Howdy dear availees right across the globe, especially our new friend/s in Bulgaria, cheers...had planned many things for today's post, but never guessed that it would come to this...anyone who is familiar with Pru baby's wantonly distorted and twisted pro-Liberal mindset...(as often expressed on supposedly balanced news shows like The Drum on the ABC-Ed)...yeah, she's frequently on there, often poorly backlit like some sort of Karloffian gothic ghoul...(last I saw her was a coupla' weeks ago when she was proselytising the disgraced/ful former NSW Premier Gladys 'Bin Chicken' Berejiklian-Ed)...yeah, well now Pru has not so much spilled the beans as flung them violently into the disbelieving visage of mainstream Australia...if anybody was still labouring under the illusion that the Liberal/National Party have anything other than rabid contempt for the electorate, us what employs them and pays their wages, etc, etc, then here comes Super-Pru to free you from your ignorant shackles...
Pru has blessed us all by sharing her 'I know better than you just because I do' attitude and know-how, and present this joyous tome of bilious self-righteousness and blissfully unawares contempt...(given the opening salvo, one would be excused for thinking she's babbling about her rankly corrupt LNP brethren like Scott Morrison, Barnaby Joyce, Angus Taylor, Christian Porter, et al-Ed)...indeed, but no, it's about us "proles", the 'proletariat', the great unwashed masses...as copied from the illustrious pages of the mother-lovin' Murdoch cess-paper, The Financial Review, enjoy...***
Why you shouldn’t underestimate the underclass
They are damaged, lacking in trust and discipline, and highly self-interested. But the poor are still a force that Australia needs to properly harness.
Pru GowardColumnist“If there is hope, it lies in the proles.” So said one of the 20th century’s greatest philosophers thinly disguised as a novelist, George Orwell, in his spookily prescient work, 1984. I believe my lifelong fascination with the underclass began when I pondered that declaration of independence against a futuristic form of government oppression, which has turned out not to be so futuristic.
As a shopkeeper’s daughter, I understood poor people; they obeyed the law, worked hard, sent their kids to the same primary schools I attended and were equally ambitious for their children. But the underclass, small as it then was, behaved differently.
Like the stoats and weasels of the Wild Wood in The Wind in the Willows, yet another English children’s book on the topic of class, they rejected the rules and lived by their own. They were to be feared and were, to use my mother’s words, not very nice. It took Orwell to turn the noble Marxist proletariat into the proles.
Since the 1950s there has been a remarkable growth in the number of proles. The welfare state is not entirely to blame, as the world of Dickens attests. Government agencies view them with alarm as huge cost centres; they are over-represented in their use of government crisis services and are always the last to give up smoking, get their shots and eat two servings of vegetables a day.
Of course, they are always seen as a deficit. Social workers, traditionally good young men and women who thought it would be nice to be kind for a living, despair of their appalling housework, neglect of their children and, notably, their sharp and unrepentant manner when told to lift their game by the patronising do-gooder.
Oh yes, and they don’t vote often, although, as I found door-knocking, it will be issues such as refugees and threats to the national flag which will get them out the door rather than the budget deficit or how much we spend on public education.
Orwell was right. The underclass can smell a fake at 50 paces, distrusts conceptual rhetoric and cannot speak a word of Newspeak.
Despite the billions of dollars governments invest in changing the lives of proles, their number increases. Their birth rates far outstrip those of professional couples and they are now a significant potential contributor to our workforce.
Except their children languish in the growing number of behavioural support classes in general high schools where they learn little and teachers itch to send them to the local TAFE to do some form of home-schooling and get them off their books.
Essential honesty
Once graduated with a basic studies completion certificate and little else, their prospects are not great. The discipline of work and often its thanklessness, especially at the unskilled end, also have little appeal.
But Orwell was right. The underclass can smell a fake at 50 paces, distrusts conceptual rhetoric and cannot speak a word of Newspeak, the language of lies made famous in Orwell’s 1984. They know what they want and see no reason why they should take notice of some man or woman in a suit when they get in their way.
They were a significant part of the anti-vax protests because they don’t like being told what to do and even though many drew their inspiration from spurious websites, they had correctly identified the freedoms the rest of us had been only too happy to give up. State leaders might have deplored the demonstrations, but they also knew they represented the tip of a sentiment the rest of society keeps hidden from view and only reveals in the privacy of the ballot box. Freedom has gathered pace.
The underclass is not always a happy place to be and bumping into the rest of the world mostly does not go well. People with chronic mental illness, cognitive disabilities and childhoods of trauma are mixed together in a sometimes brutal way, chaos and crisis never far from their door, living in a Wild Wood in their streets and public housing blocks or caravan park.
