Why class is still taboo in Australia

Tim Winton called it the “C-word”. Mentioning it was “foul” and “embarrassing”, he wrote in a 2013 essay in The Monthly. The C-word “wasn’t simply awkward, it was provocative … [and] having uttered the c-word in polite company, I felt, for a moment, as if I’d shat in the municipal pool”.

Winton’s C-word was “class”. Thirteen years later, economic inequality has stretched the Australian social fabric so tightly that wealth is almost intractably an inheritance rather than a creation. And yet, when the urgency of talking about class should be irresistible, it has instead become taboo. “The careful elision of class from public discourse,” Winton wrote, “has become mainstream.” That was then. Now, it is a collective mental block.

Examples of the taboo can be found throughout the shadow play that we take for “public discourse” in February 2026, from low to high, sublime to ridiculous, trivial to serious.

To start with the trivial. Married at First Sight, reality-TV fluff that captivates 2.7 million Australian viewers, censors the c-word. Racial and sexual diversity are cautiously seen if not heard – this season has a first black man and a first bisexual woman, though the former’s race is not candidly discussed and the latter has been given a male partner.

These are sensitive subjects; on the other hand, the c-word is absolutely verboten. It’s apparent that two of the failing couples in this year’s “social experiment” (Mel and Luke and Brook and Chris, ICYMI) have foundered on class incompatibility. It happens every year and is never discussed. Maybe the export value of the MAFS format depends on selling the Australian myth of an egalitarian utopia, breaking free from old-world class rules … at first sight. And yet, MAFS women won’t “marry down” any more than if they were in a Jane Austen novel. At least Austen’s world was upfront about it. In modern Australia, we construct elaborate silences.

To a higher class of fluff: Angus Taylor’s tilt at the federal Liberal leadership, a vicious contest that brings to mind what poets say about their contests for literary grants: “The feuds are so strong because the stakes are so small.” Even if he is a walking moot point electorally, Taylor’s drift to the top of his party reveals a lot about Australia’s mental block on the c-word.

Taylor, installed on Friday as Liberal leader, has promised to appropriate Brand John Howard. In the classic mode of cultural appropriation, this promise is a perfect inversion of what Howard actually did.

With all due respect, Taylor, a kind of pre-modern Liberal Party beau ideal, wouldn’t have lasted 10 minutes in the party that John Howard hacked out of the post-Fraser wilderness. Fourth-generation landed gentry, King’s School, Sydney University, Oxford, McKinsey, blah blah blah, motivated, in the absence of original ideas or experience, by entitlement, the Angus Taylors were an anathema to Howard. Whatever else can be said about Howard, a Canterbury Boys’ High graduate who came from a striving lower-middle-class background, he built 11 years of electoral success on repudiating the idea of the Liberals as born to rule, instead forging a connection with his “battlers”.

Before Howard differentiated the Liberals from urban intellectual elites embodied by Paul Keating, his internal party victory was over the private school elites then embodied by Andrew Peacock.

But in the pageantry of those who were born on third base and think they’ve hit a home run, it’s not the truth that matters; it is the fact of inheritance. This is a point well made by Larissa Behrendt in her contribution to Class in Australia, a 2022 book edited by Steven Threadgold and Jessica Gerrard. The classless land born in 1788 was based on the immediate disinheritance and depersonalisation of the land’s previous owners. The unmentionable lies at its very centre.

By daring to claim the Howard estate, Taylor can help prolong the long-term political project that Winton observed in his essay. Class might be an unspeakable elephant in the room, but that doesn’t stop it ruling through silence. If we pretend class doesn’t exist, we can pretend Taylor is “the sort of guy you could have a beer with at the front bar”, as Liberal senator Alex Antic puts it, or that the federal Liberals, heading for a cliff, aren’t just stomping on the accelerator.

Taylor’s apparition has already prompted Labor to revive the language of class, but they ought to be careful. In describing Taylor as being “born with a silver foot in his mouth”, Jim Chalmers is not just plagiarising Ann Richards, who used those words to describe George H.W. Bush in 1988 – another purloined political inheritance. The ALP has been complicit in what a forlorn Winton called “a transition from collective citizenship to consumer individualism”, a “counter-reformation” grounded in a cross-party political and social consensus that “workers were encouraged to see themselves as contractors, employers as entrepreneurs”.

In the important economic issues that relate to class – home ownership, taxation, and the funding of education and health to take a few – Labor and the conservatives have undertaken a bipartisan project to entrench class inequality while erasing the supposedly divisive C-word. As economic inequality has grown with each generational transfer, Australians have become inarticulate about discussing it, an inarticulacy that was always going to end with a protest party like One Nation.

“[The] term ‘Howard’s battlers’ was deployed as a deliberate attempt to appropriate the power of class language while simultaneously declaring class a dead issue,” Winton wrote. The class war wasn’t dead; it had been sneakily inverted. Winton quoted this masthead’s Ross Gittins – “If you think the class war is over, you’re not paying enough attention” – and Warren Buffett: “There’s class warfare alright, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

If Buffett’s class was winning in 2013, it is crushing it now. The average wealth of the top 20 per cent of Australian households has since risen at four times the rate of the lowest 20 per cent. That top 20 per cent now own 78-82 per cent of all private assets. The gap between them and the second 20 per cent is widening. The bottom 20 per cent, meanwhile, own 0.7 per cent of private wealth.

It’s a curious anomaly that when Australia is accelerating towards the class rigidities of the old world, when you use the C-word in conversation – about TV shows, about politics, about global conflicts – you still feel like you’re shitting in the municipal pool … or (this is 2026) in the infinity-edge plunge pool.

In the absence of the C-word, our search for solutions keeps going around in the same old circles, never progressing, and robbing us, as Winton wrote, of mobility: in wealth, certainly, but also mobility in thinking, and “what mobility affords – namely, confidence”. Another C-word we seem to have lost.

Malcolm Knox is a journalist, author and columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald.

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