through the 1960s and 1970s. The wages of the bottom 20 percent were effectively stagnant from 1983 up until the early 2000s (Argy, 2003: 6; Gregory and Fritjers, 2005). This was partly as a result of a marked increase in the profit share of GDP. The effect of the free-market reforms of the early 1980s arrested a trend extending from 1968 in which the profit share declined in relation to the growth in real wages. Between 1982 and 2000 this trend was reversed with a boosting of the profit share based on a reduction in wages and increased labour productivity (Mohun, 2003). Bramble has argued that a significant proportion of this productivity growth and profit share of GDP had been driven by an increase in ‘labour exploitation’ (Bramble, 2004: 6).

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The stagnation in wages growth for lower and middle income earners in the 1980s was a direct result of the Hawke government’s ‘Prices and Incomes Accord’ with the unions. The success of the accord allowed Bob Hawke to boast of a nine percent fall in real unit labour costs over the last seven years of the 1980s and a surge in business profits (Kelly, 1992: 669). Mohun (2003) has attributed much of the capitalist revival of the last 20 years to this combination of rising productivity combined with real wage cuts. Though there have been increases in real wages over the last 10 years, the increases for the bottom 20 per cent of income earners effectively constituted a ‘catch up’ in real wages to 1970s levels, following the stagnation of wages growth in the 1980s (Gregory and Fritjers, 2005). This stagnation accounted, in part, for the large increase in two income families, as single wage families increasingly found it difficult to meet basic expenses. Noteworthy is the fact that the number of families with two or more members working increased by 30 percent in the five years following the first raft of neo-liberal reforms introduced by the Hawke government (Kryger, 1997).

In comparison to the relative stagnation of wages growth during the last 10 years, the growth in income of the top 20 percent of income earners has exceeded that of the bottom 20 percent by a factor of four to one. Thus by 2005-6 those in the top 20 percent of income earners had an income five times the size of those in the bottom 20 percent (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2006: 19). During this time there was an explosion in executive pay: from a rate 22 times greater than average weekly earnings in 1992, to 74 times greater in 2002. In 2002, ten percent of the population held 46% of the nation’s wealth (Harding, 2002).

Further research has indicated a significant hollowing out of the middle-class. A study conducted by the NATSEM examined changes in personal and family income from 1982 (the year prior to the commencement of neo-liberal policies) to 1996-97, and found a significant increase in inequality in Australia, with middle income earners declining from 45 per cent to 35 percent of all wage-earners (Harding and Greenwell, 2002). This was reflected in research showing significant earnings inequality, with payments to skilled workers increasing from 37 per cent to 42.5 percent of total earnings, at the expense of unskilled workers who had particularly suffered in relation to the depletion of ‘blue collar’ employment and the effects of neo-liberal labour market reforms (Parnham, 2000). As noted by the social researcher, Hugh Mackay in 1999, “it is obvious that middle income earners have been shrinking at an extraordinary rate over the last 25 years” (Mackay, 1999: 55). 105

The social effects of inequality were evident in an increase in the rate of poverty and the range of social ills from increased homelessness, declining health, family breakdown and increases in the rate of crime and violence (Hutton, 1996; Wilson, 1996). Research indicates that income and wealth differentials play a significant role in determining individual wellbeing and that, above a certain minimum income standard, these differentials, rather than income levels in and of themselves, tend to be the decisive factor (Argyle: 1998: 34; Hamilton, 2003). Such research has concluded that people tend to assess their level of need based on a determination of the wealth of other people. In this context wealth generation becomes a process of status attainment unrelated to tangible increases in the quality of life. The environmental economist and social researcher, Clive Hamilton, has referred to this as the “hedonistic treadmill” (Hamilton, 2003: 28).

The Labour Market

The data indicates that while popular ‘economic’ orthodoxy tends to focus on the official rate of unemployment as the key indicator of the health or otherwise of the economy, there is a strong tendency to overlook the range of employment related data which indicates the actual employment/workplace experience. Ongoing reform of the labour market significantly impacted on the experiences of working Australians, with deregulatory labour market reforms, industry restructuring and the weakening of the trade union movement substantially changing the culture of the workplace and the nature and security of employment.

Though there was a steady increase in job creation in Australia in the period up to 2001, there had been a reduction in the number of full-time jobs available to new entrants in the workforce, with the growth areas confined to full-time casual, part-time permanent and part- time casual jobs (Borland, Gregory and Sheehan, 2001). In 2004, 28.5 percent of the Australian workforce were employed on a part-time basis, many of them involuntarily, whilst at the same time 27.9% worked on a casual basis, up from 16 percent in 1984 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2004). This was in part due to the restructuring of the Australian economy, with a move away from ‘old’ industry employment and toward new service industry jobs - particularly in the finance, business, retail and property sectors, which tend to be less unionised and characterised by casual and part-time employment (Badcock, 1995). 106

Increasing insecurities in relation to the casualisation of employment were compounded by an unemployment rate which, though officially recorded at a twenty year low, was double that of the 1960s. This official rate of unemployment was distorted by the amount of part- time workers who were interested in working more hours and the withdrawal of others from the employment market - a withdrawal reflected in the ballooning number of people on the disability support pension (Steketee, 2004; Argy, 2003: 5). Thus it is estimated that in the last decade the actual rate of unemployment was double the number recorded in official statistics (Bell and Quiggin, cited in Davis, 2008: 100).

Furthermore, the nature of employment has changed as successive waves of industry rationalisation, restructuring, downsizing and productivity maximisation has led to the disappearance of many jobs, particularly blue collar jobs, and the placement of greater demands on existing workforces. The manufacturing share of GDP in Australia fell from 30% in the 1960s to 12% in 2007. Between 1998 and 2009 the manufacturing contribution to total employment fell from 13% to 9% (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2010: 6)

Research has shown that there has been an increase in job insecurity, particularly among the unskilled, and an increase in job stress, in part the result of a strong trend toward unpaid overtime, irregular work hours and greater workloads (Ven, 2002). Australian work hours soared in the first two decades of neo-liberal reforms to be among the highest in the world, greater than those in the United States and Europe, with one third of full-time workers working more than 50 hours per week, much of it in unpaid overtime (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2006: 127). As Argy has put it: “control has been lost over working hours and conditions and the requirements of the job, while the sense of ‘mateship’ has diminished in a more competitive work place” (Argy, 2003: 41).

The gradual move to individual employment contracts under the Keating and later Howard industrial relation’s reforms effectively marked the end of Australia’s unique system of arbitration and centralised wage fixing. This was a core component of the ‘Australian settlement’ which, as I have discussed in chapter three, encompassed a recognition of the intrinsic tension between labour and capital interests and sought to address industrial conflict in pursuit of equitable outcomes. In the words of Stokes, without an appreciation of the effects of its decline “one cannot properly understand the range of uncertainties and impacts 107

upon families generated by the reforms of the 1980s” (Stokes, 2004: 16). This transformation of the workplace was undertaken in accordance with the key values and nodal points of workplace ‘productivity’, ‘flexibility’, ‘choice’ and ‘efficiency’, and facilitated through the myth of the modern worker as ‘mobile’, ‘dynamic’, ‘entrepreneurial’, ‘resourceful’ and ‘adaptive’; a mythology which failed to incorporate any conception of the desire of many for permanency, security and continuity in their work environment (Sennett, 2006: 3).

The impact of irregular work hours and the need for workers to accept less certainty in regard to conditions of employment, leave, overtime entitlements and security of tenure, amounted to a general transfer of economic risk from the business sector to the individual and family (Breen, 1997). As Sydney University’s Workplace Research Centre pointed out, this extension of risk extended beyond the workplace:

… people are now required to absorb more and more financial, social and economic risks (and therefore experiencing much more financial and social stress). These stresses are also not just about labour in production – the historical site of organised labour’s base. They are also about how labour has been much more comprehensively incorporated into economic and financial processes across their working lives. Superannuation, housing, health insurance, education, transportation and so on, have all incorporated labour into an agenda of risk management (Rafferty & Yu, 2010: 4).

The sector of the Australian community most often identified as bearing the brunt of these neo-liberal reforms was the ‘middle’ Australian demographic most typically associated with the aspirational class; that is blue collar ‘old industry’ workers, non-professional white collar workers and those employed in the service and retail industries: “single income couples, often in the suburbs, without university or tertiary qualifications and on incomes which are chronically insecure” (Mackay; 1999: 28). As Craig McGregor argued in 2001, these workers:

Live in the mortgage belts and outer suburbs of the major cities and… represent the segment of the workforce which has been thoroughly dislocated by the new industrial order. Deskilling, unemployment, redundancy, forced re-training, casual work, the forfeiture of award and union protection and a cataclysmic loss of security and upward mobility (McGregor, 2001: 116).

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A core component of the aspirational discourse was to counter dislocations related to this loss of job security and control by focusing on the socially mobile ‘independent contractor’ who, it was argued, had broken the confines of the heavily regulated old labour market and, as rugged individualists, were giving expression to their innate hard-working and entrepreneurial instincts. John Howard referred to this ‘enterprise culture’ as extending to stay at home mothers and mature people exploiting the wealth generating opportunities offered by the modern market:

More and more Australians are looking to work from home with the extra scope this gives them to take care of their families. Increasingly, women and mature- age Australians are at the cutting-edge of this do-it-yourself enterprise culture (Howard cited in Lewis, 2004).

This sector of the Labour market was regularly portrayed as an ‘emerging political and economic class’, an advance party for the modern deregulated labour market, where the collective solidarity of the trade union was superseded by the sovereignty of the individual worker. As the Australian editorial commented in 2007:

The ALP has finally admitted what happened to the legions of hard-working tradesmen and women who once formed the backbone of the party. They have struck out to become independent contractors as the aspirational heart of middle Australia. Unfortunately for the ALP, they have become increasingly loyal to John Howard (The Australian, Editorial, January 10, 2007).

However, contrary to these portrayals, research by the Australian Productivity Commission established that the actual number of independent contractors fell between 1998 and 2004 - a contraction of two percent, while at the same time the proportion of traditional employees swelled (Garnaut, 2006). A more recent study by the Australian Bureau of Statistics found that independent contractors comprised just nine percent of the workforce. Contrary to the mythology of the aspirational discourse, which emphasised the independence and control of the new aspirational entrepreneurial class, this nine percent consisted of 38 percent of contractors who had no authority over their own work and 54 percent who held only one contract. Sixty percent of contractors advised that they had no control over their hours of

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work. Further to this, rather than representing a profound shift in the Australian labour market, the majority of these contractors were confined to the construction industry and professional, scientific and technical services (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2009).

Debt

Deregulation of the financial sector and the advent of easy credit, the rise in consumer spending, combined with speculative equity based borrowing in relation to the property market boom and asset price inflation, contributed to unprecedented levels of household debt. Based on research by the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Australian Buraue of Statistics, over the 18 years from 1990, the total amount of debt owed by Australian households rose almost six-fold. This represented a threefold increase in debt to income ratios, with the 1990 household average of debt equal to half a year’s disposable income rising to one and a half years income by 2006 (Battelino, 2010; Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2009b).

Much of this rise in debt was driven by a housing bubble which saw housing prices double in the period 1996 – 2005 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2004b). During this period, the rate of home ownership remained static from levels recorded a decade earlier, indicating that the increased availability of credit brought on by the deregulation of the financial markets and lower interest rates was “capitalised into housing prices rather than generating a wider spread of owner occupation” (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2004b: 5). These trends were exacerbated by the doubling of house prices in the decade up to 2007, with the median house price in that year comprising 6.1 times the medium income. In 2007 household mortgage bills constituted an unprecedented 35.2 per cent of average income, making Australian housing, by some projections, among the most expensive in the western world (Keenan, 2005; Duffy, 2009). Rises in the amount of housing related debt were mirrored by significant increases in the rate of household credit - incorporating loans for cars and other durables, in addition to credit card debt. During the period 1997-2002 credit card debt grew by 20.9 percent (Singh, McKeown, Myers, Shelley, 2005).

This significant increase in debt was reflected in the national current account figures. Australia’s ballooning current account deficit indicated that standards of living had, to a significant extent, been maintained by borrowing from foreign institutions. Australia’s 110

foreign debt rose from $245 billion in December 1999 to 394 billion in June 2004, that is, from 40.4 percent of GDP to 48.5 percent (Parliament of Australia, 2004). The majority of this debt was consumer and housing related private debt. Hamilton, commenting after Labor’s defeat in the 2004 election, reflected on the implications of this ‘aspirational’ debt and its implications for citizenship and political engagement:

Booming house prices coupled with unprecedented levels of consumer debt have left most Australians absorbed by their own material circumstances, with little room left for thoughts of building a better society. Driven not by financial need but the very aspirationals that Mark Latham has lauded, Australian households are in debt up to their necks and that has meant hundreds of thousands of people have looked at their partners across the kitchen table and said “if interest rates go up by a couple of per cent then we’re stuffed (Hamilton, 2004).

Social attitudes

The factors that I have outlined constituted dislocations to the neo-liberal order to the extent that, subject to the antagonistic articulations of alternative political projects, they impacted on the validity of neo-liberalism’s core prosperity and well being claims, and therefore on the capacity of its myths and social imaginaries to interpellate social agents into its hegemonic order. An overview of a range of social attitudes research undertaken following the ascendancy of neo-liberalism gives some indication of neo-liberalism’s initial failure in this regard. Research into public perceptions and attitudes in regard to the role of government, big business and trade unions; values related to the public interest, fairness and equity; and views as to policy priorities in regard to industrial relations, government spending and taxation, indicate the persistent saliency of the traditional egalitarian ethos and the values and practices most closely associated with the Australian settlement/social democratic order that I outlined in chapter three.

Possibly the most comprehensive study of social attitudes undertaken in the period in question was that by the academic Michael Pusey in 2003. This research involved interviews with approximately four hundred ‘middle income’ Australians on their attitudes to work, family, leisure, well being, politics, social class, government policy and national identity. The

111 responses indicated a range of prevalent attitudes which significantly countered those promoted through the neo-liberal discourse. Pusey’s research found that a majority of ‘middle Australians’:

 Understood that the losers of economic reform outnumber the winners, for the most part by large margins (p34).  Believed that their incomes were variously “hollowing out, stagnating and stretched” (p39).  Held perceptions of wealth distribution which seemed to “excite, rather than calm moral judgments about fairness and equity” (p45).  Recognised, in their own experiences, that the emphasis on production generally, and on reducing labour input costs to production in particular, had ruptured Australia’s uniquely successful way of handling the fair distribution of the costs and rewards of production (p75).  Were a long way from accepting labour market reform, in its own terms, as an economic problem dissociated from politics and society (p75).  Recognised that a deregulated labour market was taking its toll on families (p107).  Recognised the problem of civil society, fraying social ties, impersonality, indifference, retreatism, copping out, incivility and so on, stem more from economic dislocation than from any inherent moral laxity (p110).

A collation of Australian social attitudes as recorded through the Australian Election Surveys from 1987-2003 supported Pusey’s research and suggested a progressive move away over the period from the socially conservative, small-government, free-market, individualist attitudes and values propagated through the neo-liberal discourse (Bramble, 2004: 13). Table 1 summarises the data from the Australian Election Survey’s from 1987 to 2001.

Table 1, Australian Social Attitudes 1987-2003 as cited in Bramble, 2004: Australian Election Survey Questions Percent agreeing 1987 1996 2001 2003 Big business has too much power? 50.9 64.6 71.6 59.6* Trade unions have too much power? 70.5 61.8 47.6 43.9* Australia would be better off without trade ** 25.0 17.0 ** unions?

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Stricter laws should be introduced to regulate 74.2 58.9 49.0 ** trade union activity? Income and wealth should be redistributed 45.7 47.1 55.8 43.7 towards ordinary people? Favour spending more on social services than on 15.0 16.8 30.0 48.0 tax cuts? Favour tax cuts as against spending more on 66.0 57.1 42.0 27.9 social services? High taxes make people less willing to work? 79.9 74.0 59.4 **

* 2003: Question: “Big business/trade unions should have less power?” ** No data available

An analysis of the social attitudes data indicates, as Bramble has noted, that:

... rather than becoming more aspirational… the majority of Australians exhibit a growing concern for the welfare of the broader community. Generally speaking there has been a general shift away from the values and priorities of big business and neo-liberalism towards worker, trade unions and ordinary people. Economic rationalism is a dirty word now and public provision of social services is strongly supported (Bramble, 2004:14).

The findings of this research were backed up by a number of surveys that, in totality, indicated a significant degree of resistance to neo-liberal values, practices and priorities and the ongoing relevance of what can loosely be viewed as egalitarian social-democratic subjectivities:

 In a public survey conducted in 2000 as part of the Australian’s survey of social priorities, the top response chosen out of 16 options was “ensuring everyone has access to good education” and the lowest response was in relation to “maintaining a high standard of living” (Steketee, 2001: 5).  A majority of Australians would be prepared to sacrifice economic growth for a reduction in social inequality (Australian Electoral Survey Poll 2001, cited in Argy, 2003: 121).  A high number of workers would be willing to sacrifice a significant proportion of their pay in order to achieve secure employment (Australian Election Survey Poll 2002, cited in Argy, 2003: 5).

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 Research conducted by the Social Science and Policy Research Unit at the University of New South Wales indicating majority support for the proposition that “too much emphasis is being put on improving the economy and too little on creating a better society” (Saunders, 2002: 74).  A doubling of the percentage of Australians who nominated self-centeredness and intolerance as the worst Australian trait based on a comparison with an identical poll taken in 1953 (Stephens, 2003: 9).  Social research cited by Wilson and Bruesch finding that the number of respondents preferring a reduction in taxes over an increase in social spending fell from 65 percent in 1987 to 42 percent in 2001. This decline corresponded with an increase in the number of respondents who favoured more spending on social services (Wilson and Breusch, 2003: 42).  A university study indicating strong support for modest tax increases to fund higher levels of social expenditure (Baldry and Vinson: 1998).  A University study indicating that Australians were concerned by the reform agenda associated with globalisation, weary of the associated privatisation and deregulation reforms, angry at the reduction in social services, and interested in a stronger government presence in the market to counter the power of big business (cited in Wilson and Turnbull, 2001).

One of the most striking acknowledgements of dislocations in the neo-liberal order was a series of feature articles undertaken in June 2000 by the Australian newspaper, a leading proponent of neo-liberal reforms, in relation to the distribution of income and wealth in Australia after 17 years of economic reform. The series was, in part, a response to the rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party and concerns in relation to perceptions of rising inequality and social divisions. The report referred to research undertaken as part of the series that indicated a strong attachment of the idea of Australia as a middle-class egalitarian society:

Coalition and Labor voters, high income earners and low income city dwellers, and those in the bush, young, old and in between, all post majorities of 2 to 1 or better in favour of the gap between rich and poor reducing rather than overall wealth growing as fast as possible (Steketee, 2000: 5).

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This general concern for the preservation of values related to an egalitarian social imaginary extended to the key social institutions, in particular trade unions. One of the key areas identified by proponents of the new market order and heavily promoted through the aspirational discourse was the view that the prosperity dividend of neo-liberalism had significantly undermined public support for trade unions (Teece, 2002; Murphy, 2007a; Gwynther, 2008). Such views typically cited the decline in trade union membership, a decline that was substantively related to structural factors precipitated by the increased casualisation of the workplace, combined with the associated curtailment of union powers and influence through neo-liberal industrial relations reforms, and, in particular, the move to individual workplace agreements (Peetz, 2006). The aspirational’s rejection of trade unions was employed as proof of the irrelevance of the trade union movement and as a rationale for further reform. As Phillip Teece argued in 2002:

The Labor opposition must prune the trade union movement's influence and slash its links with them. Unions are irrelevant to the new 'aspirational' voter. Young people are not interested in unions. Further 'reform' of workplace relations is essential (Teece, 2002: 3).

However the majority of attitudinal surveys taken through the later 1990s and early 2000s did not reflect such a shift in public opinion (Bearfield, 2003; Leigh, 2005). As the academic, Clive Bean, noted in reviewing these surveys in 2005:

It is interesting to compare contrasting views of unions and big business with similar attitudes expressed in the 1970s and 1980s. Whereas now people want to constrain the power of big business, then (during the 1970s and 1980s) more people believed that unions had too much power…Thus the public’s changing perceptions as recorded in survey data reflect changing social realities (Bean, 2005: 133).

What emerges from this analysis is that neo-liberal representations of the self-sufficient, individualistic and materialistic citizen, sceptical of collective organisations and wholly captive to the logic of the market, are not indicated by a significant body of the social attitudes data. While such data has inherent limitations, there is evidence the neo-liberal penetration of market paradigms with its emphasis on social fluidity, flexibility, efficiency,

115 mobility and consumer choice, failed to counter the widespread sense of displacement, stress and alienation in the community invoked by the ongoing potency of collective, communitarian and egalitarian values. The elite character of the early neo-liberal reforms, as outlined in the previous chapter, meant that when dislocations in social attitudes began to emerge in the 1990s, particularly during the economic downturn of the early years of that decade, there was an absence of neo-liberal mythologies and social imaginaries through which dislocated elements such as ‘fairness’, ‘social equality’, ‘prosperity’ and ‘community’ could be rearticulated back into the hegemonic order.

The predominant response of the political establishment was a reversion to the kind of economic growth narratives typical of the Hawke and Keating governments, which asserted an ‘all boats are rising’ rhetoric in which recognition of social ills such as inequality could be effectively bypassed by an assertion that everyone was now more prosperous. This was manifested in a common strain running through media and political commentary that ‘Australians should stop complaining’ since they ‘have never had it so good’. According to this perspective, Australians were either ignorant of the extent of their own happy circumstance, unable to appreciate its extent due to a pathological predisposition toward cynicism and negativity, or forgetful of the hardships experienced in less prosperous times. Thus for the political commentator Laurie Oakes in an article tellingly titled “It’s the Economy Stupid’, a kind of collective ignorance had clouded the capacity of average Australians to understand how much they had benefited from economic reforms (cited in Davis, 2008: 105). The headline for a story in the Melbourne Age newspaper summed up the somewhat crude and insistent character of this argument: “Stop Your Whingeing. Life is Getting Easier” (Davis, 2008: 105). In effect, social disaffection was addressed through a dry recitation of the economic growth data.

Western Sydney

Having identified broad dislocatory factors impacting on the neo-liberal hegemony, it is necessary to examine social and demographic factors relevant to that demographic with which the aspirational discourse initially was most closely associated: outer metropolitan

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Western Sydney9. This is important in light of the comprehensive political and media focus on the region as representative of a fundamental popular embrace of the neo-liberal agenda. Such claims, as advanced through the aspirational discourse, can be viewed in the context of the hegemonic project to interpellate the working-class sectors of the community most affected by neo-liberal reform. An analysis of the socio-economics of the region however reveals further evidence of the dislocatory factors evident in the wider Australian community. However, contrary to such representations, Western Sydney could be seen to be strongly reflective of the dislocatory factors evident at the national level, with pockets of growth and economic prosperity countered by a broader picture of social inequality, alienation and disadvantage.

The aspirational discourse arose primarily in regard to the Coalition’s success in the 1996 and subsequent 1998 and 2001 federal elections in key Western Sydney metropolitan seats, in particular Macarthur in the outer south west and the greater western Sydney seats of Lindsay and Macquarie. The inability of the Labor party to regain these seats in three successive elections promoted a view that Australian society was undergoing a profound transformation in demographic character and voting behaviour. According to this perspective the traditional working-class Labor voter was renouncing all allegiance to the ‘old’ and ‘outdated’ politics of class and economic redistribution and was endorsing the free-market ethos of competitive individualism. Post-election commentary at the time focused on Labor’s ‘outmoded’ and ‘outdated’ policies, its inability to understand the ‘aspirations’ of mainstream Australia and its subservience to vested interests as contributing factors in Labor’s loss of its ‘heartland’ (Kelly: 2001a; Sheehan, 2000: 32). At an elite level, the Coalition’s victory was portrayed as a triumph for the cause of economic reform and proof of a mainstream shift to liberalism. Thus John Howard’s claim after the 1996 election that:

Liberalism now has an opportunity, unparalleled for almost 50 years, to consolidate a new coalition of support among the broad cross section of the Australian people. It will only prove enduring if liberalism continues to relate its fundamental values and principles to the concerns and aspirations of the

9 Greater Western Sydney had a population of almost 1.8 million at the 2006 Census which makes it Australia's fourth most populous metropolitan area. The region stretches over nearly 9,000 square kilometres of residential, industrial and rural land.

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Australian mainstream, rather than the narrow agenda of elites and special interests (Howard, 1996).

The general pitch of the aspirational discourse posited Western Sydney as the centre for a new class of Australian citizens, representative of a widespread affluence that was facilitating a degree of unprecedented social mobility. Subsequent media interest therefore centred around a socio-demographic analysis of Western Sydney as represented by the new housing estates, rising real estate prices, the sudden appearance of luxury consumer outlets and the fact that, as one commentator put it: “there are too many café lattes being served in Western Sydney” (Wainright, 2001: 1). Mark Latham reflected the general tenor of the coverage:

Globalisation has transformed suburban Sydney - its economic aspirations, its urban form, and its political values. The western suburbs have benefited from this process. Commentators who depict the region as an endless flatland of fibro homes and fringe dwellers do so from a position of ignorance. They are blind to the economic revolution of the 1980s and 1990s and the new politics this has created. It is no longer a question of the west and the rest (Latham, 2003: 110).

Yet such growth, contrary to Latham’s linkage in the example with the aspirational ‘phenomenon’, had historically been a distinguishing feature of Western Sydney ever since the train line was opened up in the early part of the 20th century and the small farms of the Sydney basin gave way to new housing developments and small scale industry (Burchell, 2003: 17). Since that time, Sydney’s west, contrary to the many stereotypes, had been an ever expanding and developing frontier, an economic powerhouse with growth far in excess of the national average (Collins: 200: 58;Gleeson and Randolph, 2002: 5).

However, as with the Australian nation as a whole, this growth could be seen as one component of a more complex picture. The region was notable for the increasing social and spatial segregation consequent to the uneven distribution of the wealth generated through the region’s growth. Thus while there was much focus on the rise of affluent new suburbs within Western Sydney, “what bound the residents of Western Sydney together in policy terms at least was that they were generally less wealthy, less well resourced, less mobile and less healthy than the residents of larger Sydney” (Burchill, 2003: 31). A report by the National

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Economic and Digital Evaluation Model for Planning and Urban Design identified this polarisation:

Greater Western Sydney is becoming much more diverse economically. The region includes some of the most dynamic and poorest areas of Sydney. In general income and educational attainment is below average. On the other hand, some areas are booming and have high rates of growth (2001: 62).

In order to gauge the overall level of disadvantage in the region it is therefore necessary to go beyond the standard assessment of average household income as a means of measuring wealth. Randolph and Gleeson (2002) applied a multi-variant analysis which identified disadvantage as not just constituting socio-economic poverty but a range of factors that constituted social exclusion: that is, a lack of participation in, and moral connection to the socio-economic mainstream. The results of their analysis showed that disadvantage was particularly concentrated in the outer western and south western areas of Sydney:

In certain geographic pockets of Western Sydney, analysis would probably reveal moderate levels of unemployment coupled with a depressing participation rate suggesting flagging community morale and a sense of social distance among inhabitants from the mainstreams of Australian life. Moreover those in work may be in low value, casualised forms of employment and they may be highly conscious of their inferior workforce status (Randolph and Gleeson, 2002: 14).

The report also found localised poverty and housing stress, increases in some forms of crime in particular areas, a generally strengthening climate of fear about crime, traffic congestion, immobility and transport poverty, dilapidated and increasingly blighted public spaces and facilities, and growing locational disadvantage such as a lack of access to basic services and activities.

It is in this context of general disadvantage that micro-pockets of middle-income and wealthy residential developments arose, particularly in the new suburbs. These developments provided the principal focus for the Western Sydney aspirational discourse. An Urban Frontiers Program report on population structure and change in Western Sydney (2002: 102) identified ten post-1996 suburbs or ‘privatopias’ in Greater Western Sydney

119 distinguished by relative affluence compared with the rest of the region, with high proportions of predominantly white collar workers, managers, professionals and administrators earning on average double the average for the region. These more affluent pockets were surrounded by a hierarchy of suburbs which could be ranked socio- economically in relation to how recently they had been developed. At the most extreme edge of this trend were the gated security complexes and semi-gated communities, distinguished by the provision of exclusive amenities and services, which allowed residents to exclude themselves from what many saw as an increasingly run down and crime dominated public realm. In the popular press, the inhabitants of these gated communities constituted a core element of the aspirational discourse, emerging from their secluded enclaves to constitute a ‘new class’:

Today the region once renowned for cheap housing is being remade with lavish homes created by self made millionaires. And remodelled with luxury estates designed to meet the needs of up-graders who have acquired significant wealth… Smithfield resident Wally Muhieddine says there’s nothing more levelling than driving his Turbo Porsche past residents walking their goats on the way to his million dollar property (Huffer, 2004).

At the lower end of this cohort, these sub-regional patterns of development represented the modern expression of what was, in substance, a continuation of the ‘mortgage belt’ suburban demographic; that is young first home buying families seeking affordable housing on the urban fringe, typically heavily in debt to their mortgage. Indeed insecurity related to debt levels was cited as a major reason for the success of the Howard government in winning heartland Labor seats in Western Sydney. As Toohey commented at the time:

One of the common themes among Labor campaign analysts is that voters, particularly in Western Sydney, have borrowed heavily for housing and other purposes. With job insecurity rife, the Coalition found fertile ground merely by reminding voters how high interest rates climbed while Keating was treasurer. Although specific figures are not available, Labor campaign workers say many voters in Western Sydney carry debt levels well above the national average (Toohey, 2001).

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The aspirational rebadging of this group essentially involved the jettisoning of the ‘debt as liability’ factor which had, prior to the emergence of the aspirational, made for what had amounted to a rather prosaic characterisation of the mortgage belt. Instead the aspirational discourse promoted the ‘ownership’ rather than the debt aspects of the outer suburban housing market. As Green observed, the difference was one of characterisation:

Ten years ago when interest rates were in the high teens, we would have called these seats the mortgage belt. In today’s advertising jargon, spin doctors want to talk about the aspirational voters of the outer suburbs. Whatever you call them, there is no doubt that the outer suburbs are full of the sort of voters whose financial position, based on the balances between their incomes and expenses, is more important than their past political patterns (Green, 2003: 3).

The picture, rather than one of ‘generational’ and widespread affluence, was rather one of relative socio-economic polarisation. To those inhabitants of the west who were not wealthy, the move to debt-serviced bigger houses on the suburban fringe and to increasingly insular ‘private’ communities reflected a sense of social unease which could be traced to a gradual rundown of the public sphere, associated to a significant extent with neo-liberal reforms (Butcher, 2008). This phenomenon has been seen as representative of a culture of anxiety whereby individuals put themselves under considerable financial pressure to avoid the use of public services and facilities increasingly stigmatised as ‘residual’, and to secure themselves from exposure to the effects of social breakdown. As one resident of Harrington Park, a master planned housing estate near Camden interviewed on ABC radio remarked:

We actually left Holdsworthy because Holdsworthy was turning into a not very nice place. There’s a lot of cheap housing in there, and there’s lots of single parent families and there was always, like gangs walking the street at night, and it actually got to the point where we were getting glass bottles thrown into our backyard and that was it, it was time to go (Morton, 2002).

