Those hostile to an Indigenous Voice to Parliament — such as Warren Mundine, Peter Dutton and extreme-right activist group Advance — insist that it is “elites” who are pushing the Voice. But it doesn’t take much checking to see that it’s the No campaign with the strongest claim to the title of elite — financial and political.
Take its financial backers. Despite claims by Advance (formerly known as Advance Australia) that it has “tens of thousands of grassroots donations”, it’s bankrolled by some of Australia’s richest people. Billionaire Sam Kennard is a backer of Advance, as part of a dozen super-wealthy donors who have poured money into it. Among the contributions was more than $100,000 from the Garnaut family, associated with major property and financial management companies — including Garnaut Private Wealth, which says it “exclusively advise[s] high net worth, sophisticated and professional families, businesses and charities”.
Exclusive, sophisticated, high net worth — but not elite, of course.
Another major No campaign financier is retired fund manager Simon Fenwick, who according to the Financial Review “worked for EY in Australia and investment banks Societe Generale and BNP Paribas in London … sits on the board of think tank the Institute of Public Affairs … [and] is also a director of the University of Queensland Endowment Fund”.
Again, plainly a salt-of-the-earth working Aussie, rather than an out-of-touch elite.
Or there’s Andrew Abercrombie, founder and chair of buy now, pay later group Humm and director of the right-wing Liberal lobby group Menzies Research Centre. The rich lister is famous for hosting a party at his Aspen apartment in March 2020 that became a COVID-19 spreader event back in Australia. Aspen? The world’s most expensive ski resort, but not elite at all.
And let’s not forget Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart, made a special effort to support right-wing senator and Advance’s campaign leader Jacinta Nampijinpa Price when she delivered her maiden speech a year ago. Rinehart is famously in touch with the Australian heartland — lamenting that Aussie workers don’t want to work for $2 a day and drink and socialise too much.
Australia’s super-rich are perfectly entitled to spend their doubtless hard-earned cash backing the No campaign, and engaging in any other political activity they feel like. And they’re not the ones proclaiming the “elite” nature of Yes advocates. But Advance’s pretence that it’s bankrolled by “grassroots donations” and its opponents are out-of-touch elites — including attacks on “corporate elites” funding the Yes campaign — sits rather poorly with the reality of its donors.
Similarly on the political front. Senator Price is a relative newcomer to politics. But a look at the political figures lining up to oppose the Voice reveals a decidedly elitist tinge. John Howard and Tony Abbott are former prime ministers — in Howard’s case, Australia’s second-longest serving leader. Barnaby Joyce, a former deputy prime minister. John Anderson, another former deputy PM under Howard. Abbott, Anderson and Joyce are, by the way, all products of elite Sydney schools, which makes Advance’s sneering at Matt Kean’s objections to its racist advertisement last week (“elitist Sydney views”) a little confusing; at least Howard went to Canterbury Boys High before taking his law degree at the University of Sydney.
So for the avoidance of doubt, according to Advance, the following do not indicate elite status:
- attendance at elite Sydney schools;
- being a former prime minister or deputy prime minister;
- being among the richest people in the country;
- owning an apartment in Aspen;
- working for a merchant bank in London;
- complaining that Australian workers drink too much and refuse to work for $2 a day;
- advertising that you “exclusively advise high net worth, sophisticated and professional families”.
In contrast, support for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament is a marker of elite status, no matter how impoverished or powerless you may be.
Being “elite”, according to Advance, seems to be less about what we usually attribute to elite status — reflecting the power one holds based on wealth, social or political position, influence or prominence — and more about a nebulous state of mind, which either cancels out the impact of wealth, political or social prominence even if you have them, or somehow delivers them to you if you don’t. It’s a special kind of right-wing fairy dust, a little sprinkle of which transforms the world into its mirror image.
The first rule of right wing propagandists and scare campaigners is to identify your own worst most disdainful characteristics and accuse your opposition of exactly that trait before they can target you. This I guess is what you call lighting the fire that creates a smokescreen. Of course everyone who hasn’t a clue knows there’s smoke but has no idea where it is really coming from.
Well said JV
In Jungian terms, it’s called “projection of the shadow”; ie all the dark repressed stuff we have unconsciously and do not consciously acknowledge, is ‘projected” onto the ‘despised other’. It worked for Hitler with the Jews, and it worked for Ronald Reagan with the ‘evil empire’.