And yet, I like them. I like them because they call us out. They are honestly self-interested, and you always know what they think. I know many of them. So many clever, actually very clever, kids and adults, although often damaged and almost entirely lacking discipline, trust in the system, trust in anyone who represents the system.
I am convinced we can do better to harness the force that the people of the underclass represent. We need to make it a focus of social policy, not a by-product of it. We have little choice, or we will continue to import our workforce and in growing numbers, as risk management parenting forces the birth-rate lower.
So long as we keep looking at the billions of dollars they cost us, we will continue to dislike them, reject them and write them off. Yet, in an age when cultural hegemony is now as strong as it was 70 years ago, only different, never have we needed them more to challenge modern meekism. The child who cried “look at the King” in The Emperor’s New Clothes was surely a member of the underclass.
***...(wow..."And yet, I like them."...just, wow-Ed)...yeah, she's a beauty alright...and the good ol' "proles" are "honestly self-interested"...(unlike the 'deceitfully self-interested' LNP and Labour and One Nation, etc, who plunder the public purse and lie and rort with media-supported impunity? not like them then?-Ed)...no no my friend, us charming li'l chimney sweep types are genuinely and honestly corrupt and selfish and abusive...(do you reckon that it even occurred to dear ol' Pru that the real issue might be the holier-than-thou hypocrisies/attitudes of "the system", and that us "proles" take some certain offense to being told to behave by the corrupt, drug-addled/alcoholic, rorting sex-offenders that define "the system"?-Ed)...I don't think that anything much has ever occurred to Pru, I reckon she opens her mouth and disengages her brain, not necessarily in that order, and we all get to experience the result...(that the issue might be generations of class-structured inequity currently manifesting as a wholly, openly corrupt and clearly contemptuous LNP government with a definable hatred for anyone whom is not them? might that be the problem?-Ed)...again, I don't think Pru is one to let facts compromise her blizzard of privileged bias and bigotry...("And yet, I like them"-Ed)...
Last To Give Up Smoking:...what self-respecting prole could ever forget that charming image of former Liberal Treasurer Joe Hockey and Matthias Corrman, having just tabled one of the most diabolical, corrupt, selfish, and Socially Destructive Federal Budgets ever, who can forget them draped across a bench in the Parliamentary courtyard, sickening self-satisfied smirks on their ugly mugs, puffing away on big fat stogies (cigars)...(ah yeah, so pleased with themselves for the misery and suffering they had just unleashed on millions of low-earning Australians, and disabled and pensioners, etc, etc, that they had to celebrate with big ol' cigars-Ed)...yep, over-priced toxic pudgy clumps polluting all about them with their vile stench...(yeah, but what about the cigars, taboom-tish-Ed)......
Here is the link to the Twitter thread/feed that has quite rightly developed around Pru's folly...
https://twitter.com/search?q=%22Pru%20Goward%22&src=trend_click&vertical=trends
It is quite extraordinary and yet wholly understandable that this woman has held numerous portfolios related to 'Public Welfare', 'cos she is exactly the sort of legislative Anti-Christ that the LNP loves to promote to these positions...(I note that many first thought this to be a 'parody' piece, which alludes to the current comedic dilemma-Ed)...which is?...(that modern politics is so rancid, so polluted with absolute nutjobs, that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the actual from the satirical, or vice versa-Ed)...and the fact that she's currently a 'Professor of Social Interventions and Policy' at the Western Sydney university...(it's like that nasty li'l pro-LNP piece of work, Self-Defined Rapist Christian Porter's bestie, Peter Van Onselen being a 'Professor of Politics' in Western Australia-Ed)...mate, it is exactly like that, every bit as bad, every bit as contrived...who in the living shreck decides that these clowns get the supposed credibility of their 'professornesses'?...(well I for one believe that's why they get 'gifted' these positions, to give their otherwise moronically obvious pro-LNP opinions some degree of credibility, thusly helping to promote the LNP-Ed)...sounds reasonable...
Tomorrow: A Meteorite Hits Earth?
After another long week of listening to that increasingly unhinged Scott 'Scummo' Morrison bellowing incoherently at the Parliament, relentlessly face-excreting the carefully rehearsed and deliberately unintelligible word-salad he consumed the evening before, one find's oneself quietly reaching-out to embrace the sweet release of a very large chunk a' molten rock plowing into dear Mother Earth at a gazillion miles an hour...(one can only hope-Ed)...if I hear "Mr Speaker" and/or "on this side of the House" ever, ever again, it will be too soon...(I read he did 25 "Mr Speaker"s in just one 'answer'-Ed)...seems a tad conservative compared to what I was listening to, but fair enough...
I am Nick Fletcher and this is my blog...cheers and laters...
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