Gleeson has pointed to the mounting anxiety and insecurity that has contributed to this phenomenon and associated it with neo-liberal reform:

At the broadest scale, the transformation of suburban Australia reflects the long term project of neo-liberal restructuring that has been pursued by Australian

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governments since the early 1980s and which has led to new cleavages and tensions in the social and geographic fabric of the nation. In the past decade a new intensive round of restructuring of state services has seen the contraction of the public sphere and a new political emphasis on self provision (albeit some of it publicly subsidized, especially and perversely for the better off). This complex mix of successive structural changes has deepened social insecurities. These anxieties are distilled, along with the yearnings for community, in the heady mix of dream weaving and dream believing that now frames the sale of commodity communities in suburban Australia (Gleeson, 2003: 8).

What emerges from this picture of Western Sydney was reflective of the broad socio- economic stratifications that could be seen to be occurring on a national level. That is, increasing social and spatial polarisation at the sub-regional level related to a concurrent increase in both income growth and poverty (Harding, 2001). This polarisation was driven by neo-liberal reforms which, in withdrawing funds and resources from the public sector and promoting the private sector, contributed to what amounted to a ghettoisation effect whereby significant sectors of the community disassociated themselves both from public services - schools, health services, public transport, etc - and perceived law and order problems associated with the more disadvantaged sectors of the community. As Randolph and Gleeson remarked:

We point to a more insidious and less passive influence which is the tendency of many policy interventions and funding shifts in recent years to exacerbate the inequalities that ordinarily arise from market interactions. In particular shifts in Commonwealth education, welfare, health and labour market policies have contributed to the polarization (Gleeson and Randolph, 2002: 13).

This picture is further complicated by research by Healy and Birrel (2003) linking the increasing divide in Sydney between rich and poor with associated overlays of ethnic divisions. According to the Healy and Birrel thesis, there were two Sydneys; one dominated by a middle arc of low to moderate income non-English speaking migrant communities in west and south western suburbs such as Fairfield, Auburn and Bankstown, and the other comprised of an inner arc of established affluent areas and an outer arc of predominantly English speaking ‘aspirational’ areas on the metropolitan periphery. They argue that the principal demographic dynamic was an increasing ethnic segregation whereby Australian

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born residents were increasingly moving from the middle arc areas to the urban fringe and being replaced by a large component of the new migrant intake. This phenomenon has been termed ‘white flight’; that is, predominantly Australian born families moving from neighbourhoods with large migrant populations amid perceptions of rising crime and social breakdown, for perceived safe havens on the city fringe (Millet, 2002, 8). Thus while over half the population of Fairfield and Auburn were born overseas, only one in five residents of the population of the ‘aspirational’ Western Sydney metropolitan suburb of Penrith were born overseas, and a majority of these were migrants from the United Kingdom (Burchell, 2003: 34). ABS data analysed by Healy and Birrel indicate that many of these ‘in-movers’ to the ‘aspirational’ fringe were in the moderate to high-income group. In other words the ‘social mobility’ ascribed through the aspirational discourse: that is the movement of working/lower middle-class individuals into the affluent middle-class, might more realistically refer to a substantial amount of already affluent middle-class people migrating to the Western Sydney suburban fringe from areas closer to the city.

Socio-economic and racial divisions of this kind were at odds with the social mobility and prosperity identified through the aspirational discourse. The increasing existence of ‘private affluence and public squalor’, a heavily debt leveraged housing boom, the fragmentation of local communities, the pervasive sense of fear and insecurity and the alienation and disenfranchisement of large sectors of Western Sydney residents did not accord with social ‘reality’ promoted through the aspirational discourse. As one resident of Western Sydney remarked in relation to the social mobility rhetoric of Mark Latham:

Mark should be giving us hope, because what he’s saying is definitely not the reality… aspirational voters are those people who have the resources and the funds already, not those who have nothing. They are socially disadvantaged people who struggle every day. That’s what I live in every day in Blacktown (Morton, 2002).

The socio-economics of Western Sydney suggest that, contrary to its popular portrayal as representative of a ‘new affluence’ and ‘unprecedented social mobility’, the region was more realistically representative of the increasing socio-economic divisions evident across Australia as a whole. In this context, the hegemonic function of the aspirational discourse was to align the values and aspirations of the traditional working-class, that is those sections

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of the community identified as having been affected most severely by the neo-liberal reform agenda, with neo-liberal interests.

Conclusion

This chapter has sought to give an overview of a range of data that can be viewed as indicative of dislocations to the neo-liberal order. As I have argued, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that, particularly at the time of the emergence of the aspirational discourse in the late 1990s, neo-liberalism had failed to sufficiently hegemonise its social order and that as a result large sections of the community were highly susceptible to the articulations of alternative political projects. The picture emerging was one of increasing structural impacts on families and individuals, greater social inequality, work related stresses, increasing levels of debt, and the fracturing of the ‘public sphere’ through the reversion to privatised and user-pays modes of service provision. As I outlined in the previous chapter, the predominantly economic, technocratic discourses through which neo-liberalism was initially articulated in Australia, predicated in large part on the fetishisation of select macro- economic data, failed to counter the ongoing saliency of egalitarian/social democratic discursive frameworks. Furthermore, the depoliticised element in this discourse - as represented through the Hawke and Keating governments’ preference for consensus politics - meant that large sections of the community believed that they had been disenfranchised when the effects of social-economic restructuring were felt.

In this context I will now move on to an analysis of the political response to the dislocations outlined in chapters four and five, dislocations which by the time the Howard Coalition government came to power in 1996 had reached a high point. Reflecting the productive character of dislocation; that is, its opening up of discursive spaces through which new political agents and discourses can emerge (Laclau, 1990: 60), the political dynamics of this period were characterised by the emergence of new counter-hegemonic populist projects seeking to articulate dislocated discursive elements, and neo-liberal hegemonic projects seeking to suture dislocations through the production of new myths. The following chapter is concerned with analysing these dynamics as they relate to the eventual adoption of the aspirational discourse as a neo-liberal myth of citizenship.

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Chapter Six

Filling the lack; the political response

In the period following the election of the Howard Coalition government in 1996, the Labor party’s failure to hegemonise core aspects of its neo-liberal agenda and to articulate compelling myths of citizenship in response to the dislocations that were becoming more evident from the late 1980s had opened up the ground for the articulation of populist political discourses. In accordance with the discursive tensions and contestations identified in chapter three, a key focus of these new political projects would be related to conceptions of the legitimate role of government, the most effective forms of social organisation, and concepts of fairness and equality. The most dominant factor impacting on these contestations was the enduring validity of the value of Australian egalitarianism. As Kapferer and Morris note, what was most striking about the 1996-98 period was the “intensity of nationalist egalitarian discourse”, that is, a renewed emphasis on concepts of national identity, centring on values of fairness and social equality, in the wake of neo-liberal restructuring (Kapferer and Morris, 2003: 94).

In this chapter I will examine the three principal party political responses to these dislocations - those of the Labor party, the Liberal-National Coalition and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party. The stellar rise of the populist right-wing One Nation party following the 1996 election emphasised the extent of the social dislocations evident at the time. One Nation’s shattering of the political ‘consensus’ in regard to the neo-liberal reform agenda, in addition to its rejection of multicultural Australia, effectively polarised the Australian political landscape, driving a wedge between the 'winners' and 'losers' of neo-liberal reforms and acting as an impetus for the articulation of new populist discourses. For Labor and the Coalition, the political imperative would be to counter Hanson through new articulations of the neo-liberal order.

Before examining the respective political responses, I will focus on the function of populist discourses in articulating exclusive representations of the social order in circumstances where there has been a suppression of the antagonistic realm of the kind evident in Labor’s 125

reversion to a technocratic/managerial form of governance, combined with its depoliticisation of issues of social identity. I will then move on to a consideration of the principal components of a populist discourse as outlined by Laclau: the identification of a ‘lack’, the construction of equivalential poles through the construction of a political mainstream (‘the people’), and the identification of a range of social antagonisms in relation to which the hegemonic identity is defined and distinguished.

The suppression of antagonisms and the emergence of populist politics

The downfall of the Keating government in the 1996 was, in part, a result of its suppression of the antagonistic realm. Along the lines suggested by Mouffe (2005) following Carl Schmitt, an acknowledgement of the intrinsically antagonistic nature of the political is essential to any notion of a pluralist democracy. The suppression of antagonisms therefore constitutes a fundamental sterilisation of the political realm. As such, politics is liable to revert to a banal functionalism in which government is conceived as little more than the rational administrator of given (essential) ‘truths’, typically rendered through the instrumental and apolitical application of the organisational principles of management (‘administrative efficiency’, ‘sound economic management’, etc). This typically manifests in the promotion of ‘consensual dialogues’ that make no allowance for the importance of political identifications to the democratic process. As Mouffe argues:

Theorists who want to eliminate passions from politics and argue that democratic politics should be understood only in terms of reason, moderation and consensus are showing their lack of understanding of the dynamics of the political. They do not see that democratic politics needs to have a real purchase on people’s desires and fantasies and that, instead of opposing interests to sentiments and reason to passions, it should offer forms of identifications conducive to democratic practices. Politics has always has a partisan dimension and for people to be interested in politics they need to have the possibility of choosing between parties offering real alternatives (Mouffe, 2005: 28-29).

A denial of antagonism in pursuit of ‘partisan-free democracy’, rather than negating such antagonisms, heightens the potential that they will be redirected to other more exploitative

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and crude forms of politics – a polarised ‘we’ versus ‘they’ form of politics, constructed primarily on the ‘friend-enemy’ dichotomy suggested by Schmitt (1976). Mouffe asserts the irreducible nature of political antagonism, substituting Schmitt’s concept of the ‘enemy’ with that of the ‘adversary’ and argues that if the adversarial configuration is missing:

... passions cannot be given a democratic outlet and the agonistic (adversarial) dynamics of pluralism are hindered. The danger arises that the democratic confrontation will therefore be replaced by a confrontation between essentialist forms of identification or non-negotiable moral values…disaffection sets in and one witnesses the growth of other types of collective identities around nationalist, religious or ethnic forms of identification (Mouffe, 2005: 30).

The rise to power of the Coalition government was, in part, related to its leader, John Howard’s, capacity to recognise the political malaise induced by the inadequacy of Labor’s largely technocratic and administrative discourse of governance and its ‘moral’ quarantining of issues of social and cultural identity. This was also recognised by various nascent political groupings, the most important of which was Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party, in addition to elements within the Labor party. The shift would constitute populist attempts to exploit cleavages in values and identity precipitated by neo-liberal reforms and the suppression of the antagonistic realm. This would in large part involve the referencing of historically embedded traditions, rituals and myths as a means of invoking an ‘authentic’ Australian identity, set in opposition to a range of non-authentic identities equivalentially articulated as an antagonistic ‘other’. In this, the populist projection of a mainstream identity was crucial. As Canovan has observed:

Populism is not just a reaction against power structures but an appeal to a recognised authority. Populists claim legitimacy on the grounds that they speak for the people: that is to say, they claim to represent the democratic sovereign, not a sectional interest such as an economic class (Canovan cited in Bishop and Davis, 2001: 193-4).

Laclau develops a concept of populism that moves away from its standard presentation as mere crude and manipulative rhetoric and its identification with specific class interests, and rather identifies it as “constitutive of the political” (Laclau, 2005: 68). He outlines three

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significant structural dimensions of populism: the unification of a plurality of demands in an equivalential chain; the constitution of an internal frontier dividing society into two camps; and the consolidation of the equivalential chain through the construction of a popular identity which is something qualitatively more than the simple summation of the equivalential links (Laclau, 2005: 87). Its success or otherwise will depend on its capacity to transcend the particular class interests with which it is initially associated and “give successive concrete contents a sense of temporal continuity” (Laclau, 2005: 76). The premise for the generation of a populist discourse is the identification of a ‘lack’:

The frustration of a series of social demands makes possible the movement from isolated democratic demands to equivalential popular ones. One first dimension of the break is that, at its root, there is the experience of lack, a gap which has emerged in the harmonious continuity of the social. There is a fullness in the community which is missing. This is decisive. The construction of ‘the people’ will be the attempt to give a name to that absent fullness. Without this initial breakdown of something in the social order, however minimal that something could initially be, there is no possibility of antagonism, frontier, or ultimately ‘the people’. This initial experience is not only however an experience of lack. Lack as we have seen, is linked to a demand which is not met. But this involves bringing into the picture the power that has not met the demand. A demand is always addressed to somebody (Laclau, 2005: 85).

The movement from the Hawke/Keating governments to the succeeding Howard/Hanson period was one from equivalential relations of difference, that is democratic demands that were legitimate in their diversity and particularities, to popular demands of equivalence in which the interests of one group was identified with the whole. This involves a ‘radical exclusion’ in the communitarian space, characterised by “the rejection of a power that is very active within the community” (Laclau, 2005: 82) and the affirmation of exclusive notions of identity; that is, identities defined through their opposition to a non-legitimate ‘other’. Such a rejection requires the “identification of all links in the popular chain with an identity principle which crystallizes differential claims around a common denominator” (Laclau, 2005: 82). Such an ‘identity principle’ is conveyed as a positive symbolic expression.

The technocratic governance of the Labor party and its failure to adequately link its reform agenda with a coherent and accessible articulation of national identity, combined with the 128

social and economic effects of neo-liberal reforms, effectively constituted the ‘lack’ that Laclau identifies. In the period following the election of the Howard Coalition government, the essentially inclusive approach of Labor was substituted with the political construction of an antagonistic horizon of ‘un-Australian’ identities - migrants, welfare dependents, trade unionists, indigenous groups, elites and other minority or special interest groups - all of who were pitted against the interests of the legitimate ‘mainstream’. The politics of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation on one side, and the Howard Coalition and the Labor party under the influence of Mark Latham on the other, constituted two variations of this populist response.

What came to be called ‘Hansonism’ constituted a counter-hegemonic movement grounded in a populist construction of the “people’ through which essentially working-class and disadvantaged regional community interests were equated with the authentic Australian ‘mainstream’- rendered most typically through the nodal points: ‘one nation’ and ‘real Australians’. Hanson was momentarily successful in unifying a number of disaffected groups through the populist construction of notions of authentic national identity that acted as a surface of inscription for diverse social demands. Her right-wing nationalism was forged through an anti-establishment rhetoric in which the nodal point of the ‘elites’ generated antagonistic equivalential relations between interests associated with the neo-liberal reform agenda, the social democratic welfare state, and ‘multicultural Australia’- all of which were implicated in the production of the social ‘lack’. Though Hanson targeted an array of ‘non- legitimate’ minority and special interests, the focus of her attack was the economic and social elites who were implicated in the neo-liberal reforms of the 1980s and early 1990s.

While Hanson’s populism conformed to the most typical form of populism in regard to its hostility to the dominant neo-liberal order and its attempt “to constitute an order in the midst of anomie and dislocation” (Laclau, 2005: 122), the populist elements within the Howard discourse constituted that form of populism in which the dominant class reasserts its hegemony against the preceding order, in this case various embedded elements most closely identified with the previous social democratic/welfare state, which it portrays as dominant, elitist and oppressive. In this respect Laclau distinguishes between populism of the dominating classes and populism of the dominated classes. The dominant class is distinguished through its perpetual hegemonic task of addressing the alienation and disaffection of the dominated classes and this is typically pursued through right-wing forms of populism which “constitute the complex of interpellations which express the people/power 129

bloc contradiction as distinct from a class contradiction” (Laclau, 1977: 167). Laclau points out that populism, though typically constituting opposition to the dominant ideology, is not always revolutionary:

When the dominant bloc experiences a profound crisis because a new fraction seeks to impose its hegemony but is unable to do so within the existing structure of the power bloc, one solution can be a direct appeal by this fraction to the masses to develop their antagonism toward the state (Laclau, 1977: 173).

This would involve the creation of a mass movement which would:

Develop the potential antagonism of popular interpellations, but articulated in a way which would obstruct its orientation in any revolutionary direction (Laclau, 1977: 173).

The populist element within the Howard discourse and the Labor party in opposition can be seen to relate to the need for the neo-liberal power block, in the face of structural dislocation, to reassert its hegemony through a direct attack on those interests associated with the ‘old order’ that had retained a degree of power and influence under the neo-liberal power block. This old order, as I have argued, consituted concepts of government, citizenship and values of national identity associated broadly with the post-war social democratic welfare state and the core practices and values intrinsic to the ‘Australian settlement’. In the context of a neo- liberal agenda, the focus would be on the (non-economic) cultural, intellectual, bureaucratic and social ‘elites’ identified most typically with the institutions of the social democratic state, and the plethora of equivalentially articulated ‘minority interests’ who were implicated in the production of the ‘lack’.

I will now move on to a detailed consideration of the three major political responses to the dislocations that by 1996 were reconfiguring the Australian political landscape, beginning with the political phenomenon of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party.

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Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party and the revolt against neo-liberalism

Pauline Hanson and her One Nation party came to prominence following Hanson’s election as the independent federal member for the Queensland seat of Oxley at the 1996 election. The owner of a fish and chip shop and a single mother, her brand of populist politics succeeded in capturing large sections of the Australian community who were seen to be alienated and disenfranchised by the mainstream political establishment and the neo-liberal reform agenda. In the 1998 election support for One Nation constituted 8.45% in the federal election, making it the largest political presence behind the Labor and Coalition parties (Curthoys and Johnson, 1998: 97). Much of Hanson’s support came from disaffected rural and outer suburban voters, largely working-class people who constituted “a large and in all likelihood growing component of the community that is both disenchanted, feels disenfranchised and is relatively highly mobile” (Jupp, 1998: 745).

The ‘lack’ identified in Hanson’s political discourse constituted a lament for a kind of homogenous, anglicised white Australia, defined through anti-elite, egalitarian values of social equality, fairness (‘the fair go’) and ‘sameness’ (‘the average Australian’); an amalgam of the values that had constituted a core component of traditional notions of Australian national identity. Hanson’s nostalgia for an ‘authentic’ Australian identity conveyed through traditional cultural mythologies and values was juxtaposed with the transformatory social and cultural effects of globalisation and the dislocations wrought by neo-liberal economic reforms - deregulation, privatisation, industry restructuring, economic rationalism - which, she argued, had not only significantly impacted on the lives of ordinary Australians but effectively disenfranchised them from the democratic process. The core paradigm for Hanson was the loss of identity felt by Australians wedded to the economic stability of the post-war years.

In her maiden speech to parliament Hanson employed a ‘reverse discrimination’ argument as a means of both invoking the equality principle of Australian egalitarianism while railing against the privileged rights of minority groups, in particular indigenous Australians. Recent governments she argued:

… are encouraging separatism in Australia by providing opportunities, land, moneys and facilities available only to Aboriginals. Along with millions of

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Australians, I am fed up to the back teeth with the inequalities that are being promoted by the government and paid for by the taxpayer under the assumption that Aborigines are the most disadvantaged people in Australia. I do not believe that the colour of one’s skin determines whether you are disadvantaged (Jackman, 1998: 168).

According to Hanson, ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ Australians, characterised by common-sense, hard-work, loyalty and mateship, were under threat from a new global order of illegitimate out-groups: professional and bureaucratic elites, special interest groups, immigrants and racial minorities, who had taken control of the national agenda and were steadily eroding its authentic identity and egalitarian ideals. The new world order that they represented was viewed as undemocratically shrouding itself in an arcane and impenetrable technocratic language of economic maxims, human rights dogmas and managerial processes. As Kapferer and Morris noted:

Hanson took the position that the agents of the state, in coalition with the old and new political and economic elites were subjecting the ordinary population (the taxpayer) to illegitimate hardships that defied egalitarian ideals. In Hanson’s view, it was a world of “fat cats, bureaucrats and do-gooders who took advantage of ordinary tax payers who effectively lost their money to the support of ‘aborigines, multiculturalists and a host of minority groups’, their taxes funding the increase in power and position of already dominant groups (Kapferer and Morris, 2003: 94).

In place of this taxpayer subsidisation of ‘fat cats, bureaucrats and do-gooders’, Hanson argued for a traditional form of state interventionism which focused on the fostering of local communities, employment and industries. In her maiden speech she variously referred to Australia’s rising unemployment rate, the fall in living standards and rise in national debt due to neo-liberal reforms, the damaging effects of privatisation, and the need for the re- introduction of trade protection and, most particularly, tariffs (Goot, 2005: 4). In this sense her rejection of neo-liberalism involved a harking back to the nation building ethos of the ‘Australian settlement’ and led to her being dismissed by the political right as a ‘socialist’ and ‘economic nationalist’ (Rowe, 1998).

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Much of the mainstream focus on Hanson concentrated on what was popularly perceived to be her racism and her persecution of ‘privileged’ minority groups. She was subjected to extreme condemnation in the popular press and her lack of intellectual sophistication was regularly the subject of ridicule. Her enduring popularity, beyond her original notoriety, took many sections of the establishment by surprise and opened up a national debate concerned with determining whether Australia was, at core, a racist nation. The nature of this debate exposed the level of disconnect between elite and popular opinion in Australia at the time. As Jakubowicz has observed “the level of community angst about cultural diversity had borne an inverse relationship to the unanimity of cogent argument advanced by national and cultural leaders and their capacity to have their perspectives carried in the media” (Jakubowicz, 1997: 210). The elite dismissal of One Nation’s politics as simply an ignorant and unrepresentative form of right-wing racism and ‘agrarian socialism’ effectively led to a failure to properly consider the substantive grievances fuelling her support. This in turn reflected the political malaise that I have outlined in chapter four whereby matters of economic reform and cultural/national identity were increasingly subject to depoliticised instrumental/moral modes of governance. The journalist, Margo Kingston, referred to her own re-evaluation of Hansonism having received a letter from a member of the public responding to her denunciation of One Nation and its supporters:

You have lamented the so called Pauline Hanson phenomenon, saying that Queenslanders are mostly good, tolerant people – amongst other such patronising comments. You expressed your contempt and dismay over the consequent rising tide of social discontent – inter alia racism and its perceived concomitant, unemployment. On Monday night you spoke with passion about “media ownership”, yet what was the point of free speech when media has not addressed the real issues of the day – anxiety about unemployment and the disenfranchisement of large sectors of society through the diminution of standards of living. This media neglect is a significant factor in the rise of Hansonism. Instead of academic arguments about Aussie ‘tolerance’ and ‘fair play’... and the sense of abhorrence which goes with racism, you could more productively question the status quo in this country that gives rise to division and bigotry (Kingston, 2000: 3).

The grievance that informed a major part of One Nation’s rhetoric in essence constituted a poorly articulated lament for the fracturing of local communities and livelihoods attendant to

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neo-liberal economic reform. The decline in the manufacturing sector, the loss of jobs attendant to industry restructuring, the economic and social decline of rural regions - all contributed to a sense of dispossession and a striking out against those ‘inauthentic’ interests perceived to be the beneficiaries of the new order. Notwithstanding the racial and minority interest scapegoating of Hanson, it was clear that it was the ‘elites’ and the global neo-liberal economic order that they represented that constituted the primary antagonistic identity in the Hanson discourse. This was stated explicitly in the book: ‘Pauline Hanson, The Truth’, as published by Hanson’s supporters shortly after her rise to prominence:

Ordinary Australians do have a common enemy, but it is not aborigines, Asians or people of any particular colour race or creed. Our common oppressors are a class of raceless, placeless cosmopolitan elites who are exercising almost absolute power over us; like black spiders above the wheels of industry, they are spinning the webs of our destiny (Brompton, 1997: 155).

The ‘sameness and equality’ prescribed through the Australian egalitarian social imaginary was effectively destroyed by the privileged interests of these non-authentic identities. It was thus principally to these interests that the ‘lack’ was assigned and the social demands targeted. Hanson’s maiden political speech was distinguished by her direct linking of these elites to the neo-liberal economic agenda and her challenge to some of its core elements:

In response to my call for equality for all Australians, the most noisy criticism came from the fat cats, bureaucrats and do-gooders. They screamed the loudest because they stand to lose the most - their power, money and position, all funded by ordinary Australian tax payers…If this government wants to be fair dinkum then it most stop kowtowing to financial markets, international organizations, world bankers, investment companies and big business people…The government must be imaginative enough to become involved in the short term at least in job creating projects that will help establish the foundation for a resurgence of national development and enterprise (Dodd, 1997: 22).

This targeting of neo-liberalism and its identification with elitism, inequity, inequality and a betrayal of fundamental Australian values, marked the first notable political articulation of the disconnect between the key precepts of the neo-liberal discourse and the concerns of a large sector of the Australian community. Hanson was able to ‘politicise’ a discourse that

134 had, hitherto, largely been ideologically quarantined as ‘technical’, ‘neutral’ and therefore subject to mainstream political ‘consensus’. The simple logic and values of ‘ordinary Australians’ were offered as the anecdote to the duplicitous rationalisations of the elites and the illegitimate minority group interests with which they were equivalentially articulated. The repression of social antagonism under Hawke and Keating had effectively circumvented any substantial democratic vetting of neo-liberal reforms. In the face of radical social, economic and cultural change, this led to the popular puncturing of the ‘elite’ consensus. As Jakubowicz observed, “in a sense something like Hanson had to happen. Ever since the… global restructuring of the early 70s there has been a subterranean shock wave working itself through the body politic” (Jakubowicz, 1997: 109).

Hanson’s ultimate downfall was, in large part, related to the failure of the ever expanding equivalential relations generated through her discourse of dispossession and powerlessness, to override the differential identities of those associated with her party. Following Laclau: ‘the more extended the equivalential chain, the less natural the articulation between the links and the more unstable the identity of the enemy” (Laclau, 2005: 231). As the relations of equivalence expanded to incorporate ever more divergent disaffected social groups, so the capacity of nodal points within the Hanson discourse – ‘ordinary Australians’, the ‘real Australia’, ‘one nation’, ‘common sense’, ‘egalitarianism’ - to maintain these equivalential links dissolved. The initial political project to exploit widespread social disaffection through a political discourse largely determined through Hanson’s anti-elite, egalitarian and nationalist agenda, was subsumed by its evolving status as a magnet for disaffection of all kinds: from men’s groups bemoaning the family law system, to hard right nationalists with links to violent para-military groups. The capacity of fear, paranoia and prejudice to dominate the Hanson discourse and, in doing so, destroy the equivalential logic of her invocation of the ‘ordinary Australian’, was evident in the radical dystopian projections of the One Nation book “the Truth’, which conjured an Australia in 2050 in which the ‘president’ will be:

Poona Li Hung. Ms Hung, a lesbian, is of multiracial descent, of Indian and Chinese background and was felt by the World Government to a most suitable president. She is also part machine, the first cyborg president. Her neuro-circuits were produced by a joint Korean-Indian-Chinese research team” (Hanson et al, 1997: 159).

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By the year 2000, with increased public attention on its more extreme positions and political affiliations, One Nation members became embroiled in internal conflict related to the values, purpose and membership of the party and its support base dissolved accordingly. Nonetheless, Hanson had exposed the problems besetting the neo-liberal order and was the first to prominently open up dialogues in relation to the effects of its reform agenda on national identity and values. Hanson effectively politicised a widespread sense of dispossession of identity within the community, a dispossession that was all the more devastating because it had not in essence been submitted to democratic scrutiny. Followers of One Nation:

Felt they no longer understood their society and what it stood for, and many of them felt they were being told they no longer belonged to it. They couldn’t make head or tail of the political discourse and no one could explain it to them or even wanted to, let alone help them join the brave new world their elites insisted was inevitable (Kingston, 2000: 5).

The absence of the invocation of a distinctive mythology of national identity that drew on traditional notions of nationhood while at the same time aligning itself with the core precepts of neo-liberalism was at the core of people’s failure to ‘make head or tail of the political discourse’. The rational and technocratic language of the Keating government, combined with the language of cultural diversity, civil rights and social justice that accompanied its more progressive social agenda, failed to connect with the everyday experiences of a large number of Australians. The uprooting of identity that accompanied neo-liberal economic reform was compounded by complimentary cultural policies emphasising values of ‘plurality’, ‘diversity’ and ‘tolerance’. At a time of rapid structural change, such an approach intrinsically depoliticised issues of culture and identity, placing people everywhere and nowhere; in a mix of cultures and in no one culture. As a consequence the “humanity that comes from answering the political question of who are you” was forfeited (Lattas, 2001: 231). The historian, Henry Reynolds, described the sense among Hanson supporters that government and its essential political functions were in retreat to a form of bureaucratic administration that was divorced and ignorant of the real needs of the people (Reynolds, 1998: 144). In the public meetings that Hanson convened around the country, Reynolds reported that her audiences felt “brought back into the political system”, “re-enfranchised” with their “potency restored” (Reynolds, 1998: 147). In this context, Lattas has described one

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dimension of Hanson’s appeal as involving her capacity “to call difference back into play in the scene of public affairs…to call politics back into being” (Lattas, 2001: 231).

Hanson’s politics sought to attack the routine predictability of the Australian political climate. Though she was vilified as posing a “quasi-fascist threat to the Australian way of life” (Switzer, 2003: 3) and focused much of her attack on ‘privileged’ minority groups within Australia, such minority groups were generally characterised as pawns in the ‘elite policy makers’ agenda. Hanson in essence sought to exploit dislocations in the ‘fairness’ discourse of neo-liberalism by appealing to disaffected groups who were able to recognise themselves as the simple, average, honest and authentic Australian’s whose values, identity and interests had been neglected throughout 13 years of neo-liberal reform.

The widespread nature of Hanson’s support and the penetration of her anti-neo-liberal discourse transformed the Australian political landscape and gave significant impetus to the neo-liberal hegemonic project to generate new myths of citizenship which incorporated the dislocated elements cited by Hanson. In relation to the response of both the Howard Coalition and elements in the Labor party, this involved appropriating aspects of Hanson’s conservative populist agenda while assiduously eradicating that part of her discourse which directly attacked the economic elites and, ipso facto, the neo-liberal order. As the editorial of the left of centre political journal, Arena, stated:

The political demise of Pauline Hanson and the marginalisation of the party she founded, while no doubt inconvenient to those involved, didn’t stop Hanson’s policy vision from being realised. It’s now clear that Hanson and One Nation, far from being a political throw back, prefigured the politics that was to come. (Arena Magazine, Editorial, 2006.)

I will now move on to a consideration of the mainstream political response to Hanson and the dislocations to the neo-liberal order that by 1996 were becoming increasing evident, beginning with the Howard government’s populist embrace of an egalitarian mythology linked to a range of conservative values and national myths, the logic of which eventually led to its adoption of the aspirational discourse. I will then move on to a consideration of the Labor party’s articulation of the aspirational discourse as a means of reconciling its support for neo-liberal reforms with its traditional egalitarian/social democratic platform.

