1.
The contending classes
There is always plenty to fight about in Australia, starting with economic inequality -- for the country’s wealth has always been concentrated in a few hands. In the seventies one percent of the population owned 22 percent of personal wealth, while the top five percent owned more than the bottom 90 percent. This was vested in ownership not only of luxuries but more importantly of capital. A 1979 study of listed companies found that the largest 20 shareholders in half of them held at least half the shares, with the average standing at nearly 53 percent. Thus a minority owned a disproportionate share of industry, and because the remaining shares were dispersed this minority had effective control of the means of production in factories, offices, mines and mills.
That control could be highly concentrated, as for example in the media industry, where Fairfax controlled the Sydney Morning Herald, the Financial Review, the Sun-Herald, the National Times and numerous other publications, along with ten TV stations, a controlling interest in the Melbourne Age plus a third of the Macquarie radio network. The Herald and Weekly Times organisation controlled fifty percent of daily newspaper circulation together with radio and TV interests, while News Ltd controlled five metropolitan dailies, eight metropolitan weeklies, 14 country newspapers, six magazines and two TV stations. Needless to say, these companies wielded considerable political power, though they did not always apply it in concerted fashion.
The owner-controllers were linked together in relationships which help us see them as more than a collection of individuals: they begin to take shape as a ruling class, known in Marxist terminology as the bourgeoisie. In 1973, 30 percent of shares held by large shareholders in the biggest firms were held by companies, with institutions and nominees holding another 14 percent. Individuals held only 2.5 percent. Overlapping equity was matched by interlocking directorships. Anne Game and Bob Connell studied the top 50 companies, listing all common directors then working out the “density” of links between them, and demonstrated strong ties between finance, manufacturing and mining.
Control of industry enabled this class to make crucial decisions affecting the lives of large numbers of people. Firms might sack hundreds of employees without so much as a word of warning, and as Bob Connell and Terry Irving pointed out, the frantic redevelopment of central Sydney during the sixties and early seventies “resulted from a series of decisions made in the boardrooms of perhaps twenty companies”, about which ordinary workers and residents had little or no say. Although public companies were supposedly subject to democratic control by the shareholders, the concentration of big share holdings alongside the dispersal of the others ensured that in practice the same narrow bourgeois interests prevailed.
While governments claimed to regulate industry in the public interest, in reality the top levels of public administration collaborated closely with company management in capital’s own interest -- not surprisingly, since senior business people had close ties to top bureaucrats and politicians. One analysis of 418 members of various elites and their personal links revealed a “central circle” consisting of about 31 percent business leaders, 20 percent senior public servants and 27 percent politicians, plus media, judges, and a handful of union officials. Predictably, the senior public servants assisted their “client base” in industry. As H.C. Coombs remarked while governor of the Reserve Bank:
It is difficult to be intimately involved in the workings of the financial system without coming to feel identified with it ... I remember the wife of an Asian central banker asking me, “What exactly do central bankers achieve other than to protect the wealth of the wealthy?”
When business interests were threatened, the state could deploy its police, courts and other mechanisms of control in their defence. During most of the post war years, for example, governments had used penal powers to restrict strikes; these nominally included provision for sanctions against miscreant employers, but the latter were almost never used. Similarly, the police might be used against picket lines, but were not known to arrest employers who sacked workers. Class bias in the operation of the state machinery was accompanied by subtle mechanisms of social and ideological control, beginning with the mass media which was itself part of big business and including the schools, which socialised people to accept the dictates of people in authority while propagating the ideology of the system.
Even so, this ruling class domination was seldom untroubled. Firstly the bourgeoisie was divided. Rural and mining capital had interests distinct from those of the urban bourgeoisie, and those two great camps were fragmented in their turn, between industry sectors (finance, manufacturing, agriculture, mining and so on) and between States and regions. The divisions were reflected in a plethora of competing employer organisations which were sometimes bitterly hostile to each other. Within industry sectors, despite an element of monopolisation, competition and conflict could be equally fierce.
If the bourgeoisie’s industrial leadership was fragmented, so was its political leadership. Rural and mining capital oriented to the Country Party (later renamed the National Party), while urban business looked to the Liberals. The two parties maintained an uneasy coalition at the federal level but not always at state level; because of the need to reconcile differing interests, their joint policy framework was generally pragmatic at best, makeshift at worst. There was also a gap between business and its political representatives. It was true that business was directly involved in party machines, particularly Liberal Party finance committees:
In the state of Victoria, they have included Sir Ian Potter, one of Australia’s leading stockbrokers; Sir Maurice Nathan, chairman of the furniture retailing firm of Patersons Ltd; Sir George Coles, founder and director of the retail chain ... Herbert Taylor, chartered accountant, company director and a past president of the Associated Chambers of Commerce of Australia; F.E. Lampe, former president of the Australian Council of Retailers; H.G. Brain, chairman of T&G Life Assurance Co [and others].
