One way of conducting class warfare is to accuse your opponent of conducting class warfare. In his speech in reply to last week's Budget the Leader of the Opposition attacked the government for 'deliberately, coldly, calculatingly play[ing] the class war card', of portraying the political contest as 'billionaires versus battlers'.
There was a time when someone on the Government benches would have interjected to call Tony Abbott the billionaires' lacky, and pointed to some incriminating evidence is support: donations by the mining industry to his Coalition parties have soared over the past five years from a few hundred thousand dollars a year to $3 million, during which time donations to the Labor Party have gone from hardly anything to a bit less than that.
If only life, and class relations, were so simple. But they are not. It is not long since a government of which Abbott was a senior member itself played 'the class war card', but for the other side, for 'Howard's battlers'. And for most of the intervening period Labor studiously avoided playing that same card, preferring to talk about 'Australian working families' rather than battlers — or billionaires.
The frisson of comment about the terms of Abbott's assault on the Budget reflects a national ambivalence, and confusion, about class. Talk about class has never been absent from our history, but we also like to think that since no-one tugs a forelock to anyone, we (unlike the poms) are classless.
Abbott appealed to just this logic before he attacked the Government for not using it. His was 'an Australian life', he averred, 'much like yours, with Margie, raising three daughters in suburban Sydney, paying a mortgage, worrying about bills, trying to be a good neighbour and a good citizen'.
The term 'class' can itself wears much of the blame for this national confusion. 'Class' conjures up a vision of vast battalions, homogenous, distinct, and immutable. What the concept tries to draw attention to is in fact more like one of those Bureau of Metrology videos on the net, images of endlessly-swirling forces of every colour, patterned certainly, but never neat and stationary.
One of those forces is the force of language, and there is probably no time in Australia's history when the term 'class' has been so on the nose. In some ways that is a good thing, reflecting the fact that we are now much more conscious of other kinds of social relations, between genders and cultures, for example, and reflecting also the fact that in a globalising economy on a struggling planet, we are in this together.
But 'class', with its appeals to equality and fraternity, still has a job to do that the currently-preferred language of 'the market' and its insatiable lust for liberty can't do. In fact there is more of a job to be done now than at many points in the past, as a recent OECD report points out.
'Income inequality among [Australian] working people', the report says, 'has been rising since 2000 and is today above the OECD average'. The average income of the top ten per cent of earners is now ten times that of the bottom ten per cent, up from 8:1 since the mid-1990s.
Since 1980 the richest one per cent of Australians have doubled their share of the national income, from 4.8 per cent to 8.8 per cent, while the super-rich (billionaires?) have tripled their cut from one per cent to three.
It is surely not a coincidence that over the period when talking about class, however crudely or disingenuously, became the political equivalent of breaking wind, the actions and inaction of governments of both stripes have contributed to this galloping inequality.
'The growth in inequality since 2000 was driven by two forces in different periods,' the OECD says, by 'widening disparities of market incomes between 2000 and 2004, and weakening redistribution since 2004'. It points out that both 'progressivity and average tax rates have declined' since the mid-1980s, and that since the mid-1990s 'the overall redistributive effect also weakened'.
One of the things that makes class relations so complicated is that sometimes they are so simple.
Dean Ashenden has written extensively on class and other social relations.