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The Howard Coalition government; the conservative panacea

The particular combination of economic rationalism and populist cultural politics characteristic of the Howard government has elsewhere been designated as “Howardism” (Greenfield and Williams, 2002: 27). Howardism constituted a rigorous political response to the dislocations that I have outlined and to the political dynamics provoked through the rise to prominence of One Nation. In the face of widespread social insecurity attendant to the neo- liberal reform agenda, Howard pursued a form of social conservatism and cultural nationalism that entailed a recognition of the need to address social anxieties by invoking the values, symbols and mythologies of the past, as both a bulwark against the uncertainties of the future and as a counterpoint to Labor’s socially progressive and ‘elite’ technocratic form of government. Howard’s eventual adoption of the aspirational discourse reflected tensions between his endorsement of the neo-liberal reform agenda and his articulation of a traditional egalitarian social imaginary, in particular through his initial appropriation of the mythology of the ‘battler’; a mythology of citizenship historically associated in Australia with the political left. The aspirational discourse addressed these tensions by presenting a positive mythology of free-market citizenship and, in doing so, reconciling various neo-liberal values, logics and practices with elements of the traditional egalitarian discourse.

The Coalition’s landslide victory in the federal election of 1996 was overwhelmingly portrayed as resulting from the defection of large numbers of working and lower middle-class voters to the Coalition, that is a ‘blue collar revolt’ (Singleton, Martin, Ward, 1998: 24). These voters were tagged ‘Howard’s battlers’. Howard’s success was, in large part, based on his ‘small target’ election strategy in which he played down his dedication to the neo-liberal economic reform agenda and instead adopted elements of the Hanson populist discourse. Howard cited a ‘downtrodden mainstream’,“repressed by an iron regime of political correctness and ridiculed by cosmopolitan elites who had neglected the view of ordinary Australians” (Greenfield and Williams, 2003: 33). As Conley observed:

The Coalition’s electoral strategy struck a cord with those who did not want to be told that the restructuring of the 1980s and early 1990s was only the beginning of a never ending process of adjustment - a view encapsulated by Keating’s

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ominous portrayal of global economic competition as a long distance race which has no finish line (Conley, 2001: 227).

The key formula in the Howard discourse and the chief means through which he addressed the dislocations to the neo-liberal order, was through his conjoining of a neo-liberal discourse (albeit muted in the early part of his prime ministership) with a social conservatism based on a reaffirmation of traditional family, social and institutional values. For Howard, conservatism’s confirmation of the certainties of the past and its promotion of ‘unified’ and ‘exclusive’ forms of identity, effectively provided the broader sense of values, character and purpose that neo-liberalism required in order to counter its potential to generate social alienation, anomie and disunity.

In pursuing this form of politics, Howard was able to exploit aspects of the socially inclusive and progressive politics pursued by the Hawke and Keating governments. The susceptibility of such political approaches to populist projects citing a traditional unified national identity and targeting social minorities, trade unions and ‘political correctness’ has been noted by Wilson and Turnbull (2001: 386). The defection of sectors of the working-class to the political right, evident in the ‘working class Tory’ phenomenon in Great Britain under Thatcher and the ‘Reagan Democrats’ in the United States, reflected the political potency of such conservative discourses when articulated in opposition to more socially pluralistic and progressive forms of governance. The notable study of working-class conservatives in England by Mckenzie and Silver (1968) noted the deference among working-class voters to systems of hierarchy, their support for more punitive forms of law and order, and hardline attitudes to issues related to immigration and social minorities (McKenzie & Silver, 1968: 152-153).

There were also a range of factors related to structural changes within late capitalism which enhanced the political utility of such a conservative discourse. In Australia, as with the United States and United Kingdom, the collapse of class based political identifications, and the mainstream left’s embrace of the free-market, to which it referred the essential tenets of its traditional social justice platform, effectively left the ground open for a brand of conservatism to broach the key questions of national identity in a way that addressed social anxieties around the rapidity of social change. Conservatism as a political philosophy was well equipped to take on such a task. Its historical project, in the face of the rise of the

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political left and the materialist politics of redistribution in the early 20th century, was to reconstitute itself as a mass political ideology capable of winning a majority. It did so by countering its allegiance to the ‘establishment’ and its adherence to existing social and economic hierarchies by articulating nationalist rhetoric that emphasised such values and concepts as traditionalism, the nation before class, the family as the primary unit of social organisation, the organic unity of the people, the paternal duties of privilege, and the conception of society as an orderly hierarchy of powers (Hall, 1988).

Though initially muted, the linking of a neo-liberal discourse with a conservative discourse opened up the discursive ground for the more radical and transformatory elements of the neo- liberal reform agenda to be contained within the conservative cadences of moderation, continuity and order. Howard effectively incorporated elements associated with Australian nationalism – a nostalgia for the past, a reverence and reaffirmation of historical, cultural mythologies, national symbolism, and assimilationist social agendas - and set this against the array of progressive social policies and ‘illegitimate’ identities which he identified with the Labor government and the cultural, bureaucratic and intellectual (though not economic) ‘elites’. The message, in the face of social dislocation, was that under his stewardship the time-honoured Australian values of the past were not to be sacrificed to the transient and superficial demands of elites and minority interests:

…insecurity replaced certainty as people came to feel they had lost their way, their security and their sense of direction. As a consequence many came to fear change even more. Taught to be ashamed of their past, apprehensive about their future, pessimistic about their ability to control their own lives let alone their ability to shape the character of their nation as a whole, many came to see change as being in control of them instead of them being in control of change (Howard cited in Johnson, 2000: 39).

The core means through which Howard’s neo-liberalism was reconciled with his social conservatism was through his conjuring of a social imaginary involving the “privatisation of government and social responsibilities and a retreat to the personal and supposedly comfortable world of family and friends” (Greenfield and Williams, 2003: 287). This was

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evident in his 1987 ‘Future Directions’ policy document10. With its imagery of a blond wife, a suited husband and two neat children standing behind a white picket fence, Future Directions sought to invoke an ideal type of liberal individualism grounded in conservative notions of family, community and national identity. Thus the traditional family and related values of authority, respect, trust and reciprocity were presented as a fundamental guarantee against the challenges of the wider modern world.

This emphasis on the individual and the family was combined with an assimilationist nationalism which, echoing Hanson’s call for ‘One Nation’, was presented under the banner of ‘building one Australia’:

We want a united Australia proud of its distinctive identity and history in which all Australians, irrespective of social background, ethnic heritage, religion or nationality have an equal opportunity to achieve what they might want for themselves and their families (John Howard cited in Brett, 2003b: 185).

Much ridiculed at the time by social progressives for its outdated notions of Australian society, it was, as Brett has noted, an early indication that Howard was aware of the inadequacy of Labor’s political discourse; that is that “economics was not enough” (Brett, 2003b: 185).

Stuart Hall’s exposition of the discursive means by which Thatcherism forged an enterprise culture with a conservative discourse in the United Kingdom is relevant to Howard’s project in Australia (Hall, 1983, 1988). This is particularly the case in relation to the range of often contradictory discursive elements incorporated into Thatcher’s discourse. As has been noted by Frankin et al: “one of the strengths of Thatcherism was its ability to offer multiple adverse and contradictory identifications, thus successfully including within its discourse and narratives many different and even opposed sets of interests” (Franklin et al, 1991: 23). A similar process was evident in the United States in the 1990s where the neo-conservative right, representing the interests of the capitalist classes, through the generation of anti-elite and socially conservative discourses, succeeded in forging alliances with working-class constituents (Frank, 2002). Howard’s discourse similarly incorporated divergent and often

10 John Howard was leader of the Coalition in opposition from 1985-1988. He led the Coalition to a substantial loss at the 1987 federal election and was subsequently deposed before regaining the leadership in 1995. 141

contradictory elements - an emphasis on family values while at the same time pursuing a reform agenda based on a radical deregulation of the Australian economy (and workplace); an emphasis on the unity and strength of the nation state and cultural homogeneity while at the same time endorsing the processes of globalisation and pursuing an expansionary immigration program; the articulation of an anti-elite discourse that excluded the most powerful economic interests; and support for traditional Australian egalitarianism while at the same time supporting the ethos of competitive individualism and cutting the taxes of high income earners.

In terms of this discursive construction of an authentic Australian identity, Howard invoked a range of antagonistic identities that were seen to conflict with traditional mythologies of Australian identity and were posited as illegitimate and hostile to the ‘real’ Australia. Howard attributed the widespread social disaffection of the time to the Labor party and an array of vested interests which, he argued, protected under a veneer of political correctness, had profited at the expense of the ‘mainstream’ or ‘silent majority’. These included ethnic groups, indigenous groups, cultural elites and other special interest groups. His stigmatisation of refugees entering the country by boat and his infamous refusal to allow the Norwegian ship the ‘Tampa’ to land in Australia after it had picked up a large number of stricken refugees in Australian waters in 2001 represented the most potent symbol of Howard’s antagonistic framing of the non-Australian ‘other’. The extent of the antagonisms generated through the mainstream/anti-elite discourse in the first term of Howard’s period as prime minister was captured by Mickler who referred to the strongly “adversarial” nature of the “new mainstream identity”, marked by feelings of “betrayal and neglect”, which “emerged in the period following Howard’s election” (Mickler, 1997: 67). Like Hanson, Howard was able to exploit the widespread sense of disenfranchisement and the related perception that a new social order had been imposed without proper exposure to the democratic process:

One of the great changes that has come over Australia in the last six months is that people do feel able to speak a little more freely and a little more openly about what they feel… I welcome the fact that people can now talk about certain things without living in fear of being branded a racist or bigot (cited in Hodge and Louie, 1998: 98).

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Significantly Howard, in the first phase of his period in office, implicitly sought to associate neo-liberal reforms and their dislocatory social effects as simply one more manifestation of the dominance of elite special interests under the Labor government. His citing of ‘bureaucratic’ elites and vested new-class interests as an antagonistic frontier to the ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ Australia, represented an attempt to disassociate himself from broader neo-liberal reforms and harness for electoral advantage the strong feelings of anger and resentment in the community in relation to the restructuring of the Australian economy:

There is a frustrated mainstream in Australia today which sees government decisions as increasingly driven by the self-interested claims of powerful vested interests with scant regard for the national interest. This bureaucracy of the new class is a world away from the myriad of spontaneous community based organisations which have been part of the Australian mainstream for decades (Howard, 1995).

While Labor in government had attempted to sell globalisation as an essentially positive and liberating force, Howard, particularly in his first term of government, typically portrayed globalisation as an ominous force that posed a threat to the Australian way of life. Labor’s remote and technocratic form of governance was counter-pointed with an emphasis on government as a receptive and empathic bulwark in the face of economic and structural changes:

I have got a message for the battlers of Newcastle and indeed the battlers of Australia – that you have a government that listens and understands and is sympathetic to the human and social consequences of industry restructuring; that understands the pressure that globalization of the Australian economy is imposing on particular economies (Howard cited in Gordon, 1997).

However, while Howard’s affirmation of the constancy of the Australian way of life and the enduring nature of ‘fundamental Australian values’ acted as a politically potent counter to the social upheavals associated with the neo-liberal reform agenda, and in doing so won him unprecedented support from those typically working-class sectors of the community most affected by these reforms, his simultaneous adherence to the same neo-liberal reform agenda increasingly threatened his political coherence. As Megalogenis pointed out:

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What made Howard believable to voters in the mid-1990s… were his social policies. His conservative agenda helped to create the impression that he was, in fact, offering to undo some of Keating’s economic agenda because they talked about restoring old Australian values… (Megalogenis, 2006: 289).

In this sense, Howard’s political capital rested on a fundamental misunderstanding of his political allegiances on the part of a significant component of the electorate. In the longer term this contradictory element became unsustainable and required the employment of a new mythology of citizenship that reconciled his allegiance to neo-liberalism with the conservative agenda and the traditional values that he espoused through his ‘battler’ rhetoric. Howard’s project to address the dislocations in the neo-liberal order rather than to exploit them was signalled by his abandonment of the ‘battler’ mythology of citizenship and his adoption of an aspirational mythology.

From Battler to Aspirational

In Howard’s first term as prime minister, the primary mythical identity in his exploitation of Labor’s failure to hegemonise its neo-liberal reforms was the ‘battler’. The battler represented a prototype version of the aspirational citizen: “ordinary, struggling people, living in suburbs, paying off their homes, employees or small business people, battling hard” (Scalmer, 1999: 9). In a strategic political sense, the essentially struggling persona of the battler was an important component of Howard’s early portrayal of globalisation as an elemental force of change and his implicit promotion of this change as threatening the Australian way of life and the security and livelihood of ‘ordinary Australians’. In this respect, Howard’s approach was essentially designed to harness disaffected sections of the Australian community exposed through the unprecedented success of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party. Howard, and indeed a large section of the Australian political commentariat, had initially read Hanson’s success as effectively fracturing the Labor party’s constituency between its working-class base and its more urbane, socially progressive left-wing. Labor’s adoption of a neo-liberal reform agenda effectively undermined its capacity to retain these working-class voters through reversion to its traditional egalitarian social justice discourse. Howard’s fostering of Hanson supporter’s grievances, his failure to censor Hanson in relation

144 to some of her more extreme views, and the muting of his adherence to the neo-liberal reform agenda were part of his strategy to harness the support of this constituency:

Hanson allowed these people (her supporters) to grasp that they were not lone voices. There were, the ballot boxes showed, a million of them. John Howard, who styled himself cunningly as a little battler, recognized early the potential to harness these battalions. One Nation fell apart, but Hanson’s essential agenda was subsumed into Howard government policy (Wright, 2003).

Despite, as outlined earlier, John Howard’s attempts to portray the Coalition’s success in the Labor heartland as indicative of the emergence of a ‘new coalition of popular support for liberalism’ (Howard, 1996), his employment of battler mythology and his success in exploiting popular disaffection with neo-liberal reforms indicated the failure of ‘liberalism’ to win widespread support and the ongoing relevance of the traditional egalitarian social imaginary. The battler represented a mythologised Australian identity promoting a montage of character traits, in large part derivative of the pioneering ANZAC (Australia New Zealand Army Corps) persona and elements of the “Australian Legend’ identity, denoting a rugged individualism, a suspicion of elites, and rejection of authority (Ward, 1958). The imprimatur of history gave Howard’s battlers what Curran has called a “resolved” sense of national identity (Curran, 2006: 189). The battler represented an authentic version of Australian nationhood; an authenticity that was juxtaposed with the illegitimate ascendancy of the new elite class:

Powerful vested interests seem to win the day when it comes to duchessing the government and access to public funding. The losers have been the men and women of mainstream Australia whose political voice is too often muffled or ignored – the families battling to give their children a break, hardworking employees battling to get ahead, small business battling to survive, young Australians battling to get a decent start in their working lives, older Australians battling to preserve their dignity and security, community organizations battling the seemingly ever expanding role of intrusive government (Howard cited in Manne, 2004: 81).

Though politically useful, Howard’s adoption of the battler mythology was problematic. As with the aspirational citizen, the battler was seen to embody common sense and a strong

145 work ethic. However, battler mythology also entailed traditional class based conceptions of Australian identity and the social structure more associated with egalitarianism and the redistribution ethos of the political left than with the competitive individualism integral to Howard’s economic agenda. Indeed, Howard explicitly linked the battler with traditional Australian egalitarianism:

The great egalitarian innocence, that egalitarian spirit…the birthright of most Australians only a short time ago had significantly disappeared…it will be his (Keating’s) political epitaph that the Labor man from Bankstown did…betray the battlers of Australian society (Howard, 1995b).

As Scalmer has noted “the battler is the key actor in the drama of white Australian history, the key exponent of the Australian values of egalitarianism and mateship” (Scalmer, 1999: 11). As such, battler rhetoric was largely the domain of leftist social criticism and the battler was therefore imbued with the political characteristics typical of that perspective. In effect the battler, unlike the aspirational, was more likely to question the socio-economic status quo, to rail against inequality and to support the economic redistribution ethos of the welfare state.

By the end of Howard’s first term in office, the problematic nature of his adoption of battler mythology was becoming more evident. As Nick Dreyenfurth observed, Howard’s linking of the concept of the battler to themes of “mateship, family and national identity” was “deeply contradictory” since it “essentially railed against his attachment to neo-liberal, individualistic economics” (Dreyenfurth, 2005: 189). While this may have suited Howard in his initial period in office, it was clearly unsustainable in the longer term as his pursuit of the neo- liberal reform agenda became more evident - particularly in relation to key issues such as taxation, industrial relations, health and education reform. Indeed, by the 2001 election, the Labor party was framing its electoral strategy around the slogan of “We’re on your side”, with the Labor leader Kim Beazley openly challenging Howard’s ‘battler’ rhetoric:

You all know that this government has only ever been about the top end of town – the Liberal Party is always for the few, not for the many... the Coalition has monumentally let down the so-called Howard Battlers and the bulk of the Australian population (Kim Beazley cited in Henderson, 2001).

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The problems for the Coalition in promoting the myth of the battler was summarised by the journalist, Michelle Gratton, in 1999:

Liberal MPs are starting to say that the government’s battler driven rhetoric and actions are creating a new two-class mentality and giving the impression that wealth is bad. One strand is that the battler talk re-enforces the anti-elite feelings in the community that have become stronger in the last few years. This can promote intolerance and dumbing down (Gratton, 1999).

Ross Cammeron, the Liberal member for the Western Sydney suburban seat of Parramatta, indicated the incongruity between Howard’s battler rhetoric and neo-liberal ideology:

I’m wanting the government to ensure we don’t create a perception that the answer for every community problem is to make a call on higher income earners…We don’t want to create the impression that we regard the creation of wealth as a culpable activity… the Coalition should be promoting the idea of people getting ahead, because this is the way to create wealth and jobs… the critics believe the government is sending signals that rich people don’t deserve success. By using battler rhetoric you can lock people into their current position… The flip side of our egalitarian instincts is a resentment of wealth creation and that’s an issue government needs to provide leadership on. The ‘battler’ rhetoric harms that (Ross Cammeron cited in Gratton, 1999).

In the face of growing social inequalities and in line with the dictates of neo-liberal ideology, this kind of problematisation of the more traditional egalitarian ethos of the ‘battler’ was increasingly reflected at the time by a resistance, on the part of elements of the political and media elite, to the kind of politics of redistribution that such a mythology encompassed. Contravening one of the central nostrums of the traditional Australian egalitarian discourse, an unprecedented defence of the wealthy was offered; the rights and interests of whom were promoted as being in accordance with the broader social good. The tenor of this sentiment was exemplified by sections of the mainstream media when John Howard introduced a tax levy to finance Australian military intervention in East Timor in 1998 which targeted middle and high income earners:

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Mr Howard wants to milk those who have advanced themselves simply because he does not want to rile the bulk of taxpayers…Now that he is approaching a difficult election he wants to pander to the sectional interests of the $50,000 and below income range (Daily Telegraph, Editorial, 1998).

Battler rhetoric in this context had become untenable for Howard since it was alienating sections of the Coalition’s core business constituency and influential media interests, in addition to accentuating the dislocations attendant to the neo-liberal economic reform agenda. The key point is that ‘battler’ intolerance and anger toward the ‘new-class’ elites was increasingly being directed toward the economic elites who had benefited most from the neo- liberal reform agenda. In other words, the anti-elitism propagated through the mythology of the battler within the neo-liberal discourse was failing to reconcile neo-liberal interests with public perceptions, particularly in relation to ingrained notions of fairness and equality. The problem for Howard was that, despite his use of the battler discourse to identify an antagonistic cultural, intellectual and bureaucratic elite, the anti-elitsm within the traditional battler discourse had maintained a strong economic focus; that is, was historically forged around class based cleavages based on structural inequities and inequalities. These egalitarian identifications were reinforced through the economic dislocations associated with neo-liberal reforms. As Pusey noted in regard to ‘Howard’s battlers’:

One senses that the anger is fed by a double humiliation: not just of being on the sharp end of economic reform, but also by a somewhat hapless reliance on the very conventional moral codes that they invoke to nail the blame and to make sense of their distress… they feel that they have made all the sacrifices and done all the belt tightening and more than was asked of them - but without reward (Pusey, 2003: 73).

Reflecting this, the mythology of the battler had almost disappeared following the 1998 national election (Carney, 2000). At this election the Howard government lost the popular vote and only retained government due to the fact that it managed to hold a small number of marginal seats. What was politically required was a new national mythology which moved away from traditional egalitarian discourses routed in notions of class, social disaffection and structural critique, toward a positive mythology of the citizen as empowered individual which

148 reconciled the economic elitism consequent to neo-liberal reform with broad concepts of national identity, social values and mores.

The aspirational mythology that would emerge from this project constituted, in effect, a compliant version of the battler - conservative and traditional in outlook, hard working, committed to social advancement and ‘prosperity’, and pregnant with an array of ‘mainstream’ prejudices toward the ‘undeserving other’. Yet, unlike the battler, the aspirational was without the iconoclastic attitude, the critical political faculty redolent of ‘old-world’ class politics, the collectivist ethos, and the egalitarian tendency to view economic inequality as synonymous with social injustice. In effect, the conventional moral codes of the battler would be preserved, in part, through the social and cultural conservatism of Howard which discursively connoted the structural reforms of neo-liberalism with the sense of ‘fairness’ invoked through these moral codes. Above all, the aspirational was posited as a modern form of citizenship, confident, productively engaged in the market, proactively embracing the future. As the President of the Business Council of Australia put it: the ‘transition from battlers to aspirants’ involved a movement from being “focused on basic needs”, “risk averse”, “inward looking”, “waiting for others to provide” and “reliant on old industries”, to being “positive”, “focused”, “confident in meeting the challenges of competition”, “sophisticated”, “modern”, “accepting of risk” and having greater “clarity” (Chaney, 2006).

The Labor party and the aspirational politics of Mark Latham.

Following its loss of government in 1996, the political imperative for Labor was to atone for the failure of the Hawke and Keating governments to elaborate a compelling connect between its traditional egalitarian social justice platform and neo-liberalism. Probert has captured succinctly the nature of the Labor dilemma:

The impact of the rise of post-Fordism on institutional politics is most apparent in the rise of New Right politics which appears to take on the cause of restructuring most transparently. However it can be argued that it is traditional social democracy which has suffered the greater crisis. This is particularly true of the Australian Labor Party which has been trying to manage the transition to a

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new, globally restructured economic order, and to ensure a share of the new global functions for Australia while at the same time trying to maintain the loyalty of its traditional working class supporters, whose livelihoods are being devastated by the very same policies (Probert, 1992: 21).

As I have argued, Hawke and Keating, rather than focusing on articulating the connect between the interests of Labor’s traditional working-class supporters and neo-liberalism, simply assumed equitable social outcomes as a bi-product of the ‘prosperity’ created through neo-liberal economic reform, and, ipso facto, economic growth. When the economy went into decline in the late 1980s and early 1990s there was therefore an absence of interpellative myths and social imaginaries related to citizenship and national identity that could arrest the dislocation of Labor’s neo-liberal discourse. Labor’s subsequent adoption of the aspirational discourse during its first years out of government was employed to address these dislocations. The aspirational discourse provided a framework through which key neo-liberal values and practices could be ostensibly reconciled with a radically modified ‘egalitarian’ social justice platform.

For the period following its emergence in Australia, the concept of the aspirational citizen was closely identified with the Labor member for the outer-suburban Sydney seat of Werriwa and leader of the Labor party from 2003-2005, Mark Latham. Through his various publications and media commentaries, Latham signalled the dislocation of the political rationale of the Labor party and the need for an urgent modernisation of its policies and platform. To this end, he articulated a detailed representation of ‘aspirational politics’, linking the new paradigms of the global market with concepts and values of citizenship, governance and national identity, and citing the emergent aspirational citizen as the ‘new Australian mainstream’. In an approached influenced by the ‘third-way’ discourse in the United Kingdom (Giddens, 1998) and ‘market populism’ in the United States (Frank, 2001), Latham positioned the aspirational as representative of the unprecedented social mobility and economic opportunity generated by the global free-market order. In doing so he sought to promote the role of Labor as a facilitator of the skills, education, resources and information necessary for effective market participation.

... the Keating economic reforms of the 1980s gave working people access to an open, dynamic and competitive economy - one in which they could convert their

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skills and enterprise into ownership. That was a good Labor thing to do. For the first time in Australia’s history, we have an economy in which genuine mobility is possible. For most of last century, people who grew up in working class families stayed there. The old economy locked them into semi-skilled work. Young people grew up with aspirations no more advanced than doing what their parents had done. In effect, Whitlam and Keating created a whirlwind of economic and social mobility. In less than a generation, families can go from owning nothing to owning everything. I see them in my electorate all the time. People I grew up with in Liverpool’s public housing estates are now the contractors, small business owners and information workers of the new economy, living in double-story suburbs on Sydney’s urban fringe. They represent a new class of aspirational voters (Latham, 2002b).

Labor’s embrace of an aspirational discourse was formally signalled following its loss in the 2001 federal election and its incapacity to win back seats in Western Sydney that had been lost to the Coalition. The Labor leader at the time, Simon Crean11, visited the Western Sydney seat of Werriwa as part of a ‘campaign to win the aspirational class’, visiting an exclusive housing estate (or ‘gated community’) which “boasted a 24 hour security concierge to protect its upper middle-class residents from the violence, vandalism and theft on Sydney’s sprawling west” (Goot, 1996: 2). Crean was advised by residents that people at the estate had worked “very, very hard all their lives” and that the Labor party had abandoned its natural constituents who “had done well for themselves” (Goot, 1996: 2). Crean summarised the purpose of his visit as follows:

I think every voter is an aspirational voter…What we’ve got to do is to convince people that don’t see themselves in the traditional working class mode, but are nevertheless working people. We’ve got to reach out and understand better how we can appeal to them, and how we can respond to their needs (Willacy, 2001).

Though the Hawke and Keating governments had effectively dispensed with core aspects of Labor’s traditional agenda and embraced the free-market order, Labor’s alleged ongoing identification with a progressive social justice agenda, equivalentially linked to the ‘elites’ and the ‘old politics’ of class and ideology, was the focus of much mainstream media

11 Labor Leader from 2001-2003 before being replaced by Mark Latham.

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commentary (Millet, 2002; Kelly, 2001; McGregor, 2002). Given the dislocated state of the Labor discourse in the years following its loss of government12, there was a potential for this dislocation to give rise to new articulations of Labor’s traditional party platform, particularly from those remaining leftist elements in the party who had held concerns about Hawke and Keating’s embrace of neo-liberalism. This potential was clearly recognised by neo-liberal interests in the media who sought to influence the reconstitution of the party in the face of this dislocation13. As the Australian editorial opined in 2004, citing the ‘reality’ of the aspirational class as a rationale against the reversion to an ‘ideological’ approach:

Labor had been hijacked by well heeled, vain, self-indulgent ideologues promoting a range of policies that are anathema to people who vote Labor - or who used to vote Labor… Future Labor policy needs to reward individuals who aspire (The Australian Editorial, 2004).

Latham took on the task of suturing Labor’s neo-liberal discourse through an embrace of the ‘politics of aspiration’. Endorsing the ‘new neo-liberal global economic reality’ and the obsolescence of Labor’s traditional social-democratic egalitarian agenda, he essentially sought to re-constitute Labor’s traditional egalitarian platform without the politics of class, economic redistribution, and government intervention that had previously constituted core moments in the Labor discourse. Borrowing heavily from ‘third way’ theorists such as Ulrich Beck (1997) and Anthony Giddens (1998), Latham elaborated a discourse of aspirational politics framed around the market determinism of a fluid post-industrial ‘new-economy’ that had evolved beyond ‘divisive’ class politics and the crude dichotomy between labour and capital that was a feature of the old industrial economy (Johnson, 2003: 3). The global free- market economy, discursively connoted with deterministic notions of the new technologies and paradigms of modernity, essentially over-rode the political impositions of power, class and hierarchy that were integral to this old order:

12 Following its landslide loss in the 1996 election Labor lost subsequent elections in 1998, 2001 and 2004, triggering ongoing re-evaluations of its political rationale, constitution and party platform, including a major inquiry into the party in 2004 conducted by Bob Hawke and the ex-Labor Premier of NSW Neville Wran. 13 The capacity of the media to influence the Australian political discourse is indicated by the fact that Australia has one of the most concentrated patterns of media ownership of any western country, with Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited in control of approximately two-thirds of all print media (Denemark, 2005: 232). In the view of the academic Keith Windshuttle, media ownership in Australia is on a level with the kind of press domination found in third world ‘South American banana republics’ (Windshuttle, 1988: 86). 152

Out of the industrial revolution… the owners of capital were said to be exploiting those who worked the machines. Questions of equality and worker representation were understood and argued within this framework of owners and non-owners. In the post-industrial era, however, economic opportunity is being defined as much by access to human capital as physical capital. Indeed in many cases, the traditional divide between capital and labour has been blurred. The labour market bargaining power of highly skilled, internationally competitive labour – the so called knowledge workers – often exceeds that of the owners of capital (Latham, 2003: 48).

In this sense, ‘old’ debates about inequality, based on ‘hard’ notions of material ownership, could be subsumed within an individualist discourse that emphasised, not the redistribution of material wealth, but access to the skills and resources necessary to attain such wealth. In effect, a politics of the social structure which posited a fundamental tension between the interests of labour and capital, was replaced by the aspirational prosperity discourse with its support for the free-market and its promotion of a social imaginary in which social mobility and prosperity, typically rendered as a capacity for ‘ownership’ and material consumption, abounded for those with the character and resources to meet the challenges of the ‘new world order’. The emphasis was on the practical task of individual self- advancement and personal management rather than political agency. Thus Latham, echoing the editorial in the Australian cited above, referred to the importance of individual ‘effort’ and ‘responsibility’, and attributed the ‘rights agenda’ and ‘left-wing social issues’ to ‘trendy inner-city elites’, driven by ideological agendas which bore no resemblance to the real life concerns of average aspirational citizens:

While trendy left politics focuses solely on the rights agenda, the people who live and work in poor areas have a different set of priorities. They know there can be no end to the poverty cycle without effort and responsibility… Rights alone are not enough. They need to be matched by responsibilities... I have been involved with these areas for decades, and not once have I seen people embrace the rights agenda. Not once, whether in the form of feminist, environmental, ethnic or welfare rights. Poor communities have little time for abstract politics. (Latham, 2003: 91)

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According to Latham, in the context of the new global economy, there was “no lasting role for the state public sector in the ownership of large slabs of capital and market forces” and “free trade and competition policy should essentially direct government policy” (Johnson, 2003: 3). Further to this, echoing the market determinism of Hayek, the capacity of governments to understand and effectively implement interventionist social policies in a market characterised by multiple points of identity and exchange was negligible: “One of the traps in the work and family debate is for policy makers to think that they can engineer certain outcomes, based on certain types” (Latham cited in Wilson and Chiveralls, 2004: 10). Indeed Latham explicitly rejected all forms of redistributive polices based on principles of ‘positive discrimination’ as this would contravene the new ‘consensual politics’ based around the conceptualisation of the individual as comprising multiple points of identity and citizenship, none of which could be dealt with effectively through addressing the special interests of particular groups (Latham, 1999: 30).

