Will bogans decide election?
By Kim Huynh
August 21, 2007 04:00am
THIS year's federal election, like the last four elections, will be all about the bogans.
The deciding votes will be cast in the outer suburbs and towns where Hanson's heroes, Howard's battlers, Latham's ladder climbers and Rudd's sunrisers flourish. Just about all of them (give or take a few slices of beetroot in their burgers) are bogans.
We all know who bogans are. The males have a "she'll be right" attitude towards life beyond sport, and tend to splutter like Victa mowers whenever they speak. The women greet one another in our vast shopping malls with cackling cockatoo calls.
Their lineage can be traced back to the bodgies, westies, booners, bevans and alter egos of Barry Humphries.
Bogans are a fertile breed, with three generations often coexisting in less than half a century.
But the bogans of today are not so easily recognised by what they wear, drink or how much money they earn. In the past decade, a healthy economy and personal endeavour has elevated many of them in terms of wealth and perhaps even status.
Their rendered aubergine houses seem to sprout more water features by the week.
Whereas once they occupied a single socio-economic stratum, they must now be differentiated into at least two classes: the unter-bogans (who are born and bred in, and will never leave, struggle town) and the uber-bogans (also known as CUBs or Cashed-Up Bogans, who are migrating to leafier suburbs).
In recent popular culture, bogans have been simultaneously celebrated and mocked in The Castle and Kath & Kim (which is moving to Channel 7 to complement Today Tonight). Each year the Big Brother vote, which is more important to many Australians than any election, is basically a quest for the nation's biggest bogan idol.
Australians have an affection for bogans that is not reflected in North America's loathing of trailer trash or the Pommie repugnance towards CHAVs (Council Housing and Violent).
But there are some Australians who are at odds with these rising ocker battlers.
Arch-conservatives bemoan the fact that people no longer know their place and equate the bogan ascendance with the demise of civilisation and the erosion of old-fashioned values.
At the same time, and perhaps more interestingly, the chattering or political class (aka chardonnay socialists and latte set) have over the past eleven years barricaded themselves in museums, libraries and universities against what they view to be a flood of decadence and vulgarity.
In detachment and despair at what might have been were it not for mass consumerism and Deal or No Deal, chatterers prefer to champion the causes of exotic and displaced people from the other side of the earth than associate with the tribe of bogans across the street.
What can the political class possibly offer those who have much wider and flatter televisions, Bluetooth-enabled fridges and who seem so comfortable in their glossy little worlds?
At the same time, bogans have only scorn for the out-of-touch intellectuals who they view as being bereft of the ANZAC spirit and obsessed with the esoteric arts of others.
The divide between Australians who have a taste for sushi rolls, as opposed to Shannon Noll, is great.
The 2007 election offers the prospect of a rapprochement between those on either side of this cultural and political fence.
In particular, Australians are increasingly united in the need to confront the crises of the war in Iraq and climate change. When it comes to education, workplace relations and health care, there may also be growing room for consensus.
If the bogans can, for whatever reason, come around or even lead the way on these critical issues, then surely chattering Australians can stand with them?
Our politicians and George Orwell probably have one thing right and in common. If there is hope, then it lies with the bogans.
Kim Huynh teaches politics and international relations in the School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. The piece first appeared in the ANU Reporter.
they have enormous influence and act only in their own interests.