School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemGreat white noise(Melbourne University Publishing, 2004)The yawning gulf that everyone talks about isn’t between so-called elites and the mainstream, or even between the city and the bush. The big gap in Australian politics is between cleverly deployed political stereotypes and the realities of growing inequality and widespread dissatisfaction with economic ‘reform’. Elites, in other words, have been made targets of the same strategy of demonising the ‘other’ that has been used on asylum-seekers, Aboriginal land rights campaigners, ethnic youth gangs, ‘welfare mothers’, and so on. On the face of it, the current demonisation of elites is as irrational as it is clever. It is irrational because it shows contempt for the views of the thousands of Australians who wrote letters to newspapers, signed petitions and started community groups to show their outrage at the Howard government’s policies on reconciliation, on the Wik 10-point plan, on saying sorry to the stolen generations, on the treatment of refugees and asylum-seekers, and so on. Were all those who came from far and wide to march for reconciliation and plant seas of hands in capital cities, or who protested against the war in Iraq, really just part of an ‘elite’? The attack is clever because it helps to mask the fact that those who attack elites are themselves part of an elite. How many ‘ordinary people’ have a radio show or a newspaper column? How many ‘ordinary people’ have the opportunity to vet the appointment of a government minister, as radio talkback host Alan Jones did in late 2001 before the instalment of a new police minister in New South Wales?