Addressing the failure of Hawke and Keating to articulate potent egalitarian moments in their discourse, Latham’s aspirational discourse was permeated with a concern for ‘fairness’ in which the market populist ‘democratisation of wealth’ narrative substituted for the traditional Labor concern for social equality14. In this way the relational paradigm intrinsic to the notion of social equality was substituted with a conception of social mobility in which individual advancement was disassociated from any hierarchical or positional context. While Hawke and Keating had promoted this neo-liberal prosperity dividend through a dry technocratic discourse, Latham articulated it through a populist discourse based primarily on the politicisation of identity. Free-market prosperity was prosperity for everyone - who conformed with the aspirational profile:

This is one of the pillars of social justice: the shared expectation that people are responsible for their own behaviour. Indeed none of our institutions can succeed without sanctions against irresponsibility… thus the politics on the fringe follows two golden rules: the party that backs economic aspiration ahead of economic envy will most likely win and, the party that has the longest list of excuses for people who do the wrong thing will most likely lose (Latham, 2002b).

14 Usually rendered in the ‘all boats are rising’ narrative suggesting that economic growth which raises the GDP of the entire economy will also raise the incomes of all of the individuals within the economy, thus negating the need for policies aimed at promoting social equality.

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Significantly, Latham acknowledged the fact that neo-liberal reforms had adversely affected a large sector of the Labor party’s traditional support base, noting that the average working- class family was “50% more likely to face an unexpected decline it its living standards” in relation to the “pace of economic restructuring and the rise of casual, part-time, temporary and contract employment in the new economy” (Latham, 1998: 224). Given the inevitability of market forces, these adverse effects could not be addressed through structural measures and the practices of ‘old government’, but rather through an emphasis on the capacity of individuals and communities to adapt. In place of the impositions of government, Latham substituted the concept of social capital as a means of invoking the values of community, reciprocity, care and support that his de-legitimisation of government social policies had gone some way to excluding. Borrowing heavily from Putnam’s definition of social capital as the “features of social organisation such as trust, norms and networks that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions” (Putnam et al, 1993: 167), Latham posited social capital as a kind of multipurpose remedy for a range of social ills (Latham, 1998). The utility of the social capital discourse was that it integrated neo-liberal notions of economic efficiency and productivity with interpersonal qualities and values of community in such a way as to constitute a ‘values’ discourse. For Latham it required communities endowed with sufficient ‘organic’ (that is non-public welfare derived) resources of social capital and the human capital resources of hard work, responsibility, moral character and a dedication to ‘getting ahead’. As I will elaborate in chapter seven, in this way it functioned as a means of appropriating discursive elements associated with the social democratic left - particularly related to fairness and equity, combined with a conservative emphasis on strong communities, personal character and social relationships, whilst at the same time advocating cost efficient policies compatible with neo-liberalism’s ideological rejection of the welfare state. As Roskam has argued:

Two reasons explain the popularity of social capital to politicians. First, it is a concept that seems to respond to voters concerns about the changing nature of their neighbourhood and of their own lives. These issues might be difficult to quantify but are real nonetheless. Crime, rates of family break-up - even the fact that young people no longer offer up their seat on public transport - can be attributed to a decline in social capital. Second, it offers solutions to otherwise

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intractable social problems, particularly in the welfare area - without necessarily requiring extra government spending (Roskam, 2004: 2).

Thus for Latham the (costly) welfare state and the heavy and debilitating hand of government were substituted with an aspirational culture founded on the organic flair, initiative, and cost effectiveness of ‘social entrepreneurs’:

In the past, governments have wasted a vast amount of money on community development programs. More often than not, the bureaucratic rules of government departments have smothered local bursts of initiative and entrepreneurial flair… Social entrepreneurs overcome this problem. They have a way of creating something out of nothing (Latham, 2001).

Having essentially eradicated the traditional structural-power based conception of society and in doing so absolved to a significant extent the Labor party from responsibility in relation to its traditional interventionist/economic redistributionist role, Latham substituted a structural class analysis with a depoliticised conception of society as consisting of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’; that is, the “information rich” and the “information poor” (Latham, 1998). As one’s status as an outsider was essentially a consequence of matters particular to the individual - ie, individual character, resourcefulness, and capacity for hard work - any substantive conception of power imbalances, exploitation, inequality or social injustice was eliminated. Social disadvantage was typically attributed to individuals having low stocks of human and social capital. Such disadvantage was seen to be exacerbated by ‘passive welfare services’ which deprived individuals of initiative. Echoing John Howard, Latham’s ‘politics of aspiration’ were predicated on the essentially conservative values of individual responsibility, stable families and cohesive communities, guaranteed by the rule of law, and conceived in the antagonistic context of social disorder, breakdown, and the various impositions (to the realisation of individual aspirations) posed by the ‘irresponsible’ and ‘envious’:

The other dominant political theme in Western Sydney is social responsibility… people do not want the troubles of other areas to follow them to the fringe. This is why they place a premium on public decency and responsibility. Not surprisingly, people who have experienced lawlessness truly value the rule of law. This is the commonsense of suburban life. The suburbs have a strong social conscience. It is 156

based on a practical understanding of how the good society requires a certain level of order and cohesiveness (Latham, 2002b).

The concept of an aspirational class as a ‘mainstream reality’ perfectly embodying the ideals and promise of the free-market was the central discursive framework through which Latham articulated Labor’s political vision. Its utility was that it served to reconcile the neo- liberalism with elements of Labor’s traditional social justice/egalitarian discourse. Like John Howard, Latham, in his moral/ethical focus on individual values, character and market performance, was able to invoke a rigid and deterministic free-market political discourse which, unlike the technocratic and depoliticised neo-liberal discourses of Hawke and Keating, politicised issues of identity as a means of both generating hegemonic interpellations and seeking to quarantine the neo-liberal order from political contestations. As I will elaborate in chapter eight when I analyse the antagonisms generated through the aspirational discourse, while the success of Labor under Hawke and Keating was dependent primarily on economic outcomes, the politics of identity promoted through the aspirational discourse focused on the aberrant identities of various out groups as constituting the chief impediment to the free-market system. Furthermore, in shifting from a rights to a responsibilities agenda, Latham sought to disarticulate discursive moments articulated as part of the previous hegemonic order which had retained their association with Labor - in particular those associated with the institutions and practices of the welfare state, interventionist government, and a progressive social justice/rights agenda. In doing so he sought to counter those elements within the Labor party that may have attempted to reconstitute the party along social-democratic lines.

Conclusion

This chapter has provided an account of the party-political dynamics through which the aspirational discourse came to prominence. As I have argued, the lack in the social order opened up during Labor’s thirteen years of government, exacerbated through its (depoliticised) suppression of social antagonisms in accordance with its pursuit of technocratic, administrative, consensual and moral modes of governance, created the conditions of possibility for alternative populist hegemonic projects. These populist projects sought to ‘fill the gap’ through persuasive re-descriptions of the world involving the

157 generation of new myths of citizenship and national identity. As argued by Mouffe, the suppression of antagonisms through reversion to ‘adversary-free’ politics opens the ground for more exclusive and divisive populist projects to exploit community frustration and disaffection through the antagonistic division of society into authentic and non-authentic poles.

As I outlined in chapter three, the three key areas of discursive contestations that would inform the transition to the neo-liberal hegemonic order centred on notions of the legitimate role of the state, collective versus individualist modes of citizenship and organisation, and values of social equity (fairness) and equality. The Labor party, in failing to generate compelling new neo-liberal myths of citizenship and national identity, failed to arrest the prevalence of the egalitarian social democratic framing of popular values and perceptions related to these three factors. The political responses of the three major parties that I have outlined in this chapter all represented to a greater or lesser extent attempts to address these three factors in accordance with hegemonic ends.

As I have argued, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party represented the first major political project that questioned the validity of the neo-liberal order vis-a-vis the traditional egalitarian social imaginary. Its articulation of the ‘lack’ defined key aspects of the political discourse in Australia for the next decade and was a key factor in the constitution of the aspirational discourse. Hanson cited a traditional and authentic Australian identity, rooted in local communities and the mythologies of the past, which she posited as irretrievably at odds with the new neo-liberal/culturally pluralistic order and its associated bureaucratic/corporate elites. While rejecting the traditional welfare state and its associated ‘special interest groups’, Hanson at the same time referenced aspects of the state interventionism of the ‘Australian settlement’ in her call for increased trade tariffs, protectionist trade policies, government employment programs, and support for regional communities. In this sense Hanson’s conception of the egalitarian values of sameness, equality and fairness was predicated on a strong role for the state and an implicit rejection of the politically disenfranchising and socially alienating aspects of competitive individualism.

For Labor and the Coalition the adoption of the aspirational discourse would constitute the principal means through which they would seek to suture the ‘lack’ in the structure and, in doing so, reconcile neo-liberal values and practices with the egalitarian social imaginary. The 158

Coalition’s initial appropriation of the traditional Australian myth of the battler represented an attempt to exploit the dislocation of the Labor discourse through the capturing of working- class voters alienated by Labor’s embrace of neo-liberalism. In pursuing it, John Howard was acknowledging the potency of an egalitarian social imaginary rooted in the collectivist ethos and strong state practices of the Australian settlement and the post-war social democratic order. Indeed Howard’s early rhetoric, in its conservative allusions to the certainties of the past, its largely negative portrayal of the global economic order, and its conception of the government as a receptive and active mediator between the individual and the market, implicitly rejected core neo-liberal values and rationalities. The Coalition’s adoption of the aspirational discourse marked the point where this approach became politically untenable and it was compelled to address dislocations in the neo-liberal order. The aspirational discourse allowed for the retention of the conservative, anti-elite and ‘average’ Australian discursive moments in the battler discourse. Unlike the battler however, and as I will elaborate in more detail in the following chapters, the aspirational was less wedded to the idea of the interventionist state, embraced the ethos of competitive individualism as a proxy for egalitarian values of social equality and fairness, and endorsed the free-market to an extent that negated the need for collective social and political associations.

The political rationale leading to Labor’s adoption of the aspirational followed a similar course to the Coalition’s abandonment of its battler rhetoric and appropriation of the aspirational discourse. As with the Coalition, the aspirational mythology signalled a hegemonic project to reconcile embedded egalitarian discursive moments with neo- liberalism. To this end, in particular through the political philosophy of Mark Latham, Labor’s articulation of the aspirational discourse was constructed around nodal points centring on prosperity and social advancement such as ‘social mobility’, the ‘ladder of opportunity’, ‘free-market prosperity’ and ‘insiders and outsiders’, which acted as proxies for the structural conception of social disadvantage, power and privilege that had historically constituted its primary political rationale. In doing so it performed the ideological function of affirming the non-contingent essential character of the free-market, whilst directing the social disaffection attendant to neo-liberal reforms toward the range of antagonistic identities invoked through its populist discourse.

Having identified the political context in which the aspirational discourse was adopted, in the next two chapters I will move on to a detailed examination of the discursive logics and core 159 discursive elements articulated as moments within the aspirational discourse, in particular its forging of relations of equivalence and antagonism through which neo-liberal political objectives could be pursued.

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Chapter Seven

Discursive logics and key moments

The preceding chapters have given an account of both the political dynamics and context in relation to which the aspirational discourse emerged, in addition to the political priorities evident in its adoption by the Labor party and Coalition. It is now necessary to move on to a detailed consideration of the function of the aspirational discourse within the neo-liberal hegemonic formation. This involves an analysis of the particular discursive moments articulated and how they relate to the strategic objectives of neo-liberalism, in particular as represented by the Labor party and Coalition, and the mainstream media. In doing so I will examine the ways in which the aspirational discourse, as an articulation of a range of social identities, meanings and values, functionally cohered as a hegemonic representation. This involves consideration of the ‘field of discursivity’ as constituting the grounds for the partial fixation of meaning, and the function of ‘empty signifiers’ and ‘nodal points’ which serve to fix a range of discursive elements within a relational totality. I will also identify the specificity of the aspirational discourse vis-à-vis its particular equivalential ensemble of discursive elements, the genealogy of some of these elements in relation to their association with alternative political discourses and, utilising Derrida’s notion of the ‘supplement’, the political purpose served through their incorporation into the aspirational/neo-liberal discourse.

I will begin with a consideration of some of the articulatory logics, as outlined by Laclau and Mouffe, that serve to structure and order discourses, before moving on to illustrate the way in which they function within the aspirational discourse.

The field of discursivity, relations of equivalence, empty signifiers and nodal points

In the absence of a fixed centre, all attempts to construct the ‘social’; that is, to “arrest the flow of differences and to construct a centre”, constitute an effort to achieve an ultimately

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“impossible object” (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 112). This impossible object realised would, of course, effectively eradicate the political dimension since all identities would be fixed in accordance with the differential logic of the dominant discourse and all social relations would be based on “pure relations of necessity” (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 110). This lack of total fixity is not just related to the ‘interior’ of the discourse, ie, in relational affinities between the discursive elements, but in relation to its exterior. In order to be external to each other, the entities would have to be totally internal with regard to their own order, that is, to have a fully constituted identity that is not subverted by an exterior. This is not possible and without complete totalisation and closure discourses always constitute partial fixations of meaning. The partial fixation of meaning within an essentially undecidable terrain produces a ‘surplus of meaning’ which Laclau and Mouffe call ‘the field of discursivity’. This is the “necessary terrain for the constitution of every social practice” (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 111). The field of dicursivity constitutes a condition of possibility for the construction of concrete discourses, while at the same time always avoiding (or overflowing) total representation in discursive articulations. Laclau and Mouffe theorise this movement from the discursive field to concrete discourses as that from ‘elements’ to ‘moments’:

Since all identity is relational … and all discourse is subverted by a field of discursivity which overflows it, the transition from elements to moments can never be complete. The status of the elements is that of floating signifiers incapable of being wholly articulated to a discursive chain. And this floating character finally penetrates every discursive (i.e social) identity (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 113).

The notion of the ‘discursive field’ constitutes the necessary background to the constitution of social identity. Following Foucault, the lack of an objective grounding means that discourses do not derive their coherence through common themes, styles or rationales, but rather through “regularities of dispersion” (Foucault, 1985: 21). The ordering effects in relation to these regularities of dispersion can be analysed in relation to three key concepts: relations of difference and equivalence, the workings of over-determination and the function of ‘nodal points’.

The lack of a fixed essence “where each differential position is fixed in a specific and irreplaceable moment” (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 127) and the overflowing nature of the

162 field of discursivity within a discursive structure, serve to prevent that structure achieving an ordered and closed identity with an “unlimited rule of the logic of difference” (Torfing, 1999: 96). A condition for this subversion of the structure is therefore the dissolution of the specific differential moment within discourse. This is achieved, in part, through the operation of the logic of equivalence. Laclau and Mouffe give the following example:

In a colonized country, the presence of the dominant power is everyday made evident through a variety of contents: differences of dress, of language, of skin colour, of customs. Since each of these contents is equivalent to the others in terms of their common differentiation from the colonized people, it loses its condition of differential moment and acquires the floating character of an element. Thus equivalence creates a second meaning which, though parasitic on the first, subverts it: the differences cancel one another out in so far as they are used to communicate something identical underlying them all (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 127).

The relations of equivalence and difference within a discursive chain and which order will be emphasised, is dependent on the particular political context in which they are articulated - emphasis on the differential aspect will tend to divide the social space into a multitude of separate interests and identity - what Laclau calls “isolated democratic demands”, while emphasis on the equivalential aspect will simplify the social space through a process of radical inclusion and exclusion to constitute “equivalential popular demands” (Laclau, 2005: 85). In this context, equivalential relations are forged between antagonistic identities which constitute a pure negation of a discursive system (Howarth and Stavrakakis, 2000: 11). As I have indicated, the cultural pluralism pursued by the Hawke and Keating Labor governments constituted an example of the former, while the subsequent discourses of John Howard, Pauline Hanson and Mark Latham attempted to exploit aspects of this cultural pluralism through the articulation of equivalential popular demands based on a division of society into antagonistic poles.

Intrinsic to the function of equivalential relations will be the operation of various forms of over-determination, a concept derived from Freudian psycho-analysis involving either the ‘condensation’ or ‘displacement’ of various significations. Through condensation a variety of elements or signifiers are combined in a common meaning. Displacement involves the

163 transferral of the significations and meanings of one moment into another. Condensation therefore is synonymous with metaphor, while displacement is equivalent to metonymy (Torfing, 1999: 98).

Laclau points to what he calls rhetorical displacement, involving the substitution of a literal term for a figurative term, and the fact that the generation of figurative language is linked to the constitutive blockage in language which “requires naming something which is essentially unnameable” (Laclau, 2005: 71). He observes that “all distortion of meaning has at its root the need to express something that the literal term would simply not transmit” and uses the classical rhetorical term catachresis (the substitution of a literal signifier for a figurative one), which he describes as the “common denominator of rhetoricity” (Laclau, 2005: 71).

Given the impossibility of discursive elements, as floating signifiers, ever being fully articulated into a discursive chain, meaning and therefore differences can only be generated by partial fixations of the free-floating elements. For instance the signifier of ‘freedom’ escapes full articulation within a closed neo-liberal discourse and is therefore also an essential signifier within, for instance, socialist or communitarian discourses. The partial fixing of these free-floating elements is achieved by what Zizeck, following Lacan, calls ‘quilting points’:

As Zizeck has stated:

Every element in a given ideological field is part of a series of equivalences: its metaphorical surplus, through which it is connected with all other elements, determines retroactively its very identity (in a communist perspective to fight for peace means to fight against the capitalist order and so on). But this enchainment is possible only on condition that a certain signifier... quilts the whole field and, by embodying it, effectuates its identity (Zizeck, 189: 88).

Laclau and Mouffe use the term ‘nodal points’ to describe this quilting signifier and point to their role in establishing partial fixations of meaning through arresting the play of difference. In accordance with hegemonic objectives, ideological struggles will establish equivalential relations through the constitution of nodal points. As elaborated by Zizeck, the nodal points

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have no positive identity but rather act as a kind of metaphorical knot which partially fix and unify elements into equivalential relations within discourses:

If we maintain that the point de caption is a nodal point, a kind of knot of meanings, this does not imply that it is simply the richest word, the word in which is condensed all the richness of meaning of the field it quilts; the point de caption is rather the word which, as the word, on the level of the signifier itself, unifies a given field, constitutes its identity, it is, so to speak, the world to which things themselves refer to recognise themselves in their unity (Zizeck, 1989: 88).

In the example given by Zizeck, the nodal point of ‘class struggle’ within the communist discourse confers a defined signification to the range of discursive elements or floating signifiers, for instance to feminism as related to the class based exploitation of women, to ecologism as related to the profit oriented capitalist destruction of natural resources, and to bourgeois democracy as a form of exploitation (Zizeck, 1989: 87-88). As Smith points out, though some discursive formations that have attained an “unusual degree of predominance and stability” may be organised around one nodal point, “most will be organised around a complex constellation of multiple and shifting nodal points” (Smith, 1998: 98). The more diverse the demands inscribed within the equivalential chain, the more ‘empty’ the nodal point becomes in order to transcend the differential identities contained therein. Thus, within a populist discourse,

... when I am trying to constitute a wider popular identity and a more global enemy through an articulation of sectorial demands, the identity of both the popular forces and the enemy becomes more difficult to determine. It is here that the moment of emptiness necessarily arises, following the establishment of equivalential bonds. Ergo - vagueness and imprecision but these do not result from any kind of marginal or primitive situation, they are inscribed in the very nature of the political (Laclau, 2005: 99).

The vagueness and imprecision relate to the problem of designating ‘identity’ in the face of the multitude of descriptive features that potentially can constitute the signifier - how is a an object identical to itself? In the case of the aspirational identity, the emptiness of the signifier has facilitated the inscription of diverse and, in many cases, contradictory identities. This

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diversity is a reflection of its hegemonic utility. Scalmer has given an account of the definitional ambiguity or ‘slippage’ of ‘aspirational’ as an overdetermined empty signifier:

In short, the aspirationals are imagined in a range of contrary ways: young (but also approaching middle age); identified through patterns of consumptions (but also associated with certain occupations): self employed (but also salaried), selfish (but also community minded), uncommitted (but also tied to the Liberal Party) particular but also embracing the nation (Scalmer, 2005: 9).

On the most fundamental level this slippage is simply a reflection of the partial character of any social identity - the fact that in its over-determination any notion of the ‘autonomy’ of an identity is impossible (Laclau, 1990: 38). As such there is always a constitutive difference between the represented and the representative since total transparency between the two eradicates the relationship of representation. In a popular hegemonic representation such as the aspirational discourse, the ‘opaqueness’ that typifies the relationship of representation is intensified by the emptiness of the signifiers through which the hegemonic order seeks to inscribe a multitude of social identities. In this sense, the signifier “which refers to the communitarian order as an absence, an unfulfilled reality” (Laclau, 1996: 44), facilitates this definitional opaqueness. In the case of the aspirational discourse this absence is signified by the word ‘aspirational’ which both encompasses an absence (the thing being aspired to), and a deferred fulfilment denoted through its associated range of empty signifiers of which ‘prosperity’, ‘choice’, ‘freedom’, ‘progress’ and ‘opportunity’ are prominent. These ‘signifying games’ implicated in the elevation of one differential moment into a ‘locus of differential effects’ is the very foundation of hegemonic formations and as such is the result of conjunctures which are not founded on any necessary substantive content. As Laclau states:

People need an order, and the actual content of it becomes a secondary consideration. Order as such has no content, because it only exists in the various forms in which it is actually realized, but in a situation of radical disorder, order is present as that which is absent, it becomes an empty signifier, as the signifier of that absence. In this sense, various political forces can compete in their efforts to present their particular objectives as those which carry out the filling of a lack. To hegemonise is to carry out this filling function (Laclau, 1996: 44).

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I will now move on to a detailed consideration of the specific discursive elements incorporated as equivalential moments in the aspirational discourse, in addition to its articulation of empty signifiers and nodal points as a means of ordering and unifying its discursive field.

Discursive moments

The core discursive elements articulated as moments in the aspirational discourse are revealed through an assessment of representations of the aspirational in the Australian media. The following table provides a summary of all references to ‘aspirational’ as a class, model of citizenship or national value in the run up to the Australian federal election in November 2004; an election, the result of which was viewed as being primarily determined by ‘aspirational voters’ (Koutsoukis, 2004; Davidson, 2004). The table is derived from the Factiva data base, the most comprehensive data base on the Australian media, and includes all references in which aspirational forms of citizenship or values were either directly referred to, or the focus of the article.

Table 2: Media references to the Aspirational - January 2004 to November 2004.

Media References to the Aspirational – January 2004 – November 2004 Direct personal  ‘Social entrepreneurs’. traits  ‘Pragmatic suburbanites’  ‘Want to swap their tradesman’s van for a merc and think negative talk cramps their progress’.  ‘Ambitious, hard-working, socially mobile, believe hard earned tax dollars go to dole bludgers, the malingerers and their kind’.  ‘Miniature thinker and Miniature dreamer who wants to keep the ironing up to date, afford a mobile phone and DVD player, renovate the home and take an extended holiday’.  ‘Small picture materialists’.  ‘Intensely individualistic, self-interested, susceptible to short term bribery, thoroughly conformist’.  ‘Out to gain as much as possible as quickly as possible’.

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 ‘Uninterested in community and contemptuous of altruism’.  ‘Concerned principally about mortgage payments, taxation and jobs’.  ‘Materialistic, grasping, acquisitive’.  ‘Believe in reward for effort and want politicians to deliver outcomes’  ‘Narrow minded, self absorbed’.

Related values,  ‘Disillusioned with Government systems, aspire to home political ownership, private education, private health, share dividends perspective rather than pension cheques’.  ‘Believe in individual responsibility, see welfare state as obsolete and central paternal bureaucracies as not relevant to globalised and increasingly self reliant 21st century’.  ‘Believe in social responsibilities rather than rights, the enabling state, active welfare, social capability, mutual obligation, private ownership, and see themselves as social entrepreneurs’.  ‘Anti-union, see themselves as classless and depoliticised’.  ‘Believe in: social cohesion, shared values, concerned about mortgage payments, taxation and jobs, enterprise culture, disciplined economic management, government respect for free enterprise’.  ‘Associated with: anti-politics, inactive democracy, user pays’.  ‘Believe in the economic virtues of avaricious motives and that materialism is good for the economy’.  ‘Owners of lavish homes, upgraders, who have worked extremely hard for money’.  ‘Believe in hard work and the ladder of opportunity’.  ‘Desire tax cuts’.  ‘Desire reward for effort’.  ‘Believe in the new economy, flexibility, enterprise and upward mobility and seem themselves as investors, not just workers’.  ‘Formally Labor voters, set up in trade, opened business, sent children to independent school, interested in choice, low tax and low interest rates’.

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The tenor of these representations broadly reflect the polarising effect of the aspirational discourse and can primarily be divided into media comment in which the existence of the aspirational was treated as a demographic reality and portrayed in positive terms, and media comment in which the existence of the aspirational was portrayed in negative terms. The positive attributes noted were predominantly related to economic factors: ‘hard-work’, ‘choice’, ‘flexibility’, ‘ambition’ and ‘material acquisition’, all of which were ordered in accordance with the value of the ‘unregulated free-market’. Negative representations tended to accept the reality of the aspirational citizen yet pejoratively focused on certain undesirable traits or implications, for instance the advent of extreme materialism, greed, and the absence of values of social responsibility and co-operation. The specific political priorities inherent in the discourse were integral to the majority of representations. Indeed the aspirational citizen, though routinely characterised as uninterested in politics, was predominantly portrayed as co-terminus with a range of neo-liberal political priorities - ‘anti-unionist’, ‘anti-collectivist’, ‘anti-big government/taxation/welfare’.

Common to the positive representations was the notion of the free-market as a generator of demographic change and fundamental political paradigm shifts, as essentially liberating and prosperity generating market forces established a new apolitical social order of freedom and opportunity. Thus by dint of their qualities of character rather than their political agency, the aspirationals were rewarded by the market with ‘social mobility’, ‘ownership’ ‘choice’ and ‘prosperity’. This free-market prosperity, as I will outline in detail in the following chapter, was antagonistically framed with the sclerotic and autocratic paternalism of the post-war welfare state and its avowed gallery of social pariahs - the unemployed, welfare dependents, ‘rent-seeking’ bureaucrats, social minorities, special interest groups and socio-cultural elites.

Based on my preliminary assessment of the traits of the aspirational as presented in popular representations (Table 2), combined with the information in chapter two in regard to the common traits attributed to the aspirational, the following (preliminary) table15 outlining the relations of equivalence within the broad neo-liberal discourse and identifying key nodal points and empty signifiers articulated as moments can be drawn. The discursive logic governing the formation of these equivalential links is that of metonymical ‘displacement’

15 The table is a ‘preliminary table’ as it does not include an outline of the antagonistic ‘other’ in relation to which equivalential relations are forged. These will be outlined in table 4 in the following chapter.

169 and metaphorical ‘condensation’ involving the interruption of the play of meaning through a fixation of the elements into a unified discursive formation (Torfing, 1999: 98) The table is (obviously) indicative rather than definitive and reflects the ‘affective’ nature of discursive construction - that is the ‘radical investment’ required for hegemonic representation (Laclau, 2005: 71).

Table 3: Summary of discursive elements, nodal points and empty signifiers articulated as equivalential moments within the aspirational discourse.

Aspirational (nodal points in bold) Identities Aspirationals, Upwardly mobile working class, Affluent working class, Entrepreneurial workers, ‘New economy’ employees, Modern citizens, Working families, Hard working average Australians, Home Owners with mortgages, Self-employed, Wired workers, Average Australians, Mainstream Australia, Middle Australia

Socio-economic/political Social Mobility, New-economy, Free-Markets, Globalisation, Liberal democracy, Enterprise, Small government, Private sector, Competition, Low-taxation, User-Pays, Economic Growth

Individual characteristics Aspirational, Entrepreneurial citizenship, Prosperous, Values oriented, Rational/common-sense, Apolitical, Individualistic, Materialistic, Hard- working/productive, Independent, Responsible, Convictions/positive attitude, Private, Ambitious, Average, Self sufficient/independent, Battling, Productive, Competitive, Modern, Conservative

Systemic Values (empty signifiers) Prosperity, Ownership (revolution), (Ladder of) opportunity, Choice, Freedom, Classlessness, Consensus, Free-enterprise, Democracy, Modern, Progress, Social cohesion, Fairness, Individual empowerment, Individual responsibility, Equality of opportunity, Ownership, Egalitarian, Efficiency, Growth, Competition, Flexibility, Law and Order, Community

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‘Objective’ realm  The Coalition’s success in winning traditional Labor party working-class seats, particularly in Western Sydney.  The increasing conservative character of young Australians.  Affluence of the ‘old working class’ (social mobility)  Mainstream consumer access to top-end luxury goods and services.  Decline in trade union membership.  Decline of the welfare state.  Decline in ‘ideological’ political identifications.  Increase in new-economy self-employed.  Economic growth/prosperity.

As represented in Table 3, the neo-liberal discourse can be divided into five components: a range of identities associated with the aspirational discourse, a socio-economic realm through which the broad theoretical tenets of the discourse were advanced; an individual realm where-by the prescriptions of the socio-economic/political realm were embodied and enacted; a ‘systemic values’ realm which primarily consisted of empty signifiers crucial to the maintenance of hegemonic relations; and an objective realm where the hegemonic values and prescriptions were presented as according with reality. Based on an assessment of the broad principles and practices of neo-liberalism, a range of important ideological concepts and values can be identified. These include views that optimal social and economic outcomes are only achievable through the unregulated operation of the free-market; the conceptualisation of government as intrinsically inefficient and fundamentally antagonistic to individual liberty; a view that competition is the most effective means of achieving optimal social outcomes; and a belief that personal well being and social progress are primarily derivative of economic growth.

Within the neo-liberal discourse, the signifier of ‘aspirational’ confered a fixed signification to other discursive elements and to the ‘knots’ of meaning generated by the various nodal points: ‘entrepreneurial citizenship’, ‘prosperity’, ‘social mobility’, ‘the affluent working class’, ‘the ladder of opportunity’. For instance, ambition in this aspirational context became the desire to acquire consumer goods within the competitive market place; the ‘average Australian’ (or mainstream) was contiguous with the ‘rational’, ‘common sense’ of the ‘competitive’ and ‘independent’ individual; and an adherence to the values and principles of 171 the market place was signified as synonymous with an adherence to the primary dictates of free-market liberalism, freedom, democracy and good character. Equivalential relations were forged between notions of fairness and social justice (an appropriation and modification of the signifier ‘egalitarian’), and the allocative mechanism of the market.