But senior business leaders seldom entered parliament, preferring to leave it to professional politicians who, for their part, had other constituencies as well. The parties drew their mass memberships from the ranks of the middle classes and smaller farmers, whose aspirations were often quite different to those of banks, say, or big mining companies. In addition, the politicians had ties to the bureaucracy and other sections of the state machine, each of which had interests of its own. The result was a certain relative autonomy for the politicians. In some ways this had advantages for the long term survival of capitalism, since it ensured that at least a few political leaders had wider horizons than did entrepreneurs fixated with the “bottom line”. They might even say so openly: Menzies himself had once taken a jab at what he termed “reactionary” laissez-faire.
Australia’s relations with the rest of the world economy produced additional contradictions. The domestic economy was too small to generate enough capital for the rate of national development the country’s rulers wanted. From colonial times, therefore, Australian industry had relied on large dollops of overseas capital, bringing with it considerable foreign ownership. In 1967, foreign owned manufacturing plants accounted for over 25 percent of output. The late sixties saw a boom in foreign investment in mining, and by 1973 foreign capital controlled nearly 62 percent of value added in that industry. While those who benefited naturally welcomed the inflow of funds, others feared the competition and worried that the Australian state might lose control of sections of the economy; the result was a surge of economic nationalism among sections of the ruling class, resulting in attempts by the Gorton government to place greater controls on foreign capital. John Gorton’s efforts brought his political demise, however, leaving the economic nationalist field open to Labor, traditionally the party of specifically Australian (as opposed to British) nationalism.
The gaps and contradictions made for a messy and confusing picture. In a crisis, it could be difficult for any one group to unite the ruling class and lead it. The bourgeoisie was not too bad at uniting against governments whose measures they disliked: in the late 1940s the finance industry had mobilised support throughout the business community and the political right to torpedo Labor PM Ben Chifley’s plans to nationalise the banks, and in 1975 the Whitlam government faced something similar. Formulating and implementing a positive program at a time of crisis, however, was something Australia’s capitalist class found rather more difficult. During World War 2 the bourgeoisie had turned not to its own parties but to the Labor Party, partly because the ALP could enlist working class support for the war, but partly also because it was sufficiently independent of each of the warring bourgeois factions that it could make a reasonable fist of uniting all of them.
Finally, the Australian ruling class was ideologically vague. Despite occasional hairy-chested rhetoric about the dangers of “socialism” and the glories of free enterprise, business was generally quite well-disposed to the state and the public sector. Large sections of secondary industry depended on tariff protection or bounties, while rural interests counted so heavily on rural subsidies as to provoke jokes about “Country Party socialism”. Their political representatives behaved accordingly, with Menzies maintaining high tariffs and the Country Party presiding over hand-outs to its constituency.
If business and conservative politicians still persisted in anti-socialist rhetoric, much of it was just propaganda. Red-baiting and dire warnings about supposed Russian and Chinese threats served to rally the public behind the state and its overseas interests in a world divided by the Cold War. It proved equally useful in the domestic sphere, in fomenting a certain paranoia about the ALP left, and in justifying attacks on the more militant trade unions. (Socialism was understood by leaders of both capital and labour as meaning either Russian-style “communism” or nationalisation by ALP governments; Karl Marx’s own perspective of democratic workers’ power was little known.)
Red-baiting also provided emotional comfort to the conservatives’ middle class voting base, “a form of symbolic reassurance to interests and individuals supporting the [Liberal Party] whose demands could not be met” because ultimately the politicians’ first loyalty was to the ruling class. It did not mean that many capitalists or conservative politicians were prepared for open class warfare. Why should they be? Postwar experience suggested that while sections of the union movement and the ALP sometimes like to talk about socialism, in practice they could achieve gains within the existing system, and this was their real objective. It was only with the onset of economic crisis that the potential for a more fundamental conflict arose.