It seems to me that to the alt-right, “elites” are :- ‘anyone that disagrees with them through reasoned logic and facts; a derogatory term rooted in emoted fear’.
I shared classes with jack Howard, who attended C B H S but learned little of value there. He was always a stirrer, self fixated, egocentric, twisted, argumentative, supremacist, inflated and highly defective; through cunning, networking, thespian touches and boring volume, he got up and up, John Carrick regretting much of that. His inabilities showed when he became a dunce treasurer, yet he went on as the other shiners fell. The most Un-Australan P M until recent greater defectives took office, Howard remains a war criminal blot, society wrecker and boring nematode.
Good to see John Carrick getting a mention.
Glorious to see some tiny fraction of my undying hatred of #25 echoed like this. Ta.
A nice biographical precis of the Rodent. Here’s the longer narrative of the luckiest, sneakiest mediocrity ever to make it to the Lodge. Howard’s first stint in opposition was memorable only for the farce of his Keystone Cops car pursuit of Khemlani around Canberra to find smears on Whitlam. Phil Lynch would have survived as treasurer under any other Liberal PM except Fraser, and Howard’s first big stroke of luck was Fraser’s urgent need over the weekend for a bland replacement. His accidental ascendency from deputy to leader in opposition could only have come about via a congenital political miscalculator like Peacock, who tried to axe his disloyal, undermining deputy only to self-decapitate. After losing the 87 election when his expenditure sums didn’t add up and then laughed out of the position after trying a pre-Pauline Hanson race line on Asian immigration following a pow wow with Margaret Thatcher, Howard came last when he stood again for leader. But the gifts kept coming, with two more unelectable competitors – Hewson, insisting on snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, and the self immolating Alex Downer. Costello the cardboard lion declined the prize, and Howard won the 1996 election because of his birth certificate. It didn’t say Paul Keating. The first term was a study in manifest incompetence and the 1998 election saw the biggest Labor comeback since the 1966-1969 turnaround when the Libs lost a record majority and the 2 pp vote. Howard’s run of luck resumed following the world wide terrorist panic of 2001 which saw incumbents returned everywhere including the risible George W Bush. His long prime ministership continued thanks to government policy – the Chinese government, whose insatiable appetite for Australian raw materials at sky high prices ensured a rolling boom. Labor, led by human kamikaze Mark Latham, was Howard’s lucky gift in time for the 2004 election. Final inexplicable luck? That he is fawned over by a party of amnesiacs who forget he was the only prime minister to ever lose his seat during an economic boom. The commentator who dubbed him the unflushable turd of Australian politics captured him well.
The Right toss the word “elite” around because they think it is a word that triggers a reaction in the hoi polloi and not, hahaha, because of a genuine concern the Voice disenfranchises Australia’s already disenfranchised, disempowered and disadvantaged First Nation peoples. And never mind their ranks are full of stuffed-to-the-gunnels-with-money (including inherited wealth, a deal of which had its roots in stolen land) folk. I can picture them entering their “No” planning meetings. “Moral, intellectual and conscience-free zone” says the message on the door. Despicable.
Imported and learnt from the US GOP, and used across the Anglosphere RW parties & campaigns (& Hungary etc. too) like Brexit and Trump, nativist anti-immigrant and/or anti-regulation/EU was justified by similar….
Right wing media are central in dominating the space and promoting Orwellian doublespeak to help/scare or platform ageing voters (whether they believe it or not), to vote for unpalatable nativist authoritarian policies, but same voters deal with it by cognitive dissonance and collective narcissism* (right up until same voters express remorse, withdraw support or pass on…).
*Collective narcissism is a belief in in-group greatness accompanied by a conviction that others do not appreciate the in-group enough
Check this out: https://theauthoritarians.org/
It’s a pretty good lens on the mouth breathers who prop up the scum; it’s academic work.
Think this phenomenon is not going to win many below median age and/or future voters, but used to intimidate aging voters of the right (& left e.g. UK ‘Labour Tories’) into following authority and obeying orders….
Word meanings and connotations change over time – look at “woke'”
By “elites,” they seem to mean the politically informed, educated class.