The predominant subject position offered through the discourse was an economic one, based primarily on market performance and material/consumer prosperity. Thus the political/social emphasis on free-market capitalism and enterprise culture gave rise to a range of personal traits and values tied by lines of equivalence with the basic tenets of neo-liberal individualism. These can be broadly summarised as independence, reason, enterprise, initiative, common sense, ambition, personal conviction (rather than doubt or the negativity associated with political agency) and an adherence to the range of political prescriptions of neo-liberalism. The aspirational’s status as ‘home economicus’ was validated through the articulation of subject positions invoking authentic forms of citizenship: ‘hard working’, ‘average’, ‘responsible’, ‘resourceful’ and ‘values’ oriented, for instance. The class identifications offered constituted primarily working-class subject positions discursively framed, as the discourse evolved, into a national ethos of citizenship.Thus the progression from the ‘aspirational affluent working-class’ to the ‘aspirational mainstream’ or ‘aspirational Australia’.

The articulation of these discursive elements reflected the core task of hegemonic projects to “articulate a greater number of social signifiers around themselves” (Laclau, 1990: 28). For neo-liberalism, this involved the articulation of floating dislocated elements that may have been associated with the previous order or subject to articulation by antagonistic political projects. These elements include those most easily designated as ‘empty signifiers’ - that is those most able to facilitate popular interpellations. Thus the articulation of empty signifiers such as ‘freedom’, ‘growth’, ‘fairness’, ‘progress’, ‘modernity’, ‘democracy’, ‘individual empowerment’, ‘social cohesion’, ‘community’ and ‘efficiency’ was crucial to the neo-liberal hegemonic project.

The ‘aspirational’ as empty signifier/nodal point retroactively constituted a discursive chain through its construction of a metaphorical surface of inscription that both articulated, as moments, dislocated floating elements, and rearticulated pre-existing moments within the neo-liberal discourse. In this respect we are looking at the aspirational as a “particular 172

discursive concentration - the point at which several associative chains are condensed” (Reyes, 2005: 242).The inability of discourses to anchor themselves according to an essential and closed structuring principle means that they are dependent on a form of ‘radical investment’ which is something different from standard forms of conceptual apprehension. This ‘radical investment’, in the case of the aspirational discourse, was founded on the accessibility and open-endedness of the verb ‘aspire’, which acted as the primary nodal point and, as such, arranged the differential identities inscribed within into a chain of equivalence. In this sense, the notion of an aspirational citizen functioned as an empty signifier signifying “a lack” and an “absent totality” (Laclau, 1996: 42). Scanlon, in identifying the capacity of ‘aspirational’ to generate popular interpellations has identified its efficacy as an empty signifier:

People aspire to everything from adding a publishing empire to their already extensive TV network, owning a four wheel drive or finishing something at school. Terms such as the aspirational are solid enough to tap into basic human emotions and experiences, yet sufficiently inchoate that people can flesh them out with their own expectations. The people tagged with such labels may be worlds apart socially, economically and culturally, but they conjure into being the idea that we all share a common world view and set of expectations, while leaving blank the details of what make up that world view and those expectations (Scanlon, 2004).

As Morton stated: “the very word ‘aspirational’ has a glad, confident ring about it: it takes your mind off all those depressing statistics about widening inequality, rising unemployment and poverty” (Morton, 2001: 2). To aspire is to enter a realm of pure speculation founded on the capacity of the individual to imagine something better. It both acknowledges the reality of current circumstance (ie, the not having integral to the ‘social lack’) and legitimises the possibility of attainment (the ‘fullness’ of myth). In so doing, as will be argued in more detail in chapter nine, it effectively taps into a range of emancipatory consumer mythologies and social imaginaries promoted to saturation level through the advertising and marketing industries.

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Unique moments

In analysing the equivalential articulation of discursive elements in the aspirational discourse, it is important to separate those elements that are particular to its specific hegemonic project in the context of the dislocations that I have identified in chapters four and five, from those that can be identified as constituting a re-articulation of discursive moments already existing within the neo-liberal discourse. What needs to be determined is the specificity of the aspirational discourse as a neo-liberal hegemonic articulation; in effect, which dislocated or previously excluded elements are articulated as moments. This involves identifying specific discursive elements which, in the context of structural dislocation, seek to capture dislocated subject positions through the generation of new meanings, values and identities within the broader neo-liberal project. The articulation of these elements as moments through the myth of the aspirational was crucial to the hegemonic project to suture dislocations, both in the neo-liberal order and in the political discourses of the Labor party and Coalition.

As argued in the previous chapter, the aspirational discourse arose as a hegemonic response to dislocations in the neo-liberal order precipitated by the failure of the Labor party, when in power, to hegemonise a range of discursive elements related to ingrained Australian notions of social justice, equity and fairness, in addition to related expectations as to the role of the state and conceptions of citizenship. The aspirational discourse effectively addressed these dislocations. Thus, while it served to re-articulate the notion of the ‘free individual’ within the discourse of neo-liberalism, it also modified it, reframed it, more potently linked it to a number of subject positions and incorporated an array of discursive elements previously excluded or under articulated. These included notions of social justice, fairness, social values and authentic citizenship, all of which were previously important discursive moments in egalitarian social democratic or welfare-state discourses.

To examine key discursive moments, I will now consider aspects of the discourse in the context of the incorporation of specific discursive elements important to the overall neo- liberal hegemonic project; and the role of the ‘supplement’ as a key indicator of the political priorities addressed through the discourse. The following portrayal by Mark Latham is instructive in terms of identifying the political priorities as they relate to dislocations in both the neo-liberal hegemonic order and the Labor party discourse. These priorities are indicated 174

by the discursive elements equivalentially articulated through the aspirational discourse. The excerpt is taken from an article by the journalist Craig McGregor.

A lot of these [aspirational] people, he [Latham] argues, come from traditional working class backgrounds and families. They grew up in suburbs like green valley in Sydney’s west, but like him, they’ve moved to the other western suburbs such as Campelltown where land was cheap, they could afford to build a house of their own and where they could pursue the good life… He thinks they bring a lot of their egalitarian ideas and ethos with them. They believe in a fair go, they’re committed to decency and responsibility and they believe in the importance of community, law and order and self-motivation. Labor has to recognise their economic aspirations and their demand for social mobility. Latham sees them as the working class-made good, moving into their two storey homes and enjoying a lifestyle that their parents only dreamt of (McGregor, 2002).

An analysis of this portrayal of the aspirational reveals the extent and character of the dislocation of the Labor neo-liberal discourse following the 1996 election, and the imperative for Labor, in light of this, to elucidate a ‘working-class’ subject position that supplemented its neo-liberal discourse with a range of elements associated with conservative and social democratic discourses. The efficacy of the aspirational discourse in this regard has been noted by Sellar and Gale:

Aspirational appears to serve a primarily rhetorical function as a hinge concept that enables acknowledgement of social democratic imperatives while promoting neo-liberal market logics as the appropriate means for responding to them (Sellar and Gale, 2009: 42).

In the excerpt above, Latham essentially invokes a traditional mythology of the working- class, striving in the time honoured way to “build a house of their own and pursue the good life”, whose endorsement of the free-market importantly does not compromise their ability to “bring a lot of their egalitarian ideals and ethos with them”. In other words, as is evidenced by the ‘two storey homes’ and prosperity of the aspirational, in pursuing a free-market agenda, the Labor party has remained true to its traditional egalitarian party platform as it relates to promoting the material interests of the working class. An exploration of the

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discursive moments within the chain of equivalence in the example provides important indicators of the political dynamics at play, vis-à-vis the dislocations that I have identified. Thus, while acknowledging the cross-over of some of the elements, the discursive elements referenced by Latham can be categorised in the following table.

Table 4: Discursive moments in the Latham portrayal of the aspirational.

Neo-Liberal Social Democratic Conservative Self Motivation Egalitarian Law and Order Social Mobility Working Class Family Pursue the good life Fair Go Decency Individual responsibility Community

In considering these discursive elements, Derrida’s role of the ‘supplement’ is instructive. Derrida theorises the supplement as an attempt to enhance/complete the essential identity of (A) by conjoining it with a supplement (B), through which the lack in the full presence of A is addressed. In doing so, the necessity of B only serves to illustrate the inability of A to achieve a full identity (Torfing, 1999: 208). The result in the Labor discourse was the kind of (at times contorted) rhetorical amalgams evident in the ‘third way’ political project, which sought to articulate a social justice discourse based on a forging of fundamentally egalitarian rhetoric with free-market practices (Callinicos, 2001). As shown in the table above, Latham adheres to the core ‘right-wing’ attributes of the aspirational citizen - self motivation, material aspiration, individual responsibility and social mobility, yet seeks to conjoin these essential neo-liberal elements both with progressive discourses of the left and more traditional conservative discursive elements. In the conservative sense this means an emphasis on ‘decency’, ‘family’, ‘individual character’ and ‘law and order’. This neo-liberal conservatism is supplemented with a range of traits most commonly associated with a ‘left wing’ perspective - thus ‘egalitarian’ values, a belief in the ‘fair go’ and an adherence to the values of ‘community’.

In articulating these elements with a neo-liberal discourse, the meaning of the existing elements within the discourse was modified. In this sense, if we take the neo-liberal value of social mobility, it is substantively compatible with egalitarianism in regard to its allusion to a fluid and non-rigid social hierarchy, however it does not have the connotations that the notion

176 of ‘egalitarianism’ has acquired through its historical articulation within progressive social justice discourses, or indeed discourses of Australian national identity - for instance those related to the redistributive mechanisms of the welfare state or ingrained notions of Australian ‘mateship”. While both signal some form of social equity and equality, social mobility posits this as organic to the free-market system while egalitarianism has historically been associated with the redistributive mechanisms of the state. The articulation of social mobility in conjunction with the signifier ‘egalitarian’ modifies the meaning of each. The competitive individualism associated with the ‘social mobility’ of the free market is mitigated by the more communitarian and collaborative ethos that informs the egalitarian discourse. Egalitarianism, alternatively can be associated with the range of free-market elements articulated within the neo-liberal equivalential chain.

In a similar way, the core neo-liberal value of ‘individualism’, which in popular critiques of neo-liberalism of the kind propagated by Hansonism or the political left might pejoratively be associated with selfishness, inequality or social fragmentation, was supplemented by an articulation of the very principles and values commonly viewed as compromised by the neo- liberal order - ‘community mindedness’ and the egalitarian notion of the ‘fair go’- both of which, prior to the aspirational discourse, were not prominently articulated as part of the neo- liberal order. Fears as to the encroachment of commercial values (or to phrase it in more pejorative terms ‘rapacious capitalism’) were addressed by the simple articulation of the notion of ‘decency’. The journalist Gregory Hywood commenting in support of the new ‘aspirational politics’, summed up the supplementary logic evident in such representations, stating that the emerging issue in relation to “economic insecurity” was not a re-evaluation of the economic system but the political need for “more focus on community and values” (Hywood, 2004).

Supplementary relations were also evident in the use of the signifier of ‘free-market prosperity’, a key nodal point within the aspirational discourse that served to positively reframe dislocatory factors related to, for instance, greater levels of labour market insecurity, social inequality, and the unprecedented rise in personal and household debt. In accordance with the discourse of market populism (heralding the democratisation of wealth and privilege), the whole notion of debt - traditionally pejoratively associated with a raft of personal, organisational and indeed moral deficiencies was, through the aspirational discourse, connoted with a range of positive values – aspiration, ambition, social mobility. As 177

Toohey has commented: “the aspirational class loves debt” (Toohey, 2001). In the context of the personal qualities ascribed to the aspirational: common sense, a strong work ethic and moral character, the maintenance of such debt could be deemed ‘manageable’.

The forging of conservative, free-market and left-wing rhetoric evident in the Latham example, indicates a hegemonic project to transcend identification with political polarities and define a homogenous mainstream. Tony Blair’s associated dictum of the ‘radical centre’ reflects the supplementary nature of this process and its tendency to stray into oxymoron. Such a process leads to what Bastow and Martin refer to as a move to “dissolve or bridge certain policy choices and values” (Bastow and Martin, 2005: 212). In this way “both state and market are included in a government partnership, rights and responsibilities are stressed in relation to citizenship, and both individual and community are proffered as the basis of social order” (Bastow and Martin, 2005: 212). The supplementary relations facilitated the construction of a populist ‘mainstream’ that claimed to transcend sectarian or partisan political interests.

The Coalition, as a party of the political right, were not subject to the internal pressures and crisis of identity that Labor, as a party of the left, was subject to as a consequence of its identification with neo-liberalism and its subsequent loss of a substantial segment of its core constituency. Nonetheless, the ultimate need to suture dislocations in the neo-liberal order with which it was strongly aligned meant that its articulation of the aspirational discourse exhibited the same supplementary logic. As I have argued, the social conservatism of John Howard, his ‘average’ persona, anti-elitism and skilful invocation of the mythologies and traditions of the past ensured that the Coalition’s articulation of the aspirational discourse remained discursively framed in a broader Coalition narrative that emphasised continuity, order and social equity. Howard, in speeches touching on national identity, routinely offered rhetorical amalgams that forged together diverse discursive elements in order to address dislocations in the neo-liberal order:

Our social cohesion, flowing directly from a unique form of egalitarianism, is arguably the crowning achievement of Australia's experience over the past century. We remain a relatively classless society; aspirational yet egalitarian. Competitive yet ultimately accommodating (Howard, 2001b).

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Howard’s progression from the battler rhetoric of grievance to the more positive aspirational rhetoric of prosperity was evident in the supplementary character of his portrayal of the emerging social imaginary as representing: “the new synthesis of aspiration and fairness” (Howard, 2007). In effect, the essential lack in the neo-liberal aspirational order was signalled through the supplementary articulation of ‘fairness’. The joint articulation of the two represented the core political project to discursively conjoin neo-liberalism with the kind of egalitarian values that had been appropriated against it in the One Nation political discourse. In this way the social effects of neo-liberal reforms were addressed through the appropriation of additional discursive elements associated with the previous egalitarian social democratic order – ‘fairness’, ‘equality’, ‘community’, ‘social values’. In seeking to supplement a neo-liberal identity with these values the identity of both was modified. The effect was to expose the deficiency in the primary identity.

Conclusion

In this chapter I have engaged in a general examination of the aspirational discourse in terms of its durable capacity to condense diverse discursive elements into a relational totality that conformed to and advanced neo-liberal hegemonic interests. The articulation of these diverse elements was reflective of a hegemonic project to realign and reinterpret traditionally right- wing notions of citizenship, and to integrate floating elements which hitherto had been associated with alternative political discourses. In this respect, the supplementation of a neo- liberal ethos of citizenship with discursive elements traditionally associated with discourses of the political left and the socially conservative right was a key feature of the aspirational discourse. This supplementary process highlighted the principal preoccupations of neo-liberal interests in relation to suturing the dislocations outlined in chapters four and five and, in particular, the ‘lack’ identified by Pauline Hanson and One Nation.

I will now move onto a consideration of one of the core dimensions in the construction of equivalential relations of social identity - that of social antagonism, and its role as the limit of any objectivity and as the ‘constitutive outside’ to which the failure of the hegemonic order to fully realise its identity (as prescribed through its range of myths and social imaginaries) is attributed. As I have argued in chapter six, the forging of a ‘unified’ and ‘authentic’ national identity, evident in the populist discourses of John Howard and Pauline Hanson, was 179 predicated on the identification and politicisation of a range of non-authentic identities to which the lack opened up through dislocation could be assigned. Social antagonisms facilitate a logic of equivalence within discursive formations as the differential relations are unified in their opposition to the antagonistic identity. Thus while social antagonisms represent the limited, tenuous and contingent nature of the social order, they also function as an important means through which that order constitutes its identity and manages its political environment.

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Chapter Eight

Antagonisms

Essential to the formation of equivalential identities is the conceptualisation of ‘the other’ as constituting a fundamental obstacle to the full realisation of prescriptions of the hegemonic order. Hegemony therefore functions around an explicit invocation and negation of alternative identity, meanings and options that serve to establish the parameters of its social order and which constitutes its chief means of reproducing itself in the face of structural dislocations (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 128). In this chapter I will begin by giving an overview of the core antagonisms generated through the aspirational discourse and the ways in which these antagonisms related to the neo-liberal hegemonic project. I will then move on to a consideration of the ‘values’ debate and two important areas in relation to which the aspirational discourse served to generate antagonisms as a means of addressing dislocations and promoting core neo-liberal policy objectives - conceptions of social welfare and the funding of private schools.

The aspirational and the ‘negating other’

The always partial fixation of meaning within discourse and its consequent inability to constitute a ‘full presence’ leads to the concept of social antagonism as the ‘limit of any objectivity’. In the absence of a fundamental ground or essential ordering principle that arrests the differential identities inscribed within discourse, the only means of defining the limits of a discursive formation is to posit the existence of a ‘radical otherness’ which is not compatible with the differential system from which it is excluded:

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which prevent it from constituting itself as an objective reality (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 127).

Thus social antagonism functions as the ‘constitutive outside’ of any discourse, since the subversion of identity that the antagonism represents; that is, its role as the limit of any social objectivity, also offers the hegemonic identity a means of entering the field of representation as it facilitates a logic of equivalence based on a common opposition to the antagonistic identity. This ‘negating other’ has no positive identity and is therefore internal to the discourse as its ‘constitutive outside’ (Torfing, 1999: 124). The logic of equivalence generated through its opposition to the hegemonic identity overrides the differential character of the social identities inscribed within its discourse (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 128). Its ‘radical otherness’ allows the hegemonic identity to assign responsibility for its inability to realise a ‘full’ social identity to the antagonistic ‘other’. In this way, as Elderman has observed, “all problems are caused by out-groups” which are the “archetypal forces of darkness” (cited in Hahn, 1998: 122). Popular social antagonisms simplify the social space by setting up dichotomous divisions through which mainstream political dynamics can be channelled. These dynamics tend to be structured around the illusion that the annihilation of the antagonistic identity will permit a realisation of the fully constituted social identity.

The establishment of a logic of equivalence “seeks to divide the social space by condensing meanings around two antagonistic poles” (Howarth, 2000: 107). In this sense, as put by Alex Carey in reference to the broad neo-liberal project in Australia, free-market ideology has two objectives: “to identify the free enterprise system in popular consciousness with every cherished value; and to identify interventionist governments and strong unions with tyranny, oppression and even subversion” (Carey, 1997: 18). Referring to the summary of equivalential links in the previous chapter, it is possible to assemble the following indicative listing of the ‘antagonistic poles’ constructed within the aspirational discourse:

Table 5: Antagonistic relations within the aspirational discourse.

Aspirational Anti-Aspirational Identities Aspirationals, Working Welfare dependents, families, Affluent working Unemployed, Special interest class, Upwardly mobile working groups, Entrenched privileged class interests

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Entrepreneurs, Self-employed, Old economy employees, New economy workers Trade unionists, Non- productive sector. Mainstream/ Average Class identities, Elites, Special interests, Minorities Australians Aspirational Anti-aspirational Socio- Free-Markets Government/ ‘Nanny state’, economic/political socialism Globalisation Old economy Enterprise Welfare Small government Big Government Privatisation Public/nationalisation Competition Stagnation, inefficiency Low taxation High taxation Private Public

Individual Aspirational Non-aspiring characteristics Individualism Collectivism/special interests Self-sufficiency/independence Dependency Conviction Doubt Values Lack of values/poor character Independent Dependent Positive attitude Criticism/complaint/dissent Ambition, initiative Lack of initiative Competitive/flexible/dynamic Inert/lazy Productive/motivated Unproductive/Idle/unmotivated Conservative/family values Radical/moral laxity Apolitical Political/ideological

Systemic Values Social mobility Entrenched class/ingrained social hierarchy/Government redistribution Prosperity/Consumption Poverty Ownership Welfare dependency Responsibilities Rights Egalitarian Vested interests Law and Order Social breakdown/crime Choice Coercion/lack of choice

As represented in Table five, when the various signifiers that constituted key moments in the neo-liberal discourse are assembled, ‘aspirational’ bestows a specific meaning and contextual positioning on all the other elements within the paradigmatic chain of equivalence. Aspirational subject positions were constituted through a corresponding set of antagonistic identities, practices and values characterised by a ‘certain sameness’ derived from their mutual negation of the neo-liberal/aspirational identity. The aspirational discourse generated

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antagonisms that ranged from those centred on notions of individual citizenship and character, to a broad range of prescriptive policies focusing on the proper role of government, the private sector and the market. To this end, the aspirational social imaginary of consumer affluence, private ownership, social mobility and material well-being was negated by the range of equivalent anti-aspirational identities linked to the ‘old order’ of big government and state-welfare, trade unions and minority interest group politics, all of which threatened the material interests of ‘average hard working Australians’. In this sense, the anti-aspirational elements did not simply represent points of difference, but rather constitutive blockages to the aspirational identity.

The utility of the aspirational discourse in constituting an ‘authentic’ Australian identity through the equivalential articulation of antagonistic identities, posited in terms of their hostility toward, or non-conformity with, the free-market, is evident in the following article by Paul Kelly in the Australian titled “The message for Labor: aspirational voters want results, not ideology”:

Labor must…ditch the old politics completely. This is urgent. It means treating globalisation as an opportunity; seeking reforms that utilize both public and private investment; abandoning the old order of big government and centralized solutions still beloved by the ABC; accepting that a market economy and a decent social order can be integrated; searching for new stake-holding mechanisms to give people ownership of the growth economy; looking beyond passive welfare and pork barrel and above all ditching the tactic of trying to win elections by attempting to appeal to the losers of globalization while Howard asks people to think of themselves as winners (Kelly, 2001a).

The article is notable for the sheer density of its ‘packaging’ of contested empty signifiers, and its corresponding invocation of antagonistic relations between the “old order of big government” and the new aspirational order. Thus Kelly portrays ‘aspirational politics’ in the following terms: “regenerative”, “assertive”, “new ideas”, “institutional renewal”, “policy creativity”, “generational change”, modernization”, “challenge”, “liberation”, “competitive”, “new agenda”, “results”, “way forward”, “empowering”, “expanding”, “asking people to think of themselves as winners”. This is juxtaposed with a range of anti-aspirational antagonistic imagery related to ‘old-world’ welfare state ideology: “negativity”, “outdated

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paradigms”, “old order of big government”, “centralized solutions”, “passive welfare”, “pork barrel”, “appealing to the losers of globalization”. The predominant symbolism is one of dynamism, as represented by progressive reform, productivity and modernity, against an imagery of anachronism and obsolescence. The aspirational voter is conjured as the embodiment of the free-market economic agenda. Their experiences as ‘homo-economicus’ logically leads them to a neo-liberal policy perspective. They therefore embrace globalisation and the competitive free-market, want smaller and decentralised government, and are hostile to the welfare state and trade unions. The antagonistic elements are bound by their negation of hegemonic identity - the elite component of which is represented through Kelly’s reference to the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) and its ‘love’ for the old order of ‘big government’ and ‘centralised solutions’. Taking as an example the aspirational signifiers of ‘efficiency’ and “productivity’, these can be seen to be blocked at every point by the anti- aspirational presence, either through the ‘artificial impositions’ of government, ideological ‘vested interests’, or through the character failings of the anti-aspirational citizen. As a result the realisation of, for instance, the totality of efficient economic outcomes (which ultimately leads to the complete realisation of individual aspirations) are dependent on the destruction of the anti-aspirational. Thus the framing of the article around the imperative statement: “Labor must ditch the old politics”.

As I have outlined, antagonisms not only account for the failure of the hegemonic identity to fully totalise itself - that is, to ultimately realise the values propagated through its myths and social imaginaries - but also constitute the means through which the hegemonic order articulates floating elements as moments within its social order. For instance, within the aspirational discourse one of the principal blockages is that mediated by the (empty) signifier and ‘nodal point’ of ‘prosperity’. The following excerpt from the journalist Peter Hartcher, titled “Labor Clings to Dead Ideology”, provides a useful example:

As a goal of statecraft, prosperity is good, necessary and desirable. To achieve prosperity is a common human aspiration. To deliver it is one of the central functions of government. If a country has it, then celebrate it, husband it, extend it (Hartcher, 2004).

Essentially, the aspirational discourse is structured around a narrowly defined consumer based version of prosperity, equivalentially linked to free-market economic orthodoxy. This

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allows for the designation of the range of ‘economically defunct’ antagonistic identities inscribed within - welfare recipients, the elites, proponents of agenda driven ‘ideological’ politics - as essentially anti-prosperity. Given that one of the principal hegemonic functions of the discourse is the articulation of empty signifiers, the construction of antagonisms facilitates this process. The fact that Hartcher’s observation that: ‘prosperity is good, necessary and desirable’ can be articulated at all, without representing an instance of pure banality, is due to the existence of the antagonistic identity; that is, the ‘dead ideology’ of old Labor. The aberrant character of the antagonistic identity - its ‘radical otherness’- is inferred through its avowed hostility to one of the most universal of human aspirations - prosperity. In defining the limits of the hegemonic order, the antagonistic identity allows for the effective hegemonic articulation of this signifier as a component of its identity. The antagonism functions as the ‘constitutive outside’ of the discourse, since reference to the ‘dead ideology of old Labor’ generates the political frisson (ie the contestation) which validates the articulation of ‘prosperity’ within the hegemonic order.

The political utility of the citing of the antagonistic identity in this instance is manifest. Hartcher’s core assertion is a simple statement of neo-liberal ideology: that political parties of the left are associated with an obsolete ideology and that this ideology does not deliver prosperity. By contrast the free-market is both natural, since it is not an ‘ideological’ construct, and practically geared toward providing prosperity. Since such an assertion is not problematised or critically validated, the implication is that it is an objective/neutral fact. The resulting political imperative is clear - abandon ideology and interventionist social policies aimed at engineering (equitable) social outcomes and embrace the market.

The two primary antagonistic identities identified through the aspirational discourse in relation to this ‘obsolete ideology’ were welfare recipients and the elites. In regard to the former, Tom Morton has captured the efficacy of the aspirational discourse in opening up social divisions:

Aspirational politics plays to would be winners of tomorrow. By its very nature, it sets up social divisions rather than dissolving them. If there’s an aspirational class one rung down the social ladder from the middle class, what about the people below them - the working poor, the welfare dependent, the unemployed. If they’re not members of the aspirational class, presumably they have no

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aspirations, or none worth bothering about. The tacit assumption is that those on the lower rungs lack the imagination, drive and motivation to aspire (Morton, 2001).

In other words, reference to the aspirational nature of one class implicitly invoked the social substrata below as essentially lacking the capacity to aspire; that is, to be beyond hope. As I will outline in more detail later in this chapter, the aspirational discourse’s identification of positive traits of character and motivation related to market performance therefore generated antagonistic relations with anti-aspirational welfare recipients who were typically framed as lacking in character and values.

Within the aspirational discourse, elements of anti-welfare/anti-elite antagonisms were equivalentially linked with the core prescriptions of the neo-liberal reform agenda under the imprimatur of the democratic, liberating and empowering mantras of the globalised free- market. The promotion of the ‘new global economy’ as a democratic wealth generator impervious to matters of class, hierarchy, privilege or power (Frank, 2002) facilitated the redirection of popular political subjectivities away from matters related to the socio-economic structure and toward the cultural, intellectual and bureaucratic elites of the ‘establishment’ and the plethora of ‘taxpayer funded’ special interest and minority groups with whom they were associated (refugees, immigrants, artists, welfare groups, etc). The elites were portrayed as constituting a vast non-market bureaucracy of government departments, human rights advocates, intellectuals and special interest groups, all of whom were primarily concerned with the preservation of their (illegitimate) privileged status (Sheehan, 1998; Flint, 2003).

As I have outlined in my analysis of the politics of One Nation and the Coalition under John Howard, the elites were posited as a primary antagonistic blockage within populist projects seeking to exploit the widespread disaffection with both the neo-liberal reform agenda and the progressive social agenda of the Hawke and Keating governments. Mickler, in his study of the rise of anti-elite discourse in Australia, referred to the “industrial disenfranchisement” and “social insecurity” of the 1980s that gave rise to the ‘ordinary’ everyman persona of the talkback radio shock jock and other populist media identities, “posturing as the scourge of privilege” and directing public frustration toward the “professional middle classes” (Mickler, 2005: 1). A key function of this brand of ‘market populism’ was to eradicate the economically wealthy and powerful from popular conceptions of the elite and to instead

187 focus on matters of culture, identity and values. As Marion Sawyer observed: “Market populists ridiculed One Nation for its naïve economic nationalism and opposition to free trade and competition policy. However, they appropriated its ‘anti-elitism’, shorn of its hostility to banks, big business, and international financial elites” (Sawyer, 2003: 4).

Scanlon has provided the following outline of those identities constituting the ‘elites’ within the aspirational discourse:

The conservatives have been able to concoct this noxious figure [the aspirational] as the kind of voter that parties must pander to, not by articulating what they're for, but by setting them in opposition to a social type who stands for everything they're against: the "elite". Like the aspirational-battler, the elite tag cuts across class boundaries. The term applies equally to highly paid QCs who defend the human rights of asylum seekers, to activists and students on low incomes who protest outside the camps. Whereas the aspirational battlers are stereotyped as concerned only with material wellbeing, the concerns of the elite are equally narrow. Their pet causes include indigenous reconciliation, refugees, the republic and issues relating to the funding and independence of public institutions, such as the ABC and universities (Scanlon, 2004).

As Hayek had argued, social justice was a mirage and those who purported to be pursuing the public interest were really ‘special interests’ (Hayek, 1989: 13). Equality seekers were therefore ‘rent seekers’ who believed that they could do better out of the state than the market. As the conservative social commentator Katherine Betts warned in 1999, although the elite’s call for increased welfare expenditure made them seem sympathetic to working- class interests, at bottom they were contemptuous of the materialism and parochialism of the working class. When they were not lecturing the electorate to accept asylum-seekers, elites were wincing at “basic Australian values” (Betts, 1999: 81). The ‘elites’ purported rejection of the aspirational on the grounds of their ‘crass materialism’ served to inform their portrayal as the defenders of entrenched privilege and social hierarchies, of the kind that the ‘social mobility’ and ‘prosperity’ of the aspirational class was confronting. Gwyther’s portrayal of the elites and their ‘sniggering’ contempt for the aspirational was typical:

While clinging to their harbourside homes, beaches and cooling sea breezes, the residents of Sydney’s east condemn aspirationals for ducted air conditioning and

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in-ground pools. Despite their proximity to the inordinate concentration of publicly subsidized cultural facilities, residents of north Sydney snigger at the proliferation of home theatres in the new homes on estates. Those wasteful, materialistic aspirationals are blamed for greenhouse gas production, growing carbon footprints and urban sprawl (Gwyther, 2003: 195).

Having given a preliminary account of the character of the antagonisms articulated through the aspirational discourse, I will now consider in more detail an important component of this antagonistic dimension: that signified through aspirational ‘values’ and individual qualities of ‘character’. The invocation of aspirational values and qualities of good character were evident most prominently in regard to conceptions of social welfare, in particular the pejorative framing of the ‘welfare class’, and the shift from public to private models of service provision as represented most controversially in the government funding of private schools.