It was true that the need to fight for its interests against organised labour had forced capital to tighten both its industry organisation and its ideology in the sixties. Concern about growing union militancy had spurred the creation of a National Employers’ Industrial Committee, which intervened in arbitration and lobbied the government, with the metal bosses playing a leading role because their award was a benchmark in wage fixing. The employer bodies began using economists to brush up their ideology, and experts such as D.H. Whitehead of LaTrobe University provided sophisticated arguments against wage rises. These played an increasing role as the employers faced more sophisticated advocacy from the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), and more importantly, growing industrial pressure from unions whose bargaining power was rising steadily in a buoyant economy. Even so, the employers were only preparing for more vigorous jostling over income shares within an economy that was expected to go on growing. They were not developing a battle plan for imposing austerity on the working class.
The conservative politicians were little help before 1975, for the Liberal Prime Ministers who followed Menzies were all mediocrities: Holt achieved little, Gorton fell out with large sections of his own party, and Billy McMahon floundered in the face of the relatively mild 1972 recession. Amidst the crisis of the 1970s, the ruling class desperately needed a strong leader with some sort of political vision and at first some of them thought they had found one in Gough Whitlam. Later they believed, for a time after 1975, that Malcolm Fraser could do the job.
The working class in the seventies
The Australian working class is the one group in society capable of challenging the hegemony of capital, though most of the time it lacks awareness of its potential power. Most people work for wages and salaries, and a sizeable section of these belong to an organised labour movement. In the seventies Australian unions were quite large by comparison with other western societies, with the country’s 2,800,000 union members making up 55 percent of the workforce in 1976, partly because of an arbitration system which institutionalised unions even where workers were not actively involved. The public sector was very strongly unionised -- up to 88 percent in telecommunications.
One characteristic was particularly important in defining labour as a class: employees’ relationship to the process of production. Whereas the employers controlled the means of production (plant, equipment, materials) and sold the products to make a profit, workers typically owned no means of production apart perhaps from a set of tools, and were obliged to sell their labour for a wage.
This had profound social implications. Donald Horne wrote of blue collar labour that “there was a sense of estrangement from work itself. Work was something over which they had no control and in which there was little or no inherent interest ... They were simply working for other people, and, more likely than not, they saw their bosses as bastards and what they said as bullshit.” A similar atmosphere predominated in many offices. Superficial observers might think strikes were just about money. Actually they were often fuelled by this sense of alienation, and so industrial disputes contained the seeds of social and political radicalism.
The alienation was not some vague malaise, but was rooted in tangible realities. The bosses had the right to hire and fire; they tried to keep wages low; sexual harassment of women employees was common and many workplaces were sweatshops. And the bosses were arrogant, as a leaked 1971 BHP report illustrated. The report suggested that management should use “emotional blackmail” to prevent strikes and introduce “a system of moving workers who express dissatisfaction sideways”, proposing the use of suggestion boxes to “identify such people” as well as allow workers to “let off steam”. Since survey results showed that most of BHP’s Whyalla employees were unhappy with work arrangements, the report called for jolly workplace posters and better social and sporting facilities as an alternative to raising wages. “This is the lottery principle of encouraging people to live on hope.”
No wonder a lot of workers hated the employers. A study of Broken Hill mine employees in the early 1960s found they had some time for foremen and shift bosses, who were themselves close to the workforce, but when it came to management, “as the authority increased, the proportion of favourable comments decreased.” Class resentments such as these gave a sharp edge to the industrial struggles which broke out after 1968.
In 1976 some 30 percent of the workforce was in the “skilled trades”, an increase on 24 percent ten years earlier. Sixteen percent were in the clerical sector, an increase of 11 percent. Only one percent were miners, but many of these were exceptionally well organised and combative. The trades declined during the Fraser years as manufacturing suffered from recession, but the clerical or “white collar” figures edged upward. These included managers, and professionals with ties to capital, but also many others such as teachers, nurses or other members of the “lower” professions whose conditions were no longer so very different from those of blue collar workers, and whose trade union consciousness was growing. Large numbers of clerks received wages similar to those of industrial workers, while mechanisation had created vast numbers of office jobs no less repetitive than factory work. Clerks, too, were becoming union-conscious.
A similar process was underway in the technical professions, where one computer programmer told a researcher: “I’m by no means a socialist, and I don’t particularly like the idea of mass bargaining ... but over the years the income and social standing of salaried staff has been gradually eroded ... it’s only logical to join a union.”
Women were only 23 percent of clerical workers in 1966 but that rose to 31 percent five years later. Among adults, married women were an ever-increasing section of the workforce, exceeding the 20 percent mark during the Whitlam years. The unions were often slow to accept women as “real” unionists, a reflection of both sexist attitudes and conservative craft traditions, but the “feminisation” of large sections of the union movement was too strong a tide to be resisted for long. The growth of the white collar and service sectors brought a growing union participation by women, and thousands of these joined strikes during the Fraser years -- their confidence boosted by their numbers and the knowledge that industry needed them, their ideas often radicalised by women’s liberation or the other political movements of the time.
