The Underclass - Part II: A Fair Go (Until It Wasn’t)
Australia, Class, and the Myth of the Fair Go
Australia loves the story that it doesn’t really have class. Fitting that this is coming out on Australia Day.
We tell ourselves we’re different. Less rigid. Less obsessed with titles. Less is weighed down by centuries of inherited hierarchy. A young country. A reset. A place where everyone gets a fair go.
That story is comforting.
It’s also incomplete.
Australia didn’t escape class systems. We just rebuilt them differently, then wrapped them in language about mateship, opportunity, and egalitarianism.
A Penal Colony Is Still a Class System
Australia didn’t begin as a blank slate. It began as a prison.
From the very start, class existed, it was just inverted and weaponised. Convicts, guards, administrators, free settlers. Power was explicit. Freedom was conditional. Labour was coerced.
Convicts weren’t simply punished; they were assigned. Assigned to landowners. Assigned to projects. Assigned to people with authority. In practice, this created an early hierarchy where the state and its representatives sat firmly at the top, and convicts existed as a controlled labour force at the bottom.
Even after sentences ended, the stain didn’t disappear. Former convicts carried social baggage that shaped where they could live, work, and associate.
This wasn’t accidental. It was how the colony functioned.
Land: The Original Divider
Then came land.
Australia’s most enduring class divide didn’t come from aristocratic titles. It came from who got land, when, and how much.
Large land grants were handed to officers, administrators, and wealthy free settlers. Squatters occupied massive tracts. Indigenous Australians were dispossessed entirely, removed from land ownership altogether, excluded from the economic system being built around them.
Land wasn’t just wealth. It was leverage. It determined who employed labour, who accumulated capital, and who passed advantage down generations.
By the time the gold rushes arrived, a hierarchy already existed.
Gold, Opportunity, and the First Illusion
The gold rushes are often held up as Australia’s great equaliser.
And to be fair, they were disruptive.
Gold brought migrants, chaos, and moments of genuine mobility. A labourer could strike gold. A nobody could become somebody. For a brief moment, effort and luck seemed to outweigh background.
But the illusion didn’t last.
Those who truly benefited long-term weren’t just the diggers. They were the merchants, bankers, landowners, and suppliers who extracted consistent value from the rush. Once the easy gold dried up, class settled again, this time with more money and better infrastructure.
Australia learned an early lesson that would repeat itself:
bursts of opportunity don’t dismantle systems, they reshape them.
The Union Era: When Mobility Was Engineered
The most genuinely egalitarian period in Australian history didn’t come from markets. It came from collective force.
Unions, labour movements, and political organisation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries fundamentally altered class outcomes. Wages rose. Working hours dropped. Conditions improved.
The idea that someone could work a stable job, support a family, buy a home, and retire with dignity became normal, not exceptional.
This is the period Australians often remember as proof that class “wasn’t really a thing here.”
But it was absolutely a thing. It was just managed.
The system worked because:
labour had leverage,
housing was affordable relative to wages,
education expanded,
and productivity gains were shared more evenly.
Class didn’t disappear. It softened.
Post-War Australia: The Weird Utopia
After World War II, Australia entered something historically unusual.
A broad middle class emerged.
Home ownership expanded rapidly. Manufacturing jobs were plentiful. Tertiary education grew. Infrastructure spending was massive. Migration brought labour and growth without immediately hollowing out wages.
For the first time at scale, Australians could reasonably believe that their children would do better than they did.
This wasn’t natural, it was engineered:
strong unions,
protected industries,
government housing,
public education,
and deliberate nation-building.
And it worked, for a while.
When the Story Quietly Changed
From the 1980s onward, the tone shifted.
Industries were deregulated. Manufacturing declined. Unions weakened. Globalisation accelerated. Housing slowly transformed from shelter into an investment vehicle.
The language changed too.
People stopped talking about class and started talking about:
“the market”
“efficiency”
“individual responsibility”
“skills shortages”
“flexibility”
None of these are neutral concepts.
They mark the moment where structural protection was replaced with individual risk.
Australia just stopped acknowledging that it’s class system even existed.
Property: The New Inheritance
If land was the original divider, property became the modern one.
Home ownership shifted from being a baseline expectation to a gated outcome. Those who bought early benefited from compounding asset growth. Those who didn’t were locked out by rising prices.
Class began to harden again, not through titles, but through balance sheets.
If your parents owned property, you had leverage. If they didn’t, you faced a moving target.
This wasn’t framed as class. It was framed as “smart investing.”
But the effect was the same.
The Australian Illusion
Australia still sells the idea that effort equals outcome.
And sometimes, for some people, it still does.
But structurally, we’ve been drifting back toward something older:
opportunity increasingly tied to starting position,
risk pushed downward,
rewards pulled upward,
and mobility narrowing quietly, politely, statistically.
We just stopped naming class.
And now, with housing stress, insecure work, and technological disruption accelerating, the cracks are no longer subtle.
Which brings us to the present.
And the part that hurts the most. Come back tomorrow for Part III: Working, Homeless, Invisible