Values, qualities of character and the welfare sector

A principal area where the anti-aspirational discourse was applied was in relation to social welfare and the related notion of social entitlement. The Coalition came to government with the intention of continuing the neo-liberal reforms commenced by the Labor party. As I have argued, its primary political project was to widen its base to those working-class voters who had been most affected by the neo-liberal reform agenda. The construction of social antagonisms, particularly in relation to the provision of government welfare, constituted a means of harnessing the disaffection and popular resentments consequent to neo-liberal reform while at the same time pursuing that same reform agenda. As I will elaborate in the following chapter, a core part of this project would involve aspirational ‘middle Australia’ being designated as the legitimate recipient of government support at the expense of those disadvantaged groups identified by convention as requiring the support of the state, such as the unemployed, single parents, migrants and those on disability pensions. The key signifiers in relation to this project were that of ‘values’ and individual ‘character’. Increasingly, a general denigration of those reliant on welfare focused on deficiencies of character and values. In line with the neo-liberal reform agenda, this denigration extended to a tendency to

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portray the public sector as subject to the same lack of standards and values; a ‘last stop shop’ for those without the capacity to choose anything better.

The winding back of the welfare state was an important component of neo-liberal reform agenda and was pursued throughout the term of the Coalition government. Prior to the Coalition’s election to government in 1996, John Howard had given notice of his intention to cut one billion dollars from social security spending and, in line with international trends, “increase the number of people dependent on the labour market for their livelihood” (Wilson and Turnbull, 2001: 392). During the election campaign John Howard had sought to make strict distinctions between the economic rights and entitlements of working families and those of the unemployed and other marginal groups. As Philip Mendes expressed it, following Howard’s election:

There has been a concerted campaign in the media to prepare the public for welfare cuts commensurate with the ideological agenda of the new right. In a short period of barely six months, Australia has witnessed a literal cavalcade of blame the victim attacks on welfare spending and welfare recipients. The ACOSS president… has spoken of a ‘feeding frenzy’ and ‘witch-hunt’ against poor and disadvantaged people (Mendes, 1997: 45).

In accordance with this, the first budget brought down by the Coalition government introduced a range of cuts to welfare programs, including cuts in rent assistance, the abolition of benefits to new migrants and the government dental program, and cuts to government labour market programs (Van Onselen, 2007). A prominent initiative following the 1996 election was the “Work for the Dole” program which made the reception of unemployment benefits for the young unemployed contingent on participation in community work projects. (Bessant, 2002: 78-82). According to the Australian Council of Social Security (ACOSS), thirty percent of the government’s total spending cuts were targeted at people on low incomes (Cited in The Age, Editorial, 1996). These cuts were accompanied by a range of more punitive compliance measures for the unemployed, including the launching of the ‘Dob in a Dole Bludger’ campaign designed to apprehend people guilty of welfare fraud (Vanston, 2002). Part of the proceeds of these savings were then redirected, via tax breaks and subsidies, to the prototype aspirational ‘battlers’. As the journalist, Malcom Farr, commenting on the Coalition’s election campaign, wrote:

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In essence Mr Howard took the one billion he wants saved over three years from the social security system given to migrants and the unemployed and redirected it to the ‘battler’ families with jobs (Farr cited in Williams, 1997: 253).

The thrust of the Coalition’s approach to welfare conformed with the key tenets promoted through the politics of the “new right’ in Australia. Such an approach represented what might be viewed as a morality of citizenship in which notions of good character were made contiguous with competitive individualism and the values of the free-market. Thus, in accordance with neo-liberal economic theory, public money given to aspirationals - for instance tax rebates, concessions and subsidies - promoted efficiency, growth and productive human endeavour and therefore met in a more profound sense the social justice obligations of the state. Reducing the tax burden on those in higher income brackets gave further incentive to the aspirational classes to acquire wealth. As Tim Colebatch put it, the “creed of aspirational politics” involved “giving to those who have, and those who want to have will see themselves as future beneficiaries” (Colebatch, 1999). Conversely, government welfare programs, in effectively promoting the withdrawal of individuals from the market, encouraged dependency and anti-social behaviour, and impeded self-reliance. Furthermore such programs encouraged people to seek help who did not genuinely require assistance, had been captured by vested interests or ‘rent seekers’ who sought to promote the system for their own benefit, and created market distortions (through taxation, reduced incentives to work, etc) which impinged on the overall efficient functioning of the economy (Mendes, 1997: 42). As the British right-wing commentator Robert Skidelsky put it:

The welfare state, setting out to minimize moral hazard through social insurance has made it endemic; collectivism carried to extremes creates a moral hazard problem so great that while it can be allayed for a time by terror gradually brings the whole system crashing down. Patchy collectivism practiced in the Western Democracies keeps some groups poor and incompetent and makes everyone else less well off than they otherwise would have been (Skidelsky, 1997: 10).

In this sense and in line with the ‘constitutive outside’ character of social antagonisms, the needs of the anti-aspirational welfare dependent were typically discursively framed as being ‘at the expense of’ legitimate and authentic aspirational citizens. That is, welfare recipients

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constituted a threat to neo-liberal myths in regard to properity, growth, productivity and efficiency, and therefore directly impinged on the capacity of aspirationals to realise their aspirations. The social disaffection that was attendant to the dislocations in the neo-liberal order and its reform agenda was therefore directed toward these groups. John Howard regularly portrayed the aspirational in the context of the ‘blockage of identity’ presented by the antagonistic identity. He argued that the ‘attitude’ of many of those dependent on welfare:

Really stuck in the claw of hard working people in this country… aspirational people who pay their taxes, struggle to raise their families... I think the whole Australian community has no tolerance for that kind of assumption of guaranteed support regardless of attitude (John Howard cited in Lawrence, 2003).

These views were echoed by the Minister for Employment in the Howard Government, Amanda Vanstone:

A flurry of media excitement greeted Amanda Vanstone’s declaration of war against welfare cheats. Senator Vanstone last week declared: ‘I don’t have Skase to chase any more so I need something to do... I don’t see why someone on a low income should work hard and have their taxes taken and watch as the Government doesn’t exercise its full power to ensure those taxes are spent diligently’ (Hartman, 2005: 1).

The Coalition’s construction of social antagonisms reflected Zizeck’s conception of ‘enemies of the nation’ as enjoying an ‘excess of enjoyment’. According to Zizeck, the ‘nation’ is essentially defined through its generation of myths which promote a notion of ‘national enjoyment’. The enemies of the state: “want to steal our enjoyment and/or gain access to some secret perverse enjoyment”. However “by imputing to the ‘other’ the theft of enjoyment we conceal the fact that we never had what was allegedly stolen from us” (Zizeck cited in Torfing, 1999: 194). As a national myth which generated notions of national enjoyment through the appropriation of empty signifiers such as freedom, prosperity, opportunity, etc, the aspirational citizen was the embodiment of the ‘national enjoyment’ unattained. Anti ‘dole bludger’ rhetoric, as promoted for instance in the “Dob in a Dole Bludger” program, implicitly endorsed the popular conception of unemployment benefits (amounting to a bare

192 subsistence financial payment) as synonymous with ‘the easy life’ and, in doing so, reflected this drive to implicate the antagonistic identity in the social ‘lack’.

This antagonistic identity, articulated in relation to notions of legitimate citizenry, social entitlement and the failure of the aspirational to attain ‘the Thing’, inevitably led to a strong accent on individual character and values as the principal determinant of social position. Accordingly, the aspirational discourse reflected the hegemonic drive to pathologise rather than politicise social disadvantage. In part this reflected the ‘social integrationist’ arguments typical of the ‘third way’ and civil society discourses which, while accepting multiple instances of social identity, “displayed an intolerance of divergent social relationships and behaviours in relation to those deemed difficult people and dangerous classes” (Young, 1999: 390). As theorised by Young, in the post-war period notions of welfare were concerned with ameliorative state action, based largely on principles of resource redistribution designed to address the structural imbalances that were primarily seen to give rise to such disadvantage. The social integrationist discourse conversely focused on these ‘aberrant’ groups as dysfunctional in and of themselves, outside of any structural determinants. The system itself was conceptualised as fundamentally fair and just. Failure to thrive was therefore posited as the result of character flaws, for instance failure to take individual responsibility and to develop coping mechanisms (Young, 1999).

In accordance with this, reference to the aspirational’s self-sufficiency and rejection of welfare served to implicitly suggest that the reception of government welfare was more a matter of choice than a matter of need. As the Liberal member of Parliament for the Western Sydney seat of Parramatta opined, the ‘new Parramatta’ was an aspirational seat that did not cry poor but solved its own problems:

People are not looking for government to solve their problems. Old Parramatta is sort of like hard luck, disadvantaged, always crying poor, seeing government funding as the solution to every problem. This is now a strong community looking to solve its own problems (Cameron cited in Northern District Times Editorial, 2001).

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As I have argued in chapter six, Mark Latham’s promotion of the aspirational discourse regularly exhibited such a focus on individual character and social relationships as a means of avoiding both a critique of the social structure and support for the politics of redistribution:

The main drivers of dependency are social, they are not financial. Basic relations of self esteem, recognition and trust have broken down. At its core long term poverty is a problem in the relationships between people (Latham cited in Watts, 1999: 151).

As a means of addressing these “problems of self esteem, recognition and trust” in the “relationships between people”, the aspirational citizen was typically invoked as a means of personally denoting and inscribing certain ‘worthy characteristics. These characteristics accorded with the neo-liberal reverence for the conservative values and mores of civil society and the personal characteristics that it was said to engender: “good character, honesty, duty, self sacrifice, honour, service, self discipline, self improvement, trust, civility, fortitude, courage, integrity, diligence, thrift and reverence” (Giddens, 1998: 12). While the political prescriptions intrinsic to the aspirational discourse were promoted as both organic and incidental to their practical common sense and good character, antagonistic identities such as trade unionists, the unemployed and welfare recipients were distinguished by their absence of good character; that is, by a kind of practical dysfunctionality and (relative) moral degeneracy, equivalentially linked to their redundancy as market actors.

The aspirational’s sense of community rarely extended beyond concerns for law and order, and was typically portrayed in relation to an antagonistic horizon characterised by the breakdown of social order, and the absence of values of discipline, responsibility, self- sufficiency and initiative. This antagonistic dimension was routinely cited both as a means of denoting the positive attributes of the aspirational citizen, and as a constant threat, the existence of which thwarted the realisation of aspirational identity:

It is not possible to learn and succeed at school if some students are allowed to cause chaos in the classroom. It is not possible to have a strong and trusting community if people live in fear of crime. It is not possible to create public confidence in the tax transfer system if people can get away with fraud and free

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loading. Social rights need to be matched by social responsibility (Latham, 2002b).

The most potent representation of this antagonistic framing was evident in accounts of the ‘gated communities’, master planned housing estates typically identified with the aspirational class that had become popular in the outer suburbs, particularly Western Sydney. In the view of Gwynther:

The growth of master planned communities (MPCs) on Sydney’s urban fringe has provided the moral middle class with a space of their own… the attraction of the MPCs for the aspirationals is the expectation of physical and social segregation, together with economic, cultural and ontological security (Gwynther, 2008: 193).

The gated communities represented the ultimate symbolic manifestation of the antagonistic relations evident in the aspirational discourse writ large. Essentially fortified communities of well-to-do middle-class people who were mythologised not just in terms of their relative wealth, but in relation to their moral character. This moral character was not founded, as previous liberal conceptions of good citizenship were, on values of reciprocity, community obligation, altruism and the ‘social good’ (Brett, 2003b), but rather on the kind of attributes that, as I have outlined, were deemed integral to effective market participation. The ‘community values’ attributed to the aspirational citizen in this context were insular and exclusive values defined through the (internal) projection of a broken down social order and antagonistic identities - social and racial minorities, public housing tenants, welfare dependents, etc - whose existence threatened these values.

These antagonistic divisions extended beyond the master planned communities to include whole suburbs. A good example of this was provided when residents from the more affluent ‘aspirational’ Western Sydney suburb of Woodbine signed a petition to stop the building of a footbridge across the M5 motorway linking it to the less prosperous neighbouring suburb of Claymore. The petition reflected the fears of Woodbine residents that their suburb would be ‘overrun’ by the crime and social breakdown that they associated with the lower socio- economic status of Claymore. (Clark, Humphries and Cameron, 2001: 10).

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While the aspirational discourse emphasised the positive and assertive character of the popular embrace of the free-market, offering mythologies of citizenship based on duty, discipline, consumer choice and prosperity, it was clear, as I have argued, that the hegemonic imperative was to respond to the sense of anxiety in the community engendered to a significant extent through the neo-liberal reform agenda. The aspirational was offered as a myth of purposeful and principled citizenship in a social environment rife with antagonistic identities. These antagonistic identities did not just serve the hegemonic purpose of constituting out-groups to which social anxieties could be directed, but also acted as a means of facilitating a widespread flight to an increasingly heavily publically subsidised private sector.

Private schools versus public schools

The antagonistic construction of a public - private nexus was an important means by which this neo-liberal shift to private sector service provision was facilitated. Nowhere was this more notable than in the debate in regard to private and public schooling. Under the Coalition, a range of reforms promoting the privatisation and marketisation of schools were implemented in what was portrayed as a sector dominated by arcane bureaucratic processes and self-interested professional groups (Cribb and Ball, 2005). Under the Howard government, values related to the importance of the public education system as a bulwark of democracy, a key guarantor of social equality and equal opportunity, and as a central institution benefiting the community as a whole, were increasingly substituted with an emphasis on the pre-eminent (market) values of parental choice and positional advantage (Marginson, 1993; Hartley, 2008). Aspirational mythology, through its antagonistic construction of the public sector, was an important factor in countering the equity concerns to which this policy shift gave rise.

The Coalition’s schools funding policy followed a general trend throughout its term of government to facilitate ‘mainstream’ access to private services with public money. The Socio-Economic Status (SES) schools funding model implemented in 2001 by the Coalition, determined the size of government grants to schools through an assessment based on the demographic wealth profile of each school. While the formula itself was designed according to principles of public equity, the subsequent Coalition decision to guarantee real increases to 196

all schools under the new system, and to award the highest proportional funding increases to schools ranked at the top of the SES scale, meant that “private schools with the least need for additional resources received disproportionate increases in funding” (Watson, 2004: 7). This led to a substantial increase in the proportion of commonwealth funds going to the private school sector, with approximately two-thirds of Commonwealth funding going to independent schools and one-third to a government school sector which educated 70% of the nation’s children (Graham, 2007: 4; Martin, 2002)16. As funding to private schools reached unprecedented levels, restrictions on the establishment of new independent schools were relaxed, leading to a major increase in the size of the private school sector (Bonnor and Caro, 2007: 3).

The outcome was the increasing marginalisation of the government school sector and a marked increase in levels of educational disadvantage (Slattery, 2007; Bonnor and Caro, 2007; Luke et al cited in Graham, 2007: 8). The equity implications of the coalition’s funding policy substantially contradicted core egalitarian values and precipitated widespread criticism on equity grounds from education professionals and the wider public (Carr, 2001; Keenan, 2003). Aspirational mythology was employed as the key means of addressing these criticisms and as such sought to articulate market values related to parental choice and positional advantage over and above traditional education values related to equality of opportunity. Ashbolt has noted the way in which the aspirational discourse was able to obscure the equity implications of the Coalition’s funding policy:

In what sense is it private when massively subsidized by government? It is private mostly in an ideological sense: it gives members of the professional middle class a feeling they are doing the right thing by their children, disguising old class snobbery as aspirational politics (Ashbolt, 2005: 9).

Though, as Ashbolt cites, the shift to private schools was largely driven by the ‘professional middle-class’, the standard narrative associated with the aspirational discourse was that of struggling working-class parents, marshalling their limited financial resources and ‘making sacrifices’ in order to exercise ‘choice’ and send their children to a private school. This

16 Under the current Australian schools funding model 77 percent of funding comes from state governments and 23 percent from the commonwealth government (Dowling, 2007: 3). 197

essentially egalitarian argument was integral to John Howard’s selling of his school funding policy:

It is no surprise that the fastest growing area, as I understand it, in the area of education is not at the very top, not the so called elite schools, but this new group of independent schools, which reflects the growing desire of aspirational Australia to exercise educational options, the growing desire of aspirational Australia to exercise educational options which we are catering for (Howard, 2001).

This narrative provided a substantive part of the rationale for the increased government support of private schools since it countered egalitarian arguments against the funding arrangements for elite private schools by appropriating elements of that very egalitarian discourse. Thus, when the Labor party entered the 2004 election with a policy that sought more equitable funding arrangements between the private and public sectors, private school lobby groups launched a public relations campaign that promoted the idea that struggling ‘aspirational parents’ would be hit with massive fee increases (Glover, 2004).

However, despite such claims, there was no substantive evidence supporting the argument that such parents constituted a significant number of those assessing private schools (Martin, 2003). For those parents that did make sacrifices, Bonnor and Caro pointed to parent’s fears in relation to the “residualised” and “under-funded public system” and the possibility that such parents may have felt “that the only option they have in such a frightening environment is to do everything they can to protect their own children” (Bonnor and Caro, 2007: 25). Similarly, McGaw referred to the ‘social exclusivity’ of private schools and found that much parental anxiety could be explained due to the perception that “poor company confers a large additional educational disadvantage on already socially disadvantaged students” (McGaw, 2006: 3). Additionally, Mackay identified the time and work pressures that impacted on parents’ choice of private school education, with many parents seeking to make up for their absence as parents due to longer working hours by facilitating their children’s access to the superior resources and support networks available through private schools (Mackay, 2004). These accounts do not accord with the positive parental choices and emphasis on ‘values’ propagated through aspirational mythology, and point instead to anxiety related to a sense

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that public schools were both under resourced and lacking in morale. Martin has referred to the anxieties of what, he argued, was a proportionally insignificant number of parents:

... there may be a few ‘struggling parents’ making sacrifices to send their children to them (private schools), but they are motivated by a perception that their child will not be ‘up there’ unless they make them. They are aspirational parents seeking to buy individual advantage for their child (Martin, 2003: 3).

While the unprecedented increases in the amount of government funding to private schools facilitated a marked increase in private school resources and thus a heightened comparative sense of public school disadvantage, aspirational mythology emphasised the values that the private school sector was seen to embody and that the market was seen to bring to bear. In this respect, the gulf between the private and the public was not related to issues of resources, power and privilege, but values. As John Howard notably commented:

People are looking increasingly to send their kids to independent schools for a combination of reasons. For some of them, it's to do with the values-driven thing; they feel that government schools have become too politically correct and too values-neutral (John Howard cited in Crabb, 2004).

“Values” acted as a nodal point that incorporated elements of Howard’s conservative discourse, in particular the notions of discipline, hard-work and individual responsibility, all of which private schools were popularly promoted as representing. In the view of the Coalition’s education minister, Brendan Nelson, ‘values, discipline and identity’ were the three major factors determining the ‘stampede’ to private schools (Nelson cited in Doherty, 2003). Also evident as a factor in this values narrative was a conservative strain of ‘anti- liberalism’, in the cultural sense, which promoted the public sector as imbued with the rebellious, critical and morally lax politics of the progressive left. In a discourse associated with the US conservative right and pursued as an element of the ‘culture wars’ by the Howard government, antagonistic relations were forged through a citation of the corrupting influence of the social justice and civil rights movements, the shift to cultural pluralism, and the self-expressive individualism and social dissent of the ‘radical left’, the ethos of which had infiltrated public institutions (Flint, 2003). In this vein the conservative social commentator, Anne Henderson, referred to the “negative social consequences” that came

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from the “liberation battles of the 1960s and 70s... dysfunctional family life for so many, drugs, street children, overcrowded jails and so on” (Henderson, 2004). Such a critique informed Howard’s reference to ‘political correctness’ and ‘neutral values’. In the context of the ‘values’ debate, the aspirational’s avowed sense of ‘personal responsibility’, prescriptive and exclusionary conception of the social order, and uncritical allegiance to the free-market order could be categorised as conforming to what the philosopher, Stephen Law, has referred to as the modern flight from the excesses of liberalism and a return to the strictures of authoritarianism, with its prescriptive modes of behaviour, prohibitions on dissent and moral strictures (Law, 2006: 169).

In this sense the homogeneity that characterised the private school culture - from the typically formal school uniforms to the predominantly white middle-class student body - correlated with the conservative emphasis on social order, control, discipline and good character. In the context of the aspirational discourse’s framing of a community increasingly conceptualised as dysfunctional and threatening, public schools tasked with educating a wide cross section of students from different socio-economic, cultural and religious backgrounds with considerably less resources than private schools, were subject to being portrayed as synonymous with dysfunction, disorder, poor discipline and other problems generally associated with lower socio-economic groups.

In this vein, Gwynther in her study of the ‘aspirationals of Western Sydney’, cited one successful working mother: a “senior executive in a large corporation”, who sent her children to a local private grammar, due not to the superior resources of the school, but rather for the “values it professed” (Gwynther, 2008: 192). These ‘values’, related purely to the (passive) personal characteristics of ‘niceness’ and ‘respect’, were juxtaposed with the ‘nightmare’ of the state system:

My eldest son turns 15 in March. He is growing up and I have not had one problem with him. He’s got nice friends, and the parents of those friends, they’re great kids. They’re not disrespectful. And I think the school has a lot to do with the fact that my son is growing up to be a really nice young man…Whereas I look at my girlfriends who have put their children through the state system and they’re just having nightmares (Gwynther, 2008: 192).

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An analysis of the public infrastructure of Western Sydney by Gleeson and Randolph has described the circularity of this public - private debate (Gleeson & Randolph, 2002), with the general running down of the public sector facilitating a greater reliance on the private sector, which in turn created the political momentum for more government funding to the private sector and a neglect of the public sector. The outcome of this, as Christopher Pearson has summarised, was an increasingly disadvantaged and ‘residual’ public school system:

The question everyone in the political class is tiptoeing around is this. At what point do most public schools simply become sinks of disadvantage, places where a residue of kids with average or below average IQs and more of their fair share of other problems confound everyone’s efforts to teach them life’s basic survival skills? You could reformulate the question by asking: at what stage does the abandonment of public-sector education by what used to be called the lower- middle classes reach its tipping point (Pearson, 2007).

Conclusion

The aspirational discourse was articulated through a thorough invocation of an antagonistic realm portrayed as constituting a fundamental block to the full attainment of aspirational identity. Traits of the anti-aspirational were connoted with a wider stigmatisation of public institutions and a dismissal of the validity of the welfare state. The principal antagonistic groups: the elites and welfare dependents, were equivalentially articulated in terms of their association with public institutions, their hostility toward and non-participation in the free- market, and their adherence to the ‘ideological and class politics’ of the old order and its culture of complaint and envy.

The practical effect of the undermining of the public realm evident within the aspirational discourse was the gradual creation of what has been referred to as a two-tiered society, comprised of those with the economic means to ‘choose’, and those without such means who were reliant on an increasingly under-resourced and neglected public sector. The aspirational citizen essentially sutured the equity dislocations latent in the general neo-liberal shift to the private sector by articulating egalitarian moments into its market discourse. Issues related to social disadvantage and advancement were thereby disassociated from issues related to the

201 social structure and made contingent on issues of character, morality and values. Social disadvantage could by posited as a failure of individual character - the deviancy of the ‘out- group’- rather than a breakdown in the hegemonic orders capacity to promote fair and equitable social outcomes.

The utility of aspirational mythology in this regard was largely derived from its identification with the aspiring lower classes or the struggling mainstream, positively symbolised through their common sense and willingness to work hard in pursuit of neo-liberal social imaginaries. By contrast the anti-aspirational was denoted by their failure to exhibit such positive traits of character. Portrayed as constituting ‘market impediments and distortions’ and associated with social breakdown and crime, the anti-aspirational represented a fundamental impediment to the full realisation of aspirational identity.

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Chapter Nine

Myth

As I have argued, the failure of the hegemonic order to achieve a fully integrated and closed social structure is determined by the ineradicable dimension of social dislocation which perpetually disrupts hegemonic attempts to overcome its contingent and precarious nature. By the late 1990s dislocations in the neo-liberal order could be attributed in the broadest sense to both the effects of its economic reform agenda and the impact of these reforms on the Australian egalitarian social imaginary. In this final chapter I will consider the status and function of the aspirational as a myth that sought to address these dislocations through its production of a surface of inscription in which individual and national demands and hopes could be inscribed. Taking Laclau’s conception of myth as a means of ‘suturing’ the political dynamics attendant to the dislocations of the ‘real’ world, myth functions as a form of imposed order, a system of interpretation and a space of representation that atones for the fundamental complexity and disorder of the social, and arrests the play of meaning. An important component of this is the ideological project to depoliticise the social order through reversion to symbolic representations that are posited as both natural and objective.

With reference to the dislocations that I have identified in chapter five, I will begin with a theoretical consideration of the concept of myth, followed by an analysis of five core mythical elements evident in portrayals of the aspirational. Of these five, the aspirational as a ‘creature of the pure and anonymous free-market’, as ‘self-interested individual’ and as ‘consumer’ referenced important moments in the standard neo-liberal discourse, all of which were effectively re-articulated and amplified. Integral to these representations was a re- conceptualisation of concepts and values of citizenship, social equality and equity, structural power-relations, modes of governance and social attitudes toward wealth and privilege. The other two aspects of aspirational mythology represented what might be viewed as more extemporaneous hegemonic responses to contemporary political dynamics. These sought to address dislocations in the neo-liberal order through, firstly, the articulation of a classless social imaginary (which significantly modified elements of the traditional Australian egalitarian mythology), and secondly, the re-conceptualisation of social entitlement; that is, the facilitation of ‘middle-class’ or ‘aspirational welfare’.

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The function of myth

Within the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe, myth functions as a response to the precarious political constitution of society and, as such, operates as a surface of inscription for an impossible fullness that synthesises the range of ‘dislocated’ discursive elements that are a consequence of the failure of the hegemonic order to integrate social structure and agency into a fully sutured whole (Laclau, 1990: 61). Myth is identified as a means of reading a situation through the construction of means of representation that form new objectivities (Laclau, 1990: 61). Importantly myth “is a metaphor for an absent fullness” – that is a fullness which cannot be realised at present (Torfing, 1999: 115).

Ideology constitutes the primary framework for the articulation of myth. In this sense, ideology represents the “means to totality of any totalizing discourse” (Laclua, 1990a, 92) and the hegemonic drive to disguise its fundamentally contingent, tenuous and precarious nature. Through the production of myths, ideology “constructs the real world in terms of a set of fully constituted essences and tends to deny that these essences are contingent results of political decisions taken in an undecidable terrain” (Torfing, 1999: 116). The political, in this context, is the open horizon of possibility that serves to undermine ideological attempts to construct a ‘full’ and ‘closed’ social identity. For Laclau it is the constitutive split between ordering and order (or the particular and the universal), which prevents the subject from being fully determined and is the condition of politics (Laclau and Zac, 1994: 37). As represented by Barthes, this ‘constitutive split’ determines the political as an elusive world of “contradictions”, not amenable to “purifications and simplifications”, which always elludes attempts to construct a “blissful clarity” based on self-evident and non-contingent truths (Barthes, 1972: 143). The ideological drive toward this “blissful clarity” and constitutive fullness is what myth seeks to simulate as an anecdote to the tenuous nature of the social order. Barthes’ notion of myth as a form of depoliticised speech is characterised by allusion to the loss of the historical quality of things (that is the contingent political nature of social ‘reality’) and its substitution with the ‘self-evident’ and ‘natural’:

Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and

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eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but a statement of fact… it abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences… it organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity; things appear to mean something by themselves (Barthes, 1972: 143).

Any social order is therefore constituted by a tension between its essential indeterminate or unstable ensemble of social practices and the attempts of hegemonic interests to legitimise power through moral and intellectual reforms which arrest the play of meaning and constitute a neutral intellectual and moral horizon. In this sense, the function of aspirational mythology centred on the core hegemonic project of suturing dislocations related to the widening disjuncture between neo-liberal interests and public expectations that were becoming manifest by the mid 1990s. Aspirational mythology effectively sought to legitimise neo- liberal policy and practices by reframing its core values in order to harmonise them with ingrained community values and expectations - in particular those related to the egalitarian social imaginary, and by disassociating it from antagonistic political discourses emphasising its ‘elitist’, ‘pro-big-end of town’, ‘inequitable’, ‘exploitative’, ‘regressive’ or ‘anti- egalitarian’ nature; the kind of assessments that were integral to the populist politics of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.

To this end, the purpose of the aspirational discourse was to articulate a range of empty signifiers, the most prominent of which were ‘aspiration’, ‘prosperity’, ‘opportunity’, ‘community’ and ‘fairness’, in such a way as to both rearticulate key discursive moments in the neo-liberal discourse and to incorporate floating elements that may have been subject to dislocation. In accordance with this, aspirational mythology invoked a range of market subject positions associated with, for instance, competitiveness, independence, materialism and hard work, without exhibiting any of the downsides typically invoked through antagonistic political discourses: alienation, stress, inequality, debt, social isolation, lack of engagement with community and political disenfranchisement. These elements were either reframed (ie, debt conflated with prosperity) or excluded.

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I will now consider five key aspects of the mythology of the aspirational citizen in the context of the embedded discourses of citizenship, national identity and governance that it sought to variously appropriate, modify, transform and delegitimise.

The aspirational as a creature of the pure and anonymous market

The articulation of depoliticised representations of the free-market order as ‘efficient’, ‘natural’ and ‘inevitable’ was reflected in portrayals of the aspirational as essentially an organic expression of the market. In accordance with the reification function of ideology in which a transitory, historical and contingent state of affairs is presented as if it were “permanent, natural, outside of time” (Thompson, 1984: 131), such representations invoked a deterministic natural imagery, portraying the free-market order as an externally contained and essentially uncontrollable ‘phenomenon’ in relation to which democratic institutions and nation states were ultimately powerless (Perraton, 2003: 37). This has been termed the ‘necessitarian argument’ which implies that free-market globalisation is “something done to economies, governments and communities” (Watts, 2000: 146). John Howard consistently portrayed globalisation as an elemental and irresistible force:

It’s no good being frightened of change. Globalisation is with us and will be with us forever and people who imagine that somehow or other we can hold back the tide of globalization don’t understand the modern world as we come to the end of the 20th Century (Gordon and Henderson, 1997: 2).

The central imagery evident in this kind of ‘globalisation as natural force’ mythology was one of human passivity and powerlessness in the face of the ‘tide’ of globalisation. This natural force or ‘phenomenon’ was, however, at once a force of both potential destruction (if an allegiance to the ‘old order’ is retained) and progress (if the economic ‘reforms’ that it prescribes are embraced). It required not the rigour and leadership of governance, but the passivity of management. In this way the chaotic, uncontrollable and ‘frightening’ force was, at the same time, a force with its own immanent logic and intrinsic sense of order - a force which, though potentially destructive if not properly ‘managed’, was also the only means by which attainment of the (hegemonic) myths and social imaginaries - economic growth, material prosperity, social mobility for instance - could be realised.