The work force was young, and growing younger. Workers under 34 years of age made up 42 percent in 1971, and more than half ten years later. These young people, who had grown up during the postwar economic boom, shared high expectations about living standards and quality of life, while their political ideas were often left of centre. Malcolm Fraser would not find it easy imposing his reactionary policies on them.
A quarter of the workforce had been born overseas, with a heavy concentration of migrants in “blue collar” jobs and in the urban centres. Many of those from non-English speaking backgrounds had language difficulties and some lacked education, which meant “factory fodder” jobs and a disproportionate share of the unemployment: the Henderson Report found poverty nearly twice as prevalent among newly arrived migrants as it was in the general population. Their newness to the country and the raw deal it offered them meant they often felt less commitment than Australian-born workers to a range of institutions in society, including the formal structures of the trade unions.
Migrants had only begun to assert themselves in the unions in the early 1970s, with Migrant Workers’ Conferences in 1973 and 1974. The unions did begin to publish multi-lingual literature and the labour movement began to notice the influence of migrant community organisations such as the Federation of Italian Workers and their Families (FILEF). Moreover migrants’ relative lack of ties to the existing union structures was not always a negative factor: when they went on strike they could often be more militant precisely because they weighed down by the conservative traditions of some unions (the same was frequently true of women). In subtle ways the migrants also changed the outlook of Australian-born workers, by relating their experiences of oppression and struggle overseas. Unfortunately the labour movement made little effort to systematically build on this infusion of new knowledge.
Aborigines made up a small proportion of the workforce. They were concentrated in rural jobs, and large numbers were unemployed, but a growing number were working as clerks, sales staff, tradesmen, process workers and labourers as more blacks came into cities and towns. Almost all blacks in the workforce were unambiguously working class -- Australia in the seventies had no black middle class to speak of, let alone black capitalists. Moreover, Aborigines suffered appalling inequality even within the working class. A 1972 study found white truck drivers being paid $70 a week while blacks got $20; for mechanics the figures were $65 and $24, for painters $65 and $16.
Still the black struggles of the sixties had made some impact: the first Aborigine known to hold a full time union position was appointed in 1965, and in the next few years he was followed by several others. The left wing unions expressed sympathy for Aboriginal people, occasionally organising job meetings or collections in support of their struggles. The wider labour movement, however, not only failed to educate its members on issues of racism but was itself guilty at times of racial discrimination against blacks and also migrants. The struggle against prejudice and for working class unity had to be waged within the labour movement itself.
Working class organisation
Workers had built the trade unions primarily to fight for their interests against the employers, but given that objective, these organisations had huge built-in limitations. By their nature they existed to confront the employers on the terrain of the capitalist system itself, bargaining over wages rather than seeking to abolish the wages system. In addition they were highly fragmented and seemed, at the time, likely to remain so. There were 313 unions in Australia in 1976, compared with 356 in 1936; by the end of the Fraser era the total had managed to grow. This had much to do with craft jealousies -- competition between groups of workers which showed just how deeply the unions had absorbed the ethos of capitalism -- on top of which there were bureaucratic rivalries between the full time officials who dominated the union movement.
The union leaders posed other, equally serious problems. They represented an intermediary layer between the workers themselves and the capitalist system, and were an important mechanism for ensuring that organised labour did not challenge that system. While union officials claimed to represent the workers, their social position was quite different. They usually enjoyed better pay or perks, but more important was their different social role as brokers between capital and labour, which gave them an interest in resolving industrial conflicts whereas the rank and file had an interest in winning them.
The officials did not only wield power through formal structures but also through access to information and resources. A 1979 study of meetings in two major unions covering building and metal workers showed that not only did most initiatives come from full-timers, but so did even a sizeable proportion of opposing remarks. The full timers could hold office for long periods and quite a few were not even drawn from the rank and file -- university graduates could be and were “parachuted in” to join union staff owing to political connections. When you add the fact that many organisers were appointed, rather than elected, it is easy to see how entrenched union leaderships could fend off even quite strong rank and file challenges. This bureaucratic layer generated an ideology of class collaboration reflecting its position as broker between capital and labour: most union officials not only argued, but believed, that industrial conflict was best resolved through quiet dialogue presided over by themselves.
