Re your original post on this thread which included; "... Class Hatred should be left in the history of last century."
I'll second that!
Australia's struggles in this area date back to the commencement of British occupation, wherein boatloads of people convicted often for mind-numbingly small offences were banished to 'the colonies'.
These people challenged the great social divide that defined England. So too the miners on the goldfields during the 1850s & shearers & labourers forced to work for peanuts under tough working conditions by our early wealthy elite.
As an outpost of Britain we were summoned into WW1 & again in WW2 - desperate times meant there was no place for social divisions. With the benefit of a basic but common & essentially public education, Australians welded together!
But in Australia today a social divide is already reality. Our great social melting pot, public education, has been dealt multiple body blows by both sides of the political spectrum & increasingly people are separating out their kids from others.
Australia now risks becoming a nation divided; wherein kids educated in public schools resent kids educated in non-public, government funded schools & those in denominational schools; as well as vice versa.
The signs are already in our streets; generational unemployability, a cabbie stabbed to death overnight, Kings Cross ad infinitum, violence in Melbourne night clubs, record drug seizures by authorities, suburbs for the 'haves' & suburbs for the 'have nots', ...
Wayne Swan's attacks on our richest billionnaires appalled me; as did the manner in which some of our wealthiest, most influential & most powerful pooled to attack Julia Gillard & Wayne Swan. It was a society divided on full public display & a model to others as to what is OK.
While I abhor the very concept of 'social class' I despair that Australia is in the process of re-defining it.