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Aspirational mythology contained the same natural and transformational imagery, and ipso- facto, the same logic of political imperatives, as that employed in representations of the free- market. Despite, as I have argued, the strong arguments for the historically enduring nature of an aspirational ethos in Australia (Scalper, 2005; Abjorensen, 2000) and the essentially mundane characteristics attributed to the aspirationals, portrayals tended to bypass any problematic consideration of the complex nature of social or class identity and conceived of them outside of any extra-market historical or social context. By way of the ‘spontaneous market order’ ethos of neo-liberalism, the aspirationals constituted an ideal of citizenship, in effect, because they were posited as a full and ‘natural’ expression of the market, in opposition to ‘politically’ or ‘ideologically’ constituted social identities.

This was evident in portrayals of the aspirational as “new” (McGregor, 2002: 23), as a harbinger of “fundamental change” (Sheehan, 2002: 32), as a “force” which had “changed the Australian and NSW political landscape” (Judd, 2002), as a “phenomenon” (Latham, 2003: 67) and as quintessentially ‘modern’ (Scanlon, 2005; Latham, 1999). Such imagery invoked an elemental symbolism, the ‘reality’ of which legitimated (demanded) new political responses that accorded with the logic of the market. Mark Latham offered the following deterministic account of the ‘logic’ generated by the ‘reality’ of the aspirational:

In less than a generation families can go from owning nothing to owning everything…they represent a new class of aspirational voters. Anyone who denies the importance of this phenomenon is denying reality…The ownership revolution is here to stay. Aspirational politics is a logical consequence of this reality. To win the next election Labor needs to reclaim the revolution (Latham, 2002).

The modernization of Australian Labor is well overdue. Hardly surprising that the massive economic and social changes of recent decades have also changed voting patterns. A new electoral contest is in motion. Earlier this week Mr Carr alluded to a new aspirational politics - the sort of people who voted liberal at the last election but turned to Labor at the state election…What is new is the nature of the aspirants themselves. The new economy is producing a new workforce and hence a new voting population. These are people who have joined the information revolution, wired up to computer technology. This group

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also supports a new politics of participation. With vast gains in the level of education and flow of information in our society, people naturally want a bigger say in the decision making process…An information rich society demands participation rich politics. This is why Labor’s structure needs to be overhauled (Latham, 1999).

In portrayals of this kind, the ‘reality’ of the ‘ownership revolution’ was not accounted for in terms of any preceding constitutive political, social or economic factors, but rather posited in non-conditional terms (as an apolitical “modern phenomenon” and “revolution”). In the second excerpt the word ‘new’ is used seven times in short succession. Aspirationals are identified with the “new economy” which is producing a “new workforce” and a “new voting population” which supports a “new politics of participation”. The rhetorical aim is to unambiguously position the aspirational as constituting a fundamental break with the past. This break with the past is represented in the language of modern technocratic globalisation; that is, the urgent need for the “modernisation of the Australian Labor Party” in the face of “the information revolution” and ‘new economy”, with its technologically savvy citizenship “wired up to computer technology”. It follows that to deny aspirational politics and its range of political prescriptions is therefore to “deny reality” and, on this basis, to be “illogical”. The “revolutionary” character of this “new” expression of market citizenship, its complete break with the past, signifies the urgency of its political logic and the illegitimate ‘ideological’ or ‘obsolete’ character of alternative, non-market political logics. As Mouffe has observed in relation to neo-liberalism, the effect is to:

Discriminate between those who are in tune with the new conditions of the modern, post-traditional world and those who still cling desperately to the past. To use modernization in such a way is no doubt a powerful rhetorical gesture which allows them to draw a political frontier between the ‘moderns’ and the ‘traditionalists or fundamentalists’ while at the same time denying the political character of their movement’ ( Mouffe, 2005: 54-55).

The political order is therefore conceived as secondary to the ‘natural’ and ‘modern’ order, and dominated by a range of managerial imperatives involving the jettisoning of ‘anti- market’ policies and practices (public debt, big government, taxation, etc). The conception of the aspirational as a creature of the market, imbued with both objective interests and rational agency, facilitated its status as an authentic form of citizenship compatible with utilitarian 208 neo-liberal free-market economic models. As I have argued in chapter three, in this neo- liberal theoretic the legitimate role of government is fundamentally restricted to maintaining and ensuring the market-order, and interventions geared to redistributive or social justice ends are typically viewed as misconceived and ultimately counterproductive. As the ‘Public Choice’ theorist James Buchanan noted: “we live together because social organisation provides the efficient means of meeting our individual objectives and not because society offers us a means of arriving at some transcendental common bliss” (Buchanan cited in Marginson, 1992: 47). In reflection of this, aspirational mythology pejoratively framed market interventions as ‘ideological’ and fundamentally at odds with the interests of aspirational Australians:

The working class has been replaced by the aspirational class. They may not live in Vaucluse or Mosman, but their hunger for sports cars and café lattes is the same. The traditional view has been that there is systematic injustice out here which needs a massive welfare state, but people just wanted government to give them a fair go at looking after themselves (Liberal MP, Ross Cameron, cited in Mclveen, Morris and Nason, 2001).

Ideology has died in Australian politics. People don’t want big visions, big ideas, big reforms they’re tired of it. We don’t want this ‘light on the hill stuff’ - it’s dangerous (Sheehan, 2001).

People don’t want government of the old kind - full of public ownership and regulation - but a new type of public sector, one which enables people to take more control of their own circumstances (Latham, 1999).

John Della Bosca, a veteran poll reader was one of the first Australian politicians to use the term aspirational politics and understand what it implied; that the hip pocket now rules the heart, that soak the rich rhetoric doesn’t work in what is now a largely middle class country; that blame hurling has burnt itself out (John Della Bosca cited in Sheehan, 2000).

The success of neo-liberal arguments in relation to the limitation of ‘encroachments on the private sphere’ is exemplified by the contemporary trend to depoliticise key government functions through the establishment of neutral statutory regulatory bodies and independent or

209 quasi-autonomous government agencies (Flinders, 2008; Burham, 2006). In this sense, as Clarke has observed, “new right governments endeavoured to depoliticise critical public issues through installing economic and managerial discourses as the dominant frameworks for decision making” (Clark, 2004: 34). This may involve the denial of political choice in favour of “either an insistence that a certain issue is beyond the domain of political control, or that a single rational and technically correct solution to a specific problem exists” (Flinders, 2008: 256).

Self-interested individualism and the aspirational as ‘terminus a quo and terminus ad quem’.

One of the principal functions of aspirational mythology was to address the dislocations that egalitarian critiques had rendered to the neo-liberal order. The central project in this regard was to make self-interested individualism compatible with public conceptions of the ‘social good’. Its core hegemonic project was therefore the production of a compelling mythology of citizenship essentially devoid of collective forms of association and substantive political agency. The self sacrifice, public service, civic responsibility and political participation that had constituted an important component of earlier Australian values of good citizenship were therefore countered with a focus on individualised qualities of character primarily synonymous with market performance. Additionally, political agency, founded on the value of a critical engagement with the social structure, was substituted with a concern for consensual dialogues and the interpersonal management of social relationships based on values of ‘dignity’ and ‘respect’.

Historically the dominant Australian egalitarian ethos had maintained a rigorous political element founded on the value of collective forms of political organisation as a means of ensuring equitable social outcomes. The ‘rugged individualism’ that constituted an important moment in the traditional Australian egalitarian discourse was typically enacted through the formation of social collectives founded on values of kinship, mutual support and fraternity. In this respect the egalitarian nodal point of ‘mateship’ encompassed values of collaborative social relationships and political solidarity (Ward, 1958). As I have argued, this ethos of collectivism was particularly evident in the strength of the Australian labour union movement and the state’s historical acknowledgement of the collective rights of 210

workers to negotiate wages and entitlements through the unique system of industrial relations arbitration and conciliation (Sawyer, 2003; Macintyre, 2004).

Such values were a common theme in Australian mythologies of national identity – from the ‘pioneering’ folklore of early colonial Australia to the mythology of the First World War Anzac soldiers. Reflecting this collectivist ethos, the historian, Russell Ward, compared the concept of American democracy; that is, the idea of the free individual independently making his/her own way in society, with the Australian concept derived from the bush legend which meant the freedom to associate with ones mates for the ‘collective good’ (Ward, 1958: 244-245). In a similar vein, Phillip Knightly, offered the following portrayal of Australians in the World War 2 Japanese prison camps:

[In the Japanese POW camps] The British hung on to their class structure to the point of death. The Americans were the capitalists, the gangsters, even charging interest on borrowed rice. The Australians kept trying to create tiny welfare states. Within little tribes of Australian enlisted men, rice went back and forth all the time, but this was not trading in commodity futures (like the Americans); it was sharing, it was Australian tribalism (Knightly, 2000: 68).

This ‘tribalism’ entailed an emphasis on the value of civic and community expressions of citizenship and a conception of the ‘public interest’ typically pursued through political forms of citizenship. Judith Brett has contrasted the aspirational citizenship with earlier Australian liberal values of citizenship which “depended on the character of citizens, on the moral qualities they brought to political life and, in particular, on their capacity to put the interests of others before their own” (Brett, 2001: 425). Significantly a strong sense of “civic duty” and “social responsibility”, which maintained a “hatred of selfishness and self-interest”, had historically constituted a core component of the liberal individualism of the Australian “moral middle-class” (Brett, 2003b: 60). Unlike those values evident in the aspirational discourse, this entailed a strong emphasis on the value of active community engagement:

Citizenship was something which liberals both aspired to and already embodied, and which was enacted not just in their narrowly political actions like voting, but in their active involvement in the affairs of the community… citizenship was an active not a passive state. Thus voluntary associations, the need for community

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and group organization in settler countries like Australia and the United States…people had to take responsibility for their communities… they had to rely on each other (Brett, 2003b: 64).

The following quote from “The Australian Citizen” published in 1912 by Walter Murdoch, a popular Australian writer of the early 20th century, indicates the strong connection between the public interest and conceptions of good citizenship:

When a man desires the common good of the community, and desires it so ardently that he is eager to do anything in his power to further it; when he is ready to throw over his own interests when they conflict with the common good; when he is prepared to give up all he possesses... that man is in spirit and in truth a good citizen (Murdoch, 1912: 234).

In the face of this, the neo-liberal hegemonic project was to articulate new subject positions that equated competitive self-interest with the public good. To this end, those traits that in the context of the absence of any significant social, political and community engagement on the part of the citizen might previously have been viewed as selfish and contrary to the principles of good citizenshp and the national interest were, through the aspirational discourse, framed as ‘aspirational’, ‘ambitious’, ‘growth’ and ‘prosperity’ oriented. As the Journalist Kenneth Davidson noted “the aspirational class, to whom all politicians now bow, not only want more money in their pockets, but they want to feel good about it” (Davidson, 2001). Alternative values of ‘responsible citizenship’ and democratic participation involving meaningful and substantial obligations to community and society were bypassed in favour of values of citizenship derived from one’s adherence to, and capacity to perform within the market. In this sense community was equated with the market place, the public interest to matters of economic performance, and civic engagement largely framed around issues of law and order. The first speech to parliament of the Liberal party member for Casey in Victoria, Tony Smith offered a typical portrait of the primary concerns attributed to the aspirationals:

[The aspirationals] concerns for government are the same as all who passed before them. They want reward for effort and initiative, as well as a fair go for those in genuine need. They want stable and sensible economic management by the government of the day and recognition that it is the guardian of continuing

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low home mortgage interest rates and growing job opportunities… they want choice in education; the choice of quality government schools as well as the chance and the right to send their children to a private school if they see fit… small business want the right to go about their daily work without interference and intimidation from militant unions. Importantly they want to control the destiny of their own lives with government assistance – but not an overbearing government interference that limits their choices (Smith, 2002: 2).

The recurrent values running through this portrait are those of ‘choice’ and ‘wants’, all of which are defined and legitimised through the aspirational's dedication to self and market. In opposition to the discourses of the political left and the Hansonite right which incorporated narratives of social alienation, dispossession and powerlessness, the rights and capacity of the citizen to exercise choice and control is construed as essentially organic to the unrestrained market. The capacity to do this however is made contingent on the antagonistic presence of “overbearing government” and “militant unions”. The legitimate role of government is reduced to the essentially passive role of market facilitation - that is “sensible economic management”, “low interest rates”, and the provision of “job opportunities”. Broader conceptions of citizenship based on non-market social and political obligations and responsibilities beyond that of family are not part of the narrative. The value of the ‘fair go’, which comprises the sole altruistic reference, is a qualified one, signalling only those in “genuine need”. As the former politician Carmen Lawrence observed: “broader horizons, idealism about improving the fairness of society, of protecting our environment, of global citizenship, are definitely not included in the Howard definition of aspiration” (Lawrence, 2003).

This negation of collective forms of political citizenship was reflected in a range of factors integral to neo-liberal hegemony including the shift to depoliticised and technical modes of governance under the imprimatur of market determinism, the collapse of the old political and class identifications, the decline in the rate of workforce unionisation, and the pervasiveness of consumer culture. It was also, as Mouffe has noted, following Schmitt (1976), due to the historic failure of liberalism to conceive of the collective and political aspects of social life due to its reductive rendering of the individual as “terminus a quo and terminus ad quem” (Mouffe, 2005b: 13). In place of collective forms of political citizenship has been a liberal ideal of social co-operation which:

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... aims only to enhance our productive capacities and facilitate the attainment of each person’s individual prosperity. Ideas of public-mindedness, civic activity and political participation in a community of equals are alien to most liberal thinkers (Mouffe, 2005b: 62).

In the context of the aspirational discourse, this reversion to matters of ‘capacity enhancement’ in a ‘post-political’ environment was represented through a focus on issues of personal management, consensual modes of social and political interaction, and interpersonal values such as ‘respect’ and ‘dignity’ (Honneth, 2001; Collini, 2010). As the Journalist Paul Sheehan argued:

Aspirational politics is – let me get on with my life, let me make my own decisions. Let me make a crust and provide for my kids. It is absolutely clear that aspirational politics is about my kids not being on drugs and getting a good education. The old politics of class war is gone, its over. The electorate has little interest in the old ideological mode what matters is what works. There is a rising tide of public politeness. We are fed up with adversarial politics and an adversarial media. And apparently we don’t want a return to grand promises leading to big budget deficits and high interest rates (Sheehan, 2000).

More sameness, less equality

As I have argued, a core function of the aspirational discourse was related to the hegemonic project to counter the ongoing saliency of the traditional Australian egalitarian mythology and its identification with alternative political projects. In this respect the most significant discursive elements related to conceptions of social equity and equality. Given the embedded nature of egalitarianism as a signifier of national identity, the aspirational discourse, rather than explicitly rejecting egalitarianism, instead incorporated it as a discursive moment and, in doing so, modified its meaning. This modification entailed attempts to reframe concepts of social equity and equality from their traditional egalitarian associations, in order to suture dislocations associated with the increase in social inequality that was becoming increasingly evident in Australia by the late 1990s.

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As I have outlined in chapter seven, the appropriation of a floating signifier to a given discourse will involve its articulation in an ensemble of elements, the meaning of each of which will be modified vis-à-vis their equivalential articulation with the other elements in the discursive chain. The articulation of egalitarianism as a moment within the aspirational discourse and it equivalential relation with a range of neo-liberal signifiers involved a significant modification of its traditional meanings. The capacity of neo-liberalism to appropriate ‘egalitarianism’ as a floating signifer and, in so doing, modify its conventional meaning, was enhanced by its over-determined character. As Kapferer and Morris have noted:

The values of egalitarianism are potentially powerfully ambiguous, capable of being pursued in a variety of contradictory directions. The continual development of new import in its terms ensures the vitality of an egalitarian ethos, new meanings or revaluations being a potential of egalitarianism, founded as it is on a dynamic of contraries in uneasy resolution and tension (Kapferer and Morris, 2003: 112).

Historically, one of the most dominant elements of Australian egalitarianism has been the preponderance of views suggesting that Australia is essentially a classless society, both in terms of socio-economic equality and in relation to the fundamental homogeneity of its people, vis-à-vis their tastes, habits and behaviours. The genealogy of this dominant strain of Australian egalitarian mythology can be traced to the particular circumstances of Australian state formation - in particular the dominance of a rural or bush frontier social imaginary derived from early Australian colonial history (Smith, 2001; Thompson, 2004). The view of Australia as free of the kinds of class distinctions that characterised European society has been reflected in an array of social commentary. In the 1950s, Donald Horne referred to the pervasiveness of the egalitarian mythology as a signifier of national identity, noting the common Australian citizen’s understanding of their country as “the most egalitarian of countries, untroubled by obvious class distinctions, castes or communal domination” (Horne, 1968: 19). JF Archibald writing in 1907 related the widespread perception of the lack of a class structure in Australia to the fact that every Australian wore the same clothes and ate the same food (Archibald, 1968: 270). Summarising the tenor of these views, Thompson offered the following broad summary of Australian egalitarianism:

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It is a set of beliefs that has been built up over time and spread into the popular culture. These beliefs include; that Australia is a classless society because income and/or wealth are evenly distributed and because everyone can own their own home; that the social styles of the rich and poor are much the same…and that Jack is a good as his master (Thompson, 1994: viii).

The dominance of these beliefs in the context of the particularly harsh and demanding nature of early Australian settlement, contributed to a particular mythology of national character that emphasised both rugged individualism and a collective solidarity between equals (often referred to as Australian ‘mateship’):

Beneath the governor and the overseers, everyone was equal. It was, perforce, a one-class society, united in a mixture of hostility and nostalgia towards Mother England, united especially in the isolation and the rigor of Australian life (McCrum, MacNeil, Crum, 1992: 100).

Ward in his study of the “Australian Legend’ filled out the personality type typical of this classless social imaginary, conjuring a rugged individual, independent, resourceful, and sceptical of authority:

He is a hard case, sceptical about the value of religion and of intellect and cultural pursuits generally. He believes that Jack is not only as good as his master but at least in principle probably a good deal better and so is a great knocker of eminent people. He is a fiercely independent individual who hates officiousness and authority (Ward, 1958: 1).

Representations such as these indicate that egalitarian conceptions of Australia as essentially ‘classless’ were predicated not on a tolerance of difference or diversity but rather a tendency to define one’s authenticity as a citizen through a rejection of difference - be it on intellectual or cultural grounds, or the very notion of social ‘eminence’. Although Australian egalitarianism included a range of values and mythologies, in the most general sense it could be seen to revolve around two principal components - values of ‘sameness’ and ‘equality’ (Thomson, 1994: xi). This emphasis on sameness generated a particular brand of equality, an individualism guaranteed by the rejection of non-authentic forms of identity, for instance those related to social elites or cultural minorities. The practicalities of living in a harsh and

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demanding environment ensured that there was a strong degree of cynicism toward the pretentious, elaborate or overly sophisticated, what in modern parlance has been called the Australian ‘tall poppy syndrome’.

Wealth differentials therefore tended to be suppressed. The wealthy, due to the egalitarian prohibitions, tended to not ‘advertise’ or ‘flaunt’ their wealth, and the emphasis on ‘sameness’ was maintained by their conformity with mainstream standards of, for instance, dress, habit and custom. Thus while Australia had always been subject to the kind of class based economic inequalities and impediments to social mobility typical of other western societies (Stillwell, 1997: 31; McGregor, 1997; Connel and Irving, 1992), the potency of the egalitarian social imaginary effectively repressed public manifestations of this inequality. As the leader of the Labor party in 2005, Kim Beazley, remarked:

In Australia, while there is always an element of class politics, the reality is that we're a very egalitarian society in spirit. We may not be in outcomes or experience, but in spirit, we all see ourselves as much the same. If you're a political leader, you have to relate to that fact. In fact, you want to relate to that fact, because it's a good thing about being Australian (Beazley cited in Hartcher, 2005).

Despite the absence of strong class identifications, it was in relation to an increasing public awareness of wealth differentials and social inequality that dislocations of the neo-liberal hegemonic order, particularly in the last years of the Keating Labor government and the first term of the Howard government, became increasingly evident. As I have argued, the period was notable for the strong upsurge in ‘egalitarian’ sentiments as the neo-liberal reform agenda began to fracture many of its central tenets. As the social commentator Hugh Mackay noted at the end of the 1990s:

The dream of egalitarianism came into full flower when it looked as if we could all be prosperous. Now thirty years later the scene has changed. The rosy expectations of the fifties and the sixties have darkened into the bleaker realities of the nineties. Things are tighter, tougher and less certain. The dream of egalitarianism is turning sour, especially for those who are being denied access to Australia’s employment, education and health care opportunities (Mackay, 1999: 52).

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The following public comment by a director of a remuneration consultants firm defending the massive increase in business executive salaries in 1995, illustrates the tenor of the public discourse and the extent of the gulf between popular values and elite opinion at the time:

Australians and Australian companies need to come to terms with the fact that traditional Australian egalitarianism and views of fairness are not what is needed today… because the race to prosper in a more competitive world [is] endless (Wiseman, 1996: 93).

As neo-liberalism generated significant inequalities in income and wealth distribution, and significant financial and work pressures on sections of the traditional working-class, the invocation of the egalitarian prohibition on social inequality became more pronounced. The dislocatory effects were enhanced by the lack of a mythological framework or compelling neo-liberal narrative under Hawke and Keating. As I have argued in chapter six, the ‘battler’ rhetoric that the Howard government employed to exploit the Labor government’s failure to sufficiently hegemonise its neo-liberal reforms was imbued with the egalitarian, social justice discourses of the left and as such entailed prohibitions on social inequality that were not compatible with the Howard Government’s simultaneous implementation of neo-liberal reforms. This led to Howard’s eventual abandonment of ‘battler’ rhetoric and the adoption of the aspirational discourse. The aspirational discourse offered a means of addressing dislocations based on the increasing public awareness of social inequality and, in particular, wealth differentials, while at the same time maintaining key egalitarian elements. Howard’s aspirational rhetoric was very specific in relation to those aspects of the traditional egalitarian ethos that he wished to modify:

Mr Howard said Australia was becoming more like America - more entrepreneurial, a trend he wanted to encourage. Young people, in particular, were becoming entrepreneurial because they were more upwardly mobile. He wants to push Australia further in this direction...The attitude to enterprise in Australia had changed, the Prime Minister said. "The old story... you see a bloke driving by in a Rolls-Royce in America, you say, 'I'll have one of those one day'. But sometimes the old Australian [attitude] resents the fact that somebody else has got it," he said. "Now, I think that's changing. I think that's changing quite a lot with younger people. Younger people now are more aspirational. There's a

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very important change that's come over our society. Young people now are very disdainful of trade unions. They think they belong to a bygone era” (Howard cited in Hartcher and Dodson, 2004).

Though statements of this kind represented a radical break with egalitarian values (the “old Australian attitude” cited above by Howard), important egalitarian elements were maintained. The aspirational perspective entailed a strong affirmation of the classlessness of modern Australian society and the rejection of social eminence based on cultural or elitist grounds. The Australian ‘bloke’ driving the Rolls Royce remained an ‘average’ Australian. The ‘sameness’ of identity, manners and habits that was integral to Australian egalitarian mythology was maintained. In Howard’s aspirational imagery, the seminal cultural signifier of wealth and privilege - the Rolls Royce - was now a status good firmly within the range of the ‘average’ Australian. Thus while Howard’s aspirational rhetoric broke the traditional Australian prohibition on acknowledging wealth differentials and, ipso-facto, ostentatious displays of wealth, it effectively maintained the traditional egalitarian emphasis on ‘sameness’ in its denial of any essential identity disjuncture between the wealthy and the less well off. In this way, inequality of wealth was substituted with equality of identity. The two were separated not by class or by any intrinsic structural impediments to social advancement, but by circumstance which, in turn, was predicated on one’s performance in the (‘democratic’, ‘open’, ‘free’) market. In this respect the aspirational citizen’s seminal identification with working/lower middle- class interests was of crucial importance since it allowed for the conflation of the interests of the ‘lower’ classes with the interests of capital, the wealthy and privileged. As I have argued in chapter seven, this supplementary articulation of egalitarian discursive elements into the competitive, free-market prosperity discourses of neo-liberalism constituted a key component of the aspirational discourse.

Dislocations related to widening social inequality were further addressed through the aspirational concept of ‘social mobility’. In the words of Mark Latham “the aspirational phenomenon” was “fuelled by social mobility the likes of which we have never seen before” (Latham, 2003: 67). Such mobility, always of the upward kind, attributed a classless dynamism to the system that was discursively juxtaposed with the imagery of inertia and entrenched class divisions typical of neo-liberal representations of the post-war welfare state. Social mobility implied a perpetual social fluidity which over-rode critical attempts to identify fixed or entrenched structural inequality or inequities. As Scanlon noted:

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Terms such as the aspirational are increasingly used in place of class to describe collective identities…they express the kind of social fluidity that led the students in my class to conclude that there is no such thing as class and the cleaner in ‘Nickel and Dime’ to believe that a luxurious mansion was in her reach if she worked long and hard enough (Scanlon, 2004).

While economic inequality was therefore disassociated from any entrenched structural determinants and made compatible with concepts of fairness and equity, the egalitarian emphasis on a homogenous social identity (sameness) was maintained and amplified through anti-elite discourses that focused primarily on the ‘otherness’ of cultural and intellectual elites. These elites, it was argued, constituted the principal violators of the egalitarian ethos on the basis of their non-conformity with the ‘average’, ‘authentic’ Australian identity; that is, their transgression of the ‘sameness’ principle. The widespread anxiety and resentment toward the neo-liberal reform agenda was therefore directed, not at those who had benefited economically from these reforms, but to the ‘otherness’ of the ‘politically correct chattering classes’, ‘the thought police’, ‘academic snobs’ and social justice ‘do-gooders’ who, through their relative positions of privilege, their arcane language, political self-righteousness and pretentious violation of the ‘common sense’ of the ‘mainstream’, were posited as antagonistic to the egalitarian ethos (Hill, 1998: 38).

The aspirational as needy and deserving

The absence of any wider obligations of social or political citizenship in the aspirational discourse indicates another important component of its mythology – the conception of the aspirational as both needy and deserving and, in line with this, its employment as a means of modifying the conceptions of social need and entitlement that had been integral to the post- war welfare state. The advent of ‘aspirational’ or ‘middle class’ welfare was a feature of the second half of the Howard government and represented an important practical dimension of the hegemonic suturing of structural dislocations attendant to neo-liberal reforms. In light of the emphasis on the individualism of the aspirational, its ‘independent’ character and hostility toward the traditional recipients of social welfare, the fact that the aspirational discourse effectively paved the way for an explosion in ‘middle-class’ welfare involved

220 fundamental tensions and contradictions between its rhetoric and its range of practices. These tensions were addressed through the ‘aspirational as deserving’ mythology and the disassociation of aspirational welfare from traditional forms of welfare.

The framing of the aspirational as ‘legitimately in need’ and ‘worthy’ was derived from its seminal neo-liberal identity as self-interested individual and consumer. In accordance with this, material acquisition and consumption were prescribed as important determinants of individual identity and social status, and were further connoted economically with the national interest vis-a-vis the generation of economic growth. In this sense, regular reference to the ‘struggling’ or ‘battling’ aspirational, though resonate of the kind of noble poverty and hardship discourses typical of early Australian pioneering mythology, was expressed in reference to wants (ie the desire for material wealth, positional goods, etc) rather than ‘needs’ (food, shelter, clothing, etc). While the notion of families ‘struggling or battling’ for positional goods might, on face value, seem absurd, in a discursive sense it represented an effective conflation of market consumerism with elements derived from a pioneering ethos founded on qualities of self-sufficiency, self-advancement, strength of character and hard work - all qualities readily associated with the aspirational. In a certain sense, the status driven material acquisitiveness of the aspirational, the desperate quest for personal identity and social status on the frontier of a competitive market place, was effectively connoted with discursive elements associated with the subsistence level aspirations of the pioneering Australian (‘struggle’, ‘hard work’, ‘ambition’, ‘self-sacrifice’). Both were associated with essentially simple, organic and fledgling expressions of citizenship discursively linked to the ‘national interest’. The aspirational discourse in this sense simply involved a substitution of the pioneering frontier with the suburban shopping mall.

As I have argued in chapter eight, an important component of the aspirational discourse was the recasting of conceptions of social welfare away from an assessment of ‘need’ and ‘entitlement’ based purely on the relative material/financial circumstances of the individual, toward one based on character and worthiness. In line with this and in accordance with neo- liberal conceptions of the pernicious effects of ‘passive welfare’, traditional welfare provision to the ‘poor’ was increasingly viewed through the prism of ‘moral hazard’, the undertaking of which threatened the social order as a whole. The aspirational’s worthiness as citizen effectively allowed for a re-conceptualisation of the notion of social welfare, away from the destructive practices of the old welfare state and its consolidation of entrenched 221 welfare dependency and social disadvantage, and toward the tax cuts, bonuses, rebates, incentives and rewards of the aspirational state and its promotion of market participation, social mobility and prosperity. In this sense, social welfare when directed toward the ‘aspirational’ mainstream was reconceptualised as equivalent to performance bonuses; a ‘reward for effort’ and ‘encouragement’ for those, in the words of John Howard, “prepared to have a go” and wanting to “lift their incomes”:

I am a great believer that you have to encourage the aspirational side of the Australian community. You have got to look after the poor but you have also got to encourage people who are prepared to have a go and who want to lift their incomes, who want perhaps a slightly larger home, who want more options in relation to their children’s education. There’s a very strong aspirational streak in the Australian community and I think it is something to be encouraged and nurtured (Howard, 1999).

As the world economy boomed post 2001 and the Australian government’s financial resources were strengthened through windfall revenues in resource taxes, royalties and levies, the capacity of the Howard Government to “encourage” the “aspirational streak” was enhanced. The expansion in government income support to the middle-classes escalated at the time that the China-led resources boom and lower unemployment led to significant increases in government revenue. The paradox of the second half of the Coalition government was that while it continued to pursue core elements of the neo-liberal reform agenda, many of which had a negative impact on middle Australia, it did so while at the same time compensating those affected groups with a variety of tax cuts, cash payments, subsidies, rebates, and benefits. As the Journalist Michael Harvey noted in 2004:

Howard has always advocated for small government. Yet… he has embarked on a spending spree aimed at specific groups whose support the Coalition needs - effectively expanding rather than constraining the concept of middle class welfare (Harvey, 2004).