Nationalism provided an important ideological cement for class collaboration, as unions formed alliances with employer groups to defend protective tariffs against foreign competition, and the officials seized on the burst of economic nationalism after 1967 to try to maintain common ground between the bosses and the most militant sections of the rank and file. In the Fraser years agitation against the supposed conspiracies of multinationals, sparking projects for alliances with “patriotic” capitalists, contributed to confusing and dampening the class struggle against the employers.
None of this is to say the rank and file members were uniformly more militant or politically advanced than their officials. If the unions were capitalist institutions, designed to achieve improvements for members within the existing social order, this largely reflected the expectations of the members themselves, the majority of whom were relatively conservative and apathetic much of the time because the pressures of daily life under capitalism were largely conservatising. People working all day in factories and offices, and having to cope with the stresses of family life in an oppressive society, normally didn’t get around to developing visions of social change. Despite its oppressive features, they accepted the existing social framework if only by default. But this could begin to change if their immediate personal aspirations or the mere defence of their living standards brought them into direct conflict with the system, as occurred in the seventies. Sizeable numbers of workers were then impelled to challenge the system in practice. Most of them did not fully grasp the implications of their actions, but a minority did, some of whom looked for systematic ideas to justify their new stance. Unfortunately, even the most left wing union leaders failed to provide them with the answers they needed.
If there were problems with the industrial leadership of the working class, there were even greater ones with organised labour’s political leaders. Overwhelmingly, those workers who wished to fight the bosses in the political sphere looked to the Labor Party. Labor had held power in the past, including long stretches at the State level, without unsettling the bourgeoisie, but two decades of conservative rule in Canberra had allowed hopes to rise among some Labor supporters, and fears among conservatives, that a socialist tiger lurked somewhere within the ALP. These views were not entirely illusory, for the Australian party system did reflect class divisions.
True, some workers voted Liberal, and Labor could win over middle class voters, but two academic observers could still write confidently that “class, whether objectively or subjectively defined, remained the most powerful predictor of the vote ... the primacy of occupational class is the rock on which the party system rests.” And when it came to the party organisation, the ALP’s class character was equally obvious. Only a small minority of Labor voters were party members and a smaller minority were active. Nevertheless, an army of blue and white collar workers did canvassing work and attended branch meetings; during the polarised elections of the 1970s, these activities sometimes took on the dimensions of a crusade.
Party activists were often rank and file leaders in other spheres, as shop stewards on the job or leaders of protest campaigns, giving the party deep roots in unions and social movements. Labor’s internal factions had rank and file followings too, and for every careerist looking for parliamentary preselection there was someone else acting on conviction -- especially in the party’s sizeable left wing current, strongest in Victoria, which did not hesitate to describe itself as socialist.
Of course, working class people are not automatically more left wing or militant than others. But the industrial conflicts of the late sixties, alongside the anti-war movement of the time, had created a more left wing climate and most of the party’s members and supporters looked to Labor to bring significant social change. Thus the base of the party had a potential for political radicalism and for struggle. Unfortunately, the ALP structures were not a suitable vehicle for either of these.
The party was highly fragmented, with much power concentrated at State level, and it was fairly bureaucratic. The trade unions controlled a solid majority of votes at annual conferences, typically about 60 percent. This was a reflection of the party’s class basis, but a distorted one which did not involve control by rank and file workers; rather it placed considerable power in the hands of full time union officials who normally decided the make-up of delegations. Though some union leaderships took fairly radical left wing stances, they were balanced by stronger centre and right wing forces, especially at the national level. Bold party leaders, pursuing right wing policies backed by the media and vested interests, might find ways to get around these structures, but the rank and file had little hope of doing so.
Labor politicians were generally even further removed from the rank and file than the union officials. In government, they administered the capitalist state and tried to regulate the capitalist economy. In opposition, they kept trying to establish their suitability for government. Like the union officials, they had a political outlook corresponding to their social position: an emphasis on going through “proper channels”, complemented at most by cautious, orderly and generally limited protest actions, and above all an orientation to the ballot box. Whatever the issue, however stormy the conflict, you could always rely on Labor politicians to suggest waiting for the next election.
Since the unions were organisations stuck on the terrain of the capitalist system, since their full time officials were largely committed to that system, and since the ALP was based firmly on the trade union structures, it followed inexorably that Labor itself would perpetuate rather than challenge the basic institutions of capitalist society. So while it was understandable if some saw the ALP as a vehicle for radical change, such hopes or fears were largely misplaced. As Labor moved closer to government under Gough Whitlam’s leadership the party actually moved steadily to the right, and the experience of government was to accelerate the trend.
