In his now notorious John Button Lecture last week, Wayne Swan, in a rollicking attempt to energise the base, made the following claim about the working class bona fides of the federal Labor caucus:
“Like Springsteen, I and many caucus members came from working class families, and got the chances our equally talented brothers, sisters and friends often never got, after watching our parents being denied the opportunities in life that their talents deserved.”
Wayne’s story, immortalised in his 1993 maiden speech to parliament, is well known. His hardworking parents, who both died in their 60s, “did not get a fair go. I was fortunate enough to get a fair go, and I got that fair go from the Whitlam government.”
But is Labor’s 102-member caucus really full of ex-battlers like Wayne striving against the odds to stake out a piece of Capital Hill for the downtrodden?
Many studies of Parliament’s make-up (nicely summarised by Nick Bryant) find MPs are increasingly drawn from the pool of political staffers and trade union activists. But what about before they joined the gravy train? Were today’s representatives motivated to become staffers in the first place because they saw their parents struggling to put bread on the table?
In the first installment of Get Fact — a new Crikey initiative inspired by overseas sites like Politifact and the Fullfact.org — we combed through the first speeches and other claims of Labor MPs to find out how they characterise their upbringing. The full table of MPs’ backgrounds reveals a vivid picture of blue collar boys and girls made good.
Over two-thirds — 72.5% (or 74) — of ALP members and senators explicitly claim a direct hardscrabble lineage. Shave off a few per cent for serial embellishers and those reluctant to trawl over their childhood, and it’s safe to say that well over half of Labor MPs did, in fact, grow up in working class conditions.
Accordingly, Get Fact rules that Wayne Swan’s statement that “many” Labor caucus members come from hard-bitten backgrounds is “Mostly True”.
*Any omissions or stuff-ups? What other claims and spin from across the news agenda should Crikey examine as part of Get Fact? Drop us a line with your suggestions …
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If they are all from Struggle Street how come their policies don’t reflect it?
What they actually do–economic rationalism, lock up refugees, extend the NT intervention– recalls that parody of THE INTERNATIONAL: The Working Class can kiss my a*se/ I’ve got the foreman’s job at last.
Really annoyed by the inference that being a trade unionist prior to being a parliamentarian somehow means you are not working class.
I have worked as a union organiser for 20 years, have sacrificed a lot of personal stuff because of the demands of the job and I am at a loss how this would mean that if I later on became a MP (GoD forbid) that would mean my working class back ground was absent.
I wish there were more ex union officials in Parliament because at least they get the fact that working people need unions.
Not sure the background always counts, some people who “escape” the working class lifestyle can be more unfeeling because they think if I can better myself why can’t everybody? I also believe having parents as working class (and then going to uni) is different to having a working class job and surviving yourself. The experience is not the same.
This is a joke, right?
I can’t remember which English comedian once observed that, according to the author biographies on modern novels, most modern authors had been postal workers, builders labourers, shop assistants or sewage farm hands. He wondered why the biographies never mentoned that these were uni vacation jobs.
And how the f**k does being born in Ireland make you working class???