Thus while the Howard government, as we have seen, implemented a more punitive and scaled down social welfare system in relation to traditional disadvantaged groups - the unemployed, the disabled, indigenous groups, and other minority groups - contra to neo-

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liberal ideology, the overall welfare net was extended rather than retracted during the post 2001 economic boom. Thus by 2004, 39.3 percent of all families were effectively receiving more income support from government than they were paying tax, and by 2007 this figure had risen to 41.6 per cent (Megalogenis, 2008). For the period 1998 to 2008, the total dollar amount of Australian Government spending grew by 54% (Commonwealth of Australia Budget Paper, 2007.) Much of this increase was made up of a range of spending initiatives which effectively addressed political issues associated with the dislocations that I have outlined in chapter five. Government subsidies to private schools, health care rebates that ‘rewarded’ people taking out private health insurance, child care rebates which coincided with a shift to privately owned for-profit child-care centres, one off cash payments following the birth of a child, and an array of (largely non-means tested) family benefit payments can be seen as prime examples of this paradoxical shift to the public subsidisation of private services, many of which hitherto were provided by government (Gittens, 2009). The Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) calculated that up to the year 2003, two billion dollars a year had been allocated to measures that constituted ‘upper class welfare’ (ACOSS, 2003). This amount increased substantially in the period following the economic boom commencing in 2001, when government finances began to surge. As Ben Eltham commented in 2007:

... economic consensus from both major parties has produced a uniquely Australian “semi-welfare state. Generous middle-class tax benefits and a minimal - but still existing - safety net have largely protected the Australian middle- classes from declining [economic] prosperity. But nor have these policies made things substantially better for our poorest citizens (Eltham, 2007: 2).

Thus when related to simultaneous tightening of the traditional welfare sector (as discussed in chapter eight), the shift exposed a wider project to redefine the very notion of social entitlement. The extent of this growth in middle-class welfare and the degree to which it contradicted the independent ‘aspirational’ rhetoric was pointed out by the conservative commentator Janet Albretchtsen:

If you’re scratching your head trying to work out who are the true economic conservatives, join the club. John Howard’s pitch for aspirational Australians goes to the heart of the dilemma. The more handouts you provide, the more

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people expect. Surreptitiously the politics of aspiration are being replaced with the politics of government dependency. The premise behind the politics of aspiration was encouraging people to use their initiative to move up the economic ladder. Yet as they moved up the ladder, the Howard Government kept them close with constant handouts of middle-class welfare. The Liberal Party’s campaign launch was more of the same, enticing aspirationals with non-means tested tax rebates for parents of schoolchildren and further tax deductions for first home buyers… Its not a good look for the Coalition. Those who were once his most ardent supporters, those tagged as the PMs aspirationals, may end up dumping the government because the Coalition has fed their expectations, not managed them (Albretchsen, 2007).

There was an important practical dimension to the aspirational discourse’s recasting of social need and welfare support which went to the dislocatory effects of neo-liberal reforms. As we have seen, the gradual withdrawal of the state as a service provider, the deregulation of labour markets, constraints on real wage growth, the move to user-pays and privatised means of service provision, and the changing requirements of employment meant that, as the social researcher Peter Saunders expressed it, “increasingly working people needed an income package containing both wages and welfare to maintain an adequate standard of living” (Saunders, 1998: 10). Indeed the worldwide trend under neo-liberalism of increasing government outlays on social expenditure, that is, transfers to households and social programs, was explained by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 1998 as resulting from the fact that ‘technology and....globalisation” were “tending to increase income inequalities” and thus increase “demands for more extensive income redistribution” (OECD, 1998: 157). The impetus for such spending in Australia could be related to the fact that, as outlined in chapter five, the profit share of GDP accounted for an increasing portion of national wealth at the expense of the wages and salary share (Bramble, 2004) and, from the second half of the 1990s, the rate of household income dedicated to servicing debt reached historically unprecedented levels (La Cava and Simon: 2003: 1; Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2004b). As Manning observed, the middle-class status of many Australians rested on “the fragile foundation of high levels of personal and household debt” (Manning, 2005: 2).

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Implicit in the aspirational as ‘needy’ and ‘deserving’ narrative, beyond the rhetoric of individualism, reward for effort, hard work, independence and self-sufficiency, was an acknowledgement of the increasing financial, time and work burdens on a ‘mainstream’ which included a large section of the old middle-classes. As Beidatsch put it: “neo-liberalism has to cause pain to the people who [are to] provide its advocates with electoral support” (Beidatsch, 2007: 56).

The principal hegemonic project for neo-liberalism was therefore concerned with successfully accounting for the needs of those sectors of the community who were most adversely affected by its reform agenda. As the public sector contracted and became increasingly under-resourced and run down, a core dimension of this was an increasing tendency for access to private services to be facilitated with public money. As Gleeson and Randolph noted, under Howard:

The aspirational welfare state has created its own brand of aspirational dependency with households increasingly caught in the trap of seeking further public interventions to support private benefit, be it in exclusionary planning, investment is subsidized private schooling, medical and health insurance, transport infrastructure and so on (Gleeson and Randolph, 2002: 22).

In this context the ‘mainstream’, ‘equal rights’ discourses propagated by both Pauline Hanson and John Howard against ‘preferential’ government support to minority interests, rather than being viewed as ‘anti-welfare’, can be more accurately viewed in the context a political project to reconceptualise the focus and intent of social welfare away from traditional disadvantaged groups and toward a disaffected, ‘worthy’ and ‘struggling’ mainstream. As Andrew Marcus has pointed out:

It was a feature of the politics of the late 1990s that those objecting to special benefits for indigenous Australians and funding of the multicultural ‘industry’ demanded assistance for the group with which they were identified. The demand for equal rights existed alongside a valuation of ‘us’ as worthy of government attention and ‘them’ as unworthy’ (Marcus, 2001: vii).

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A key point is that the ‘aspirational politics’ pursued by Howard, while popularly interpreted as reflective of the ‘good times’ and the ‘prosperity’ generated by neo-liberal reform, was to a significant degree, a practical response to the dislocations engendered by this very same reform agenda. As such it was more closely related to social hardship and dependency than the prosperity and independence narrative promoted through the aspirational discourse. These dislocations, in turn, created the wellspring of discontent and resentment that was latent in the aspirational discourse’s antagonistic identification of the socially ‘undeserving’. Studies such as those conducted by Esping-Anderson and Herbert Gans have shown that for those nations with ‘residual’ support for the poor, periods of hardship and stress on the working population often manifest in contestations as to ‘work effort’ and a punitive focus on those receiving welfare (cited in Wilson and Turnbull, 2001: 388). The aspirational discourse provided a means of harnessing this discontent for hegemonic purposes.

In this sense aspirational mythology affirmed the qualities of character and purpose of the aspirational ‘mainstream’ as a means of denoting their worthiness as citizens and, ipso facto, their entitlement to government support over and above traditional recipients of government welfare. The mythical portrayal of the aspirational as ‘in-need’ and the provision of aspirational welfare constituted important components of the suturing of dislocations attendant to the neo-liberal agenda.

The aspirational as consumer

The aspirational’s unreserved endorsement of the values of consumerism and commitment to the myths of personal transcendence through consumption, propagated by the marketing and advertising industries, functioned as a strong symbolic endorsement of the free-market and its drive toward ever increasing economic growth. In this respect it can be seen to involve an appropriation of the potent interpellative capacity of consumer mythologies relating to individual prosperity, growth and wellbeing in the face of dislocations rendered by the loss of social connectedness and meanings generated through neo-liberalism’s undermining of the public realm.

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The associations between market consumerism and the aspirational citizen are explicit. The neologism ‘aspirational’ had its origin in the consumer marketing of the 1970s and was appropriated as a political signifier in this context. In marketing terms aspirational brands are those top-end exclusive brands that are coveted by a certain set of consumers, primarily due the fact that they are outside of their personal means (Thomas, 2007: 2). In accordance with this, the signifier ‘aspirational’ and its identification with high-end consumption facilitated the political appropriation of the kind of consumer significations promoted through a raft of sophisticated marketing campaigns promoting personal fulfilment and prosperity. From Morton’s characterisation of aspirationals as: “upwardly mobile men and women on the make, buying their name-brand values off the shelf…defined by their purchasing power and driving ambition to acquire the gadgets and graces of the middle-class” (Morton, 2001: 2), to Emma Kate Symons’ prosaic conception of them as: “miniature thinkers and miniature dreamers who want to keep the ironing up to date, afford a mobile phone and DVD player, renovate the home and maybe take an extended holiday” (Symons, 2004), the crass materialism of the aspirational, their ‘nouveau riche’ embrace of ‘luxury’, ‘high end’ consumer goods and their questionable taste and style, was typically either lampooned by the left-wing commentariat or lauded by the populist right.

The aspirational discourse was a reflection of the fact that the mode of consumerism had “become the dominant twentieth century paradigm for subjectivity, the dominant way of thinking about being... it has come to infiltrate our processes of making choices and even making ethical judgements” (Barklan, 1998: 753). In accordance with this, the symbolic representation of the modern community or social space as typically represented through the aspirational discourse was the shopping mall. Thus when Mark Latham was questioned about Labor party leader Simon Crean’s visit to a shopping mall as a means of meeting and identifying with ‘aspirational voters’, Latham’s reply was that:

There are two things that define who we are on the outer edge of Sydney. We are consumers and we are commuters. So for Simon to be visiting shopping centres and railway stations in Western Sydney, he’s going exactly where the action is (Latham cited in Jones, 2001).

The ideological drive to interpellate the citizen as a consumer is an instrinsic feature of late capitalism. The expanding need for a production frontier means that it is necessary to shape

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values in addition to needs and desires. This is particularly the case in relation to the economic law of diminishing marginal utility: that is the fact that the more an individual consumes a product, the less it is desired (Galbraith, 1976). Capitalism counters this diminishing utility through the production of new and rebranded consumer goods and through advertising and marketing strategies which manufacture demand through the perpetual invocation of individual need and, by extension, personal inadequacy. In relation to this, commentators such as Rosenblatt have written about the creeping sense of failure and discontent intrinsic to consumerism:

It is the perpetual and relentless round of having and yearning that drives the system and which, in my view, maintains us in a continual state of unhappiness, conscious or not, a state we may actually seek. The state of not having gives us a frontier, a thing to reach and not to reach. When we ran out of a real frontier, we made other things not to have (Rosenblatt: 1999: 2).

In much the same sense, the aspirational was perpetually consigned to a state of becoming rather than being. This was indicative of a consumer ethos based on what Juliet Schor has called the “aspirational gap’; that is the gap between what people wish for and their actual income in a capitalist system which is driven by keeping gratification just out of reach (Schor cited in Rosenblatt, 1999: 6). The politics of aspiration, in line with its function as hegemonic myth, substituted an absence in the present with a promise of fullness in the future in a way that was reminiscent of the modern day fetishisation of ‘dreams’ as propagated through political rhetoric, marketing and self-help culture. Personal failure to realise the totality of one’s aspirations, as defined through the advertising industries construction of social identity, could be overcome through the perpetual act of material acquisition and consumption. In this respect the profound cultural links between material acquisition and personal well-being might be seen as a social imaginary around which such myths as the ‘suburban dream’ are constructed.

The hegemonic saliency of the aspirational discourse was evident in its capacity to carry the values and logic of market consumerism to realms previously conceived of outside its area of relevance. Sellar and Gale point to the widespread employment of the consumer/materialist elements of the aspirational discourse with young people and the connecting of issues of

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equity with conceptions of individual motivation and participation. They quote a teacher from a school attempting to engage students:

Because teenagers are materialistic, I’ve started talking about what things you want to buy and how do you get to that stage, and you can’t get to the brand new car or a new house, or a trip overseas on the dole, you know (Sellar and Gale, 2009: 2).

The extent of the penetration of this aspect of neo-liberal mythology was also evident in the increasing adoption of consumer discourses in the public sector, in particular the portrayal of clients as ‘consumers’ exercising ‘choice’ (Phillips, 1996, 216). This was particular striking in the Howard government’s marketing of its industrial relations Workchoices reforms, which sought to connote labour market deregulation with discourses of consumer sovereignty, predicated on the notion of labour market ‘choice’ and ‘flexibility’ (Muir, 2006).

Whether it was the pursuit of happiness through changes to one’s psyche or through ones attainment of aspirational goods, in line with the consumer paradigm, the atomised individual of neo-liberal mythology functions in an increasingly privatised social space penetrated and fractured by a plethora of commercial messages and market interpellations hinging on the construction of identity through the personal and often random exercise of choice. In this context, the mythical promotion of an aspirational citizen, imbued with objective interests and rational agency, can be interpreted as a hegemonic response to the loss of community, social connectedness, individual identity and collective meanings that has been, in part, a consequence of neo-liberal hegemony. As Hamilton has remarked:

The neo-liberal drum-beat of self-reliance and small government is the same message that, more subtly, the marketers reinforce every time they try to sell us something that promises to make us happier. But if we cannot construct an identity from the raw materials provided by our communities and cultural heritage, from what can we build it? Into this breach stepped the marketers of modern consumerism. Increasingly it is to the market, to the brands and the lifestyles attached to them, that people turn in order to create themselves - not to their communities, clubs or unions. In this world it is consumption, typified in the shopping experience, that becomes the characteristic act (Hamilton, 2006: 2).

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In serving to link notions of prosperity and personal fulfilment with market acquisition, aspirational mythology therefore sought to promote the market mechanism and counter the anomie that was a consequence of its undermining of non-market forms of citizenship.

Conclusion

The various myths promoted through the aspirational discourse represented hegemonic responses to the dislocations in the neo-liberal order, particularly evident from the early 1990s to the commencement of the set of factors that characterised the Australian economic boom, post 2001. As a response to antagonistic political projects citing traditional Australian values, aspirational mythology both rearticulated fundamental neo-liberal discursive moments, in addition to articulating new moments involving the modification of the traditional egalitarian discourse and the promotion of ‘middle-class’ social entitlment. In doing so it sought to hegemonise popular conceptions of the legitimate role of government, valid forms of citizenship and social organisation, and values of social equity. Core hegemonic priorities were evident in the project to transcend sectional or class interests, re- establish the ‘non-contingent’‘natural’ status of the free-market order, invoke qualities of character commensurate with market participation, embrace the prosperity narratives of modern capitalist consumerism, and reject the structural hierarchy, ‘ideologies’, ‘state paternalism’ and ‘social divisions’ of the ‘old order’.

While the hegemonic utility of the aspirational discourse was, in part, due to its efficacy in generating a compelling new mythology of citizenship, its viability was, to a significant extent, a consequence of a range of economic circumstances that served to validate its neo- liberal prosperity narrative - in particular the credit fuelled, post 2001 global economic boom, that led to a nominal increase in household wealth. This boom and the related windfall increase in government finances served to ameliorate the worst effects of economic restructuring through an expansion in the provision of government welfare.

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Conclusion

The primary purpose of this thesis has been to puncture the veneer of neutrality and non- contingency that allows hegemonic orders to disguise their fundamentally precarious political character and the relations of power that constitute their primary rationale, and “to pinpoint from a certain exterior the gaps and points of undecidability that enable discourses to both cohere and organise themselves but which simultaneously undermine their coherence and unity” (Howarth, 2000: 45). In this sense the aspirational, as a neo-liberal myth of citizenship, provides a genealogy of the primary political logics and priorities of neo- liberalism in the context of its failure to fully dominate the social order.

Unquestionably there have been recent transformations in Australian society and in the identifications individuals make with the social order. In the face of the trauma to the social order induced by dislocation, the identifications that social agents make are not subject to privileged ordering principles or essential rationalities, but are rather determined through the capacity of political projects to articulate compelling respresentations that interpellate social agents into particular hegemonic formations. An important objective of this thesis has therefore been to interogate the political contestations attendent to what I have argued was the dislocation of the neo-liberal hegemony in Australia in the 1990s, and attempts by various political agents to articulate the dislocated elements through the generation of suturing myths and the construction of subject positions that linked ‘real’ and idealised forms of citizenship and national identity with hegemonic values, policies and practices.

Penetrating the ideological veil of the aspirational discourse involves firstly identifying its various moments in terms of their continuity with historical factors. In this respect, articulations of the aspirational discourse supplemented its ideological framing as ‘social reality’ with symbolism that promoted its eminence as an emergent ‘phenomenon’: ‘modern’, ‘new’, ‘transformative’ and ‘irresistible’. As the organic embodiment of the ‘natural’ free- market, the aspirational citizen projected the same immanent logic of political imperatives, the same churning of social reality into political necessity, and the same depoliticised logic that has been evident in the free-market fetishism of neo-liberalism. In the face of this, this thesis traced the various moments articulated as part of the aspirational discourse in terms of

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their associations with previous discourses of national identity, in particular those related to the egalitarian discourse, and argued that it represented a continuation of the ‘new class’ prosperity discourses that have historically cited the transition of the working-classes into the middle-classes.

Significantly the aspirational ‘identity’ was not a static or homogeneous identity. The articulation of a principle of ‘fullness’ in the face of a social order that is intrinsically unstable leads us to a consideration of the dynamic element in such discourses. This thesis has sought to illustrate the capacity of hegemonic discourses to be responsive to the immediate political environment and to articulate in a coherent and viable way a range of divergent and contradictory values, identities and demands as a means of managing this environment. As Laclau has argued, the language of such discourses “is always going to be imprecise and fluctuating, not because of any cognitive failure, but because it tries to operate performatively within a social reality which is, to a large extent, heterogeneous and fluctuating” (Laclau, 2005: 118). This imprecise and fluctuating character necessitates the employment of empty signifiers that defy strict classification and definition in order to offer the widest possible space of representation. It is in this context that the failure of empirical attempts to identify an aspirational class and attempts to assign rational agency to the aspirational identity should be viewed.

The articulation of the aspirational discourse represented recognition of the importance of the politics of identity – that is, the generation of myths through which people recognise themselves. It therefore included a range of standard conservative elements in which neo- liberal individualism and productivism were embellished with values of individual character, national identity and an invocation of traditional myths and social imaginaries. In this sense it referenced a range of embedded discourses of national identity and citizenship, including: traditional liberal conceptions of the hard-working, competitive and independent individual; conservative values related to qualities of character and allegiance to family; egalitarian values of social conformity and ‘sameness’; the unpretentious rugged individualism of the pioneering Australian; the stoic persona of the Australian working-class; and the ambitious materialism and social status aspirations of the petit bourgeois. These elements were articulated as moments into new discursive constellations with different accents, emphases and modified meanings, in accordance with hegemonic priorities.

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This thesis has sought to identify the particular political dynamics that led to the articulation of the aspirational discourse. As I have argued, the genesis of the aspirational discourse can be traced back to the prominence of the ‘lack’ in the social structure that became apparent during Labor’s implementation of the neo-liberal reform agenda. This could be attributed in the broadest sense to the failure of Labor to reconcile its neo-liberal discourse with the ingrained egalitarian values that historically constituted a core component of the Australian national identity. This egalitarian ethos extended to both ideals of citizenship and to the role of the state as a guarantor of egalitarian outcomes, and was complimented in key respects by interventionist state practices associated with the ‘Australian settlement’ and the post-war social-democratic welfare state. By 1996, the year that Labor suffered one of the biggest electoral losses in its history, the dislocation of the neo-liberal order and the ‘lack’ opened up by this dislocation had reached its high point. A range of empty signifiers integral to the establishment of political hegemony: ‘prosperity’, ‘growth’, egalitarianism’, ‘fairness’ (the Australian ‘fair go’), ‘equality’ and ‘community’, had essentially lost their saliency as moments in the neo-liberal discourse and had thus taken on the character of floating elements. The proceeding period was characterised by hegemonic contestations around these dislocated elements as political projects sought to expoit social disaffection and articulate them as moments within their own hegemonic order.

This disaffection facilitated a politics of grievance based on the equivalential antagonistic framing of a range of social groups that hitherto had been subject to the differential logic of the more pluralistic order under Labor. In this context, the conditions were favourable for populist political projects to ‘re-politicise’ the social order through the promotion of exclusive representations of social identity that forged equivalential relations based on the stigmatisation of ‘non-legitimate’ identities. Foremost of these populist projects was Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party, which railed against the ‘new world order’ of bureaucratic elites. These elites were explicitly identified with both the ‘social progressives’ associated with multiculturalism and the welfare state, in addition to the economic elites implicated in the neo-liberal reform agenda. One Nation equivalentially linked the special privileges of minority groups: welfare recipients, indigenous groups and other social minorities, with this elite agenda. In this way, it forged relations between a range of disaffected groups through the generation of a mythology of ‘real’ Australians: ‘average’, ‘simple’, ‘honest’, ‘hard- working’, grounded in the Anglo-Celtic pioneering cultural heritage and the egalitarian ethos of the ‘fair go’. The capacity of these Australians to live an authentic Australian life was 233

blocked by the range of antagonistic ‘un-Australian’ identities. One Nation effectively exposed the extent of the social disaffection at the time and the degree to which the elite agenda had become detached from the popular democratic discourse.

This was essentially recognised by elements within both the Labor party and the Coalition. The Coalition under the leadership of John Howard sought to exploit this disaffection in the community and to capture the One Nation constituency by appropriating key aspects of its populist discourse, while at the same time jettisoning its attack on neo-liberal interests, values and practices. Howard’s initial muting of his allegiance to the neo-liberal reform agenda, and his adoption of ‘battler’ rhetoric and an anti-elite discourse (minus One Nation’s ‘economic elite’ dimension), represented an attempt to exploit the disaffection trigged by Labor’s economic reform agenda. The large number of outer-suburban ‘working-class’ voters who abandoned the Labor party in the 1996 federal election essentially responded to Howard’s implied rejection of the radical economic transformations occurring in Australia at the time.

Howard’s adoption of battler mythology and his subsequent abandonment of this for aspirational mythology exposed key elements of his political agenda. Battler rhetoric was historically associated with the Australian working-classes and the egalitarian rhetoric of the political left and, as such, was highly effective in exploiting the dislocations that were evident at the time Howard came to office. However, the largely negative character of battler rhetoric was ultimately incongruent with Howard’s allegiance to neo-liberalism. The aspirational was essentially the battler rebadged, a positive myth of free-market neo-liberal citizenship divested of the political baggage of the battler.

Reflecting the aspirational discourse’s hegemonic status, the Labor party similarly embraced aspirational politics as a means of reconciling its traditional egalitarian social justice platform with its support for the neo-liberal reform agenda. Aspirational mythology acted to suture the dislocations in the Labor discourse attendant to the Hawke and Keating governments’ ‘elite’ and technocratic form of governance. While Hawke and Keating had dryly inferred a social justice dividend from the prosperity generated through the global free-market economy, the principal proponent of aspirational politics within the Labor Party, Mark Latham, gave character and identity to this core neo-liberal conception, framing the aspirational as a popular subject position in order to reconcile Labor’s traditional constituency with its vision of the neo-liberal order. In much the same way as the Howard aspirational discourse, the 234

transformative social mobility and prosperity discourses of neo-liberalism acted as a proxy for the traditional egalitarian, social justice discourses of the Labor party. This was consolidated through a thorough invocation of conservative values of character, citizenship, civil society (‘social capital’) and national identity, as conveyed through traditional myths and social imaginaries. The ‘supplementary’ character of Latham’s equivalential articulation of a smorgasbord of signifiers associated with the political left and conservative right indicate the ‘third way’ project to capture the political middle ground or ‘consensus in the centre’.

The final three chapters of this thesis analysed core moments in the aspirational discourse in relation to the discursive logics outlined by Laclau and Mouffe. I provided an analysis of the discursive elements incorporated as moments in order to identify their affinity with neo- liberalism, in addition to identifying those elements more typically associated with alternative discourses and the strategic intent evident in their articulation within the aspirational discourse. Thus the rearticulation of intrinsic neo-liberal discursive elements: self-interested individualism, competition, the free-market, consumer choice, small-government and anti- welfare/collectivist perspectives; and the supplementary articulation of a range of discursive elements previously not prominently articulated as part of the neo-liberal discourse: ‘egalitarianism’, ‘fairness’, ‘community’, ‘law and order’, ‘family’ and ‘decency’. I outlined the discursive logics in accordance with which the various moments cohered; in particular the function of empty signifiers and nodal points.

These hegemonic preoccupations were also reflected in the narratives that the aspirational weaved around the array of antagonistic identities identified as implicated in the blockage of the full realisation of aspirational identity. The aspirational carried its grievance toward the ‘negating other’ with particular force. This grievance reflected neo-liberalism’s rejection of the ‘market distortions’ of the welfare state and its coterie of ‘rent seeking’ bureaucrats and ‘dependent client groups’. The failure to adhere to the aspirational ideal of citizenship was conceptualised as primarily representing a lack of ‘character’ and ‘values’, and an associated tendency to revert to the politics of envy and complaint - that is, the politics of the ‘old left’- as a proxy for a failure to perform in the market. The stigmatisation of collective forms of political agency and the reversion to a focus on issues of individual capacity and performance as a substitute for a politics of the social structure were two important hegemonic preoccupations reflected in the aspirational discourse. Political agency, as a contravention of

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the ideological projection of a natural and neutral social order, was typically pathologised as envy and complaint.

I developed this analysis of the discursive moments in order to identify the primary mythological elements promoted; that is, the means by which the hegemonic principle of fullness was reasserted in response to the lack in the social structure. Thus the aspirational’s promotion of consumerism, self-interested individualism and the ‘pure and anonymous mechanism of the market’ as a means of depoliticising the social order and generating market rationalities. These core neo-liberal moments were combined with moments particular to the immediate hegemonic purposes of the aspirational discourse: thus the notion of the aspirational as ‘deserving’ and ‘in need’ as a means of restructuring social welfare practices in the face of increasing financial stresses on middle-Australia; its invocation of a form of ‘egalitarianism’ devoid of the value of social equality and the traditional prohibitions on (demonstrative) wealth; and its promotion of ‘social mobility’ as a substitute for the old ‘ideological’ politics of economic redistribution.

This thesis has sought to identify the way the aspirational functioned as an embodiment of the ‘unachievable fullness’ that is the object of myth. Its function on this level was well captured by the signifier ‘aspiration’; that is, as a symbolic representation of the myriad of unattained desires, dreams, hopes and wishes that constitute the hegemonic promise of ultimate transcendence in the face of the insufficiencies of the Real. The aspirational identity implied a trajectory toward ‘the thing’, an attainment of authentic identity predicated on the function of the free-market and the values of citizenship encompassed by the self-interested individualism of neo-liberalism. As such it tapped into the emancipatory consumer myths and social imaginaries promoted through the marketing and advertising industries. Its hegemonic utility was therefore predicated in large part on its invocation of relentless materialism in a social order dominated by market logics, commercial practices and consumer mythologies, in which need had become increasingly confused with desire. Ultimately the relentless materialism of the aspirational could be seen as atoning for the increasing demands on individuals, families and communities attendant to neo-liberal economic restructuring.

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Though, following the defeat of the Howard government in 2007 and the demise of the Labor Leader Mark Latham17 in 2005, the centrality of the aspirational to the Australian political discourse diminished, it effectively generated a range of popular subject positions that, to a significant extent, aligned public expectations with neo-liberal values and practices. Its efficacy in this regard led to its progressive autonomy from ‘the literality of the original dislocation’ (Laclau, 1990: 64) and its articulation as a social imaginary of prosperous national identity denoting positive purpose, ambition and enterprise, linked to the national interest. Thus John Howard’s allusions in the last days of his government to the “Australian renaissance” of “aspirational nationalism”, involving a “blueprint for prosperity built on the foundations of a decline in class based tribalism, better education and younger generations less attracted to collectivist ideology” (Howard cited in The Australian, Editorial, 2007).

The primary purpose of this thesis and its contribution in terms of the Australian political discourse is to atone for the superficial and limited scrutiny that the notion of an aspirational ‘class’ had hitherto been subjected. Analysis that has been undertaken on the subject has tended to accept the objective possibility of such an identity, and as such, failed to approach the subject in terms of the ideological interests and practices implicated in its production. In seeking to capture the diverse significations, social interests, historical factors, political priorities and discursive logics intrinsic to the production of the aspirational discourse, this study has necessarily been broad in scope. Further research is required in analysing in more detail some of the specific issues referenced in this thesis. This might include further analysis of the intrinsic tensions, conflicts and contradictions inherent in the global trend for political parties of the left to fuse neo-liberal practices and rationalities with predominantly progressive social democratic rhetoric. Such research would build on research already undertaken by Johnson (1996, 2000, 2003); Bramston (2003) Maddox (1989) and Norman Fairclough (2000) in the United Kingdom. In light of the widespread view that the Australian Labor party has been dominated by party apparatchiks (Cavalier, 2010) and the recent further deterioration of its grass roots membership, there is also a particular need to analyse in detail the relation between reforms to its organisational structures in the last two decades and the evolution of its political discourse.

17 Interestingly, Latham later renounced the aspirationals as ‘self seeking’ and stated that he had erred in assigning them egalitarian values and in assuming that, having climbed the ‘ladder of opportunity’, that they would be interested in assisting others to do the same (Latham, cited in Manne, 2010). 237

As a study that has been concerned with the various hegemonic preoccupations evident in neo-liberalism, there is also a need for further exposure of the disjuncture between the rationalities of neo-liberalism and its concrete practices, and the ways in which this disjuncture is accounted for through its myths and social imaginaries. This might include more detailed analysis of my contention that neo-liberal reforms, in their promotion of the profit share of national wealth over the labour share and their generation of increasing social inequalities, have paradoxically generated a need for a reconfigured and expanded welfare state (see Hartman, 2005, and her analysis of this subject). In a similar sense, there is also a need to explore further the tensions between neo-liberalism’s articulation of ‘individual freedom’ and its simultaneous extension of the state through the generation of behavioural norms predicated on a stringent conformity with market values, practices and rationalities (Larner, 1997).

A primary focus of this thesis has been the eradication of a substantive political/antagonistic dimension to the public discourse and a reversion to consensual and non-adversarial modes, predicated on the essential character of the free-market order, in which critical matters of public interest have effectively been quarantined from democratic review. Myths such as the aspirational, while routinely dismissed by critics as nothing more than empty rhetoric, constitute an essential means through which this simulation of a natural and neutral social order is achieved. Further research in this regard might identify a typology of the common disursive means by which the social structure is depoliticised. Such research would compliment those approaches that have focused on the various concrete practices through which government functions have been reassigned to non-government bodies in recent times (Flinders and Buller, 2006; Flinders, 2008).

In the current environment, the need to question the ascendency of neo-liberalism and to expose its precarious and contingent character has become even more pressing. The status of neo-liberalism as a core rationale for the capitalist class and in particular corporate interests, has led to the gradual encroachment of market relations and values, and the diminution of the institutions of state, political collectives, and wider values of civil society, the environment, human rights and the public good that might otherwise have constituted a check to this encroachment. The extent of the penetration of market logics and commercial imperatives has been indicated by the fact that neo-liberalism has been able to withstand potential dislocations to its core economic rationale consequent to both the global financial crisis of

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2008 and the increasing urgency of scientific demands for a response to global warming. Both these matters bring into question the long term viability of neo-liberalism’s continued emphasis on market deregulation, unfettered economic growth and consumerism. In the face of this, the ongoing dominance of neo-liberalism indicates the efficacy of its key myths and the extent of its colonisation of the objective order. To understand the means by which this dominance is achieved and maintained, as this thesis has endeavoured to do, is an important step in the construction of possible political interventions.

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