The small groupings to Labor’s left could offer no serious political alternative. The Communist Party had once enjoyed considerable strength in industry, but by the seventies it had fragmented and was in terminal decline. Although the fragments retained a certain influence both in the unions and (informally) inside the ALP, their politics, apart from various international affiliations, largely blended into those of the Labor left. Important Communist union leaders like John Halfpenny and Laurie Carmichael were actually more moderate than some ALP officials. There were small groups of organised revolutionaries with some influence among students, but they remained at the margins of the labour movement.
Thus while capital and labour were by far the most important forces in Australian politics, each in its own way was too confused, too fragmented, too poorly led to be prepared for an era of class warfare. Yet that was just what awaited them after 1968. The conflict became sharply polarised after 1975, because the rising expectations of workers and Labor voters clashed with the imperatives of a ruling class faced with economic crisis, and no longer prepared to make concessions.
About the “middle classes”
Australia’s class structure would be worth a book on its own, whereas this chapter seeks only to introduce the main combatants. From that point of view, the various social layers located between capital and labour are comparatively unimportant, since the acute polarisation after 1975 drove most politically active people towards an alliance with one or another of the two main classes.
When I say this, however, some will disagree. Influential political science theories these days see western society since the sixties as shaped by the rise of new social movements (peace, green, feminist, etc), which are allegedly carried by a “new middle class” consisting of students, intellectuals and professionals. These are sometimes thought to be displacing the labour movement as the main challenger to the social order. But while the middle classes have taken on some new contours in recent decades, they did not play the role sometimes claimed for them in the social movements of the Whitlam and Fraser years.
It is certainly true that students had become an important political force in the sixties, reflecting their increasing numbers amidst a massive expansion of tertiary education. Tertiary enrolments, which had risen by 75 percent in the fifties, climbed by 187 percent in the sixties (including Colleges of Advanced Education). As their numbers grew, students became more assertive and even began to see themselves as taking the lead in changing society. When a group called Student Action was set up at Melbourne University in 1961 to campaign against the White Australia policy, one of its leaders wrote that students had “shown several times in the past twelve months that they are prepared to give a moral lead.” During the sixties’ political radicalisation, students became an important source of activists for the anti-war movement and a recruiting ground for various radical currents. After graduation, many of the same people went on to become active in white collar or professional organisations, or emerged as leaders of various social movements.
Students, however, cannot be defined statically as “middle class”, since each generation of students goes on to join the workforce. The radical students of the late sixties and early seventies had generally found work by the time Fraser replaced Whitlam, a large proportion of them entering professional and white collar jobs as teachers, health workers, public servants and the like. These sections of the workforce, as we have seen, were not part of a “new middle class” but rather represented new sections of the working class. A large proportion of the people joining, say, anti-uranium demonstrations in the seventies were workers of this kind.
Other ex-students became managers, or joined professional elites such as doctors and lawyers, or went into business, but these groupings showed little bent for social radicalism. On the contrary, some of them undoubtedly supported the reactionary anti-union mobilisation discussed in chapter eleven.
Finally, some of the university-trained “sixties’ generation” became career intellectuals, and did indeed play an important role in setting the ideological tone among feminists, peace campaigners or environmentalists from the seventies onwards. Unfortunately, their influence generally accelerated the decline of these movements by pushing them away from links with the working class and socialist politics, a process we will consider in chapter ten. The student movement itself had little staying power and declined sharply from the early seventies, intimidated by a rapidly slackening job market for university graduates. Suddenly, good marks really mattered.
Far from being sustained by a “new middle class”, the strongest social movements always had direct or indirect connections with the labour movement. The social radicalisation of the late sixties and early seventies would not have been so powerful were it not for a more or less simultaneous strike movement in the working class and the involvement of the ALP left in the anti-war campaign; similarly the anti-uranium movement of the early Fraser era owed its considerable political impact to trade union support. As various social movements turned away from a working class orientation, their social weight declined even if their numbers held up: even the large disarmament rallies of the early eighties were comparatively ineffectual precisely because the peace movement tried to orient to a supposedly more enlightened middle class constituency. The only really effective middle class mobilisation was the battle to save the Franklin River -- a campaign in which the environmentalists enjoyed strong support from sections of the bourgeoisie.
In all the decisive conflicts of the Whitlam and Fraser years, capital and labour were the forces that really mattered, as they always will be while the capitalist system endures.