THE "NEW CLASS" (essay)
Recently reactionary journalists and right-wing populists have been dusting off and resurrecting Pareto-style theories about the "circulation of elites" and the idea first raised at the end of the 19th century by the nihilist Jan Waclaw Machajski and the anarchist Max Nomad, that the modern intelligentsia constitute a new and oppressive social class.

This recycled "new class" theory takes a variety of forms in different hands, but all the major recent Australian exponents of it give it a distinctly conservative spin, imitating similar thinkers in the US and Europe. Katharine Betts argues that this "new class" forms a rootless cosmopolitan elite, whose views, sympathetic to migration and opposed to racism, defy the more popular racist wisdom of the native Australian Volk. Michael Thompson takes a similar line. P.P. McGuiness very explicitly revives Pareto and says that the "Chardonnay set" and the "chattering classes" are a silly group, who continue the "self-destructive hedonism of the 1960s", when what is really required is constructive conservatism as represented, of course, by his own reactionary ideas on all questions.

The only point at which this sustained right-wing ideological polemic impinges on sociological reality is in the chapters in Katharine Betts' book The Great Divide on The Social Location of Intellectuals and Australian Intellectuals and the Immigration Question. In these chapters Betts gives some statistics about the changed educational composition of the Australian population, which is, in fact, not a bad starting point for a serious inquiry into what are the new features of the class formations in Australia.

Betts, however, only uses her figures in a very loaded polemical way, to develop her tendentious "new class" thesis. Unfortunately on further investigation Betts' figures turn out to be a bit inaccurate, and therefore I have collected all the useful material available from that wonderful institution, the Australian Bureau of Census and Statistics. The figures I now rely on are some of Betts' figures, with those of her figures that seem to be inaccurate corrected by the statisticians' figures.

The two most useful census documents for this inquiry are Australian Social Trends 1999 and the Social Atlas for each capital city, and I will use the 1996 Sydney Social Atlas as my working example. On page 83 of Social Trends 1999 is the ABS classification of qualifications, which divides post-school qualifications into five categories: "bachelor degree and above", "undergraduate diploma", "associate diploma", "skilled vocational qualification" and "basic vocational qualification".

For purposes of describing people who have a university degree or equivalent, it seems sensible to group the first two together as representing a university degree. In the first census where degrees were tabulated, 1966, 1.5 per cent of the population over 15 years had degrees. In 1976, 3 per cent had degrees. By 1996, Katharine Betts gives the figure of 10.2 per cent, but she seems to be wrong, as the Bureau gives the figure of 12.8 per cent.

In addition, the Bureau gives a figure of 8.8 per cent for people with undergraduate diplomas and associate diplomas together. For simplicity's sake, we may assume half the 8.8 per cent for each category, which means that in 1996, according to the Bureau, approximately 17.2 per cent of the adult population had a university degree. By 1998, according to the Bureau, the figure had become 14.5 per cent plus 7.9 per cent, which takes the number with a university degree up to 18.4 per cent of the adult population, a very high figure indeed.

Another framework that is useful in relation to the educational qualifications of the population is the figures for the raw number of tertiary students. In 1912, when the Australian population was 4.5 million, there were a tiny 3672 tertiary students. In 1938, when the population was approximately 6.5 million, there was a still tiny 12,126. In 1966, when the population was 11.7 million, the number of students had risen to 91,272. Thirty years later, when the population had increased about 50 per cent to about 18 million, the number of tertiary students had soared seven fold to 634,094.

Women predominate among graduates in the fields of health, education and society and culture

In the Census Bureau's documentation there is a very detailed breakdown of "People with post-school qualifications, by type of qualification" by both age and sex. They reveal a very sharp increase in the number of women with university qualifications, who now number about the same as men, and who are concentrated in such areas as teaching, the health industry, social work and also, to some degree, in commerce and business.

The number of female primary teachers went up between 1988 and 1998 from 71.7 per cent to 77.5 per cent. The number of female secondary teachers went up from 48.3 per cent to 53.5 per cent, and the number of women teaching in higher education went up from 27.3 per cent to 35.1 per cent.

In 1996 227,000 people had bachelor degrees or higher in business and administration, 35.7 per cent of them were women; 213,600 had university degrees in health, 66.2 per cent of them were women; 357,800 had university degrees in the delightful ABS classification called "society and culture", defined as "economics, law, behaviour, welfare, languages, religion and philosophy, librarianship, visual and performing arts, geography, communication, recreation and leisure, and policing", 54.8 per cent of them were women. In engineering, however, with 120,100, only 8.4 per cent were women.

The great numerical explosion of people with university degrees was a product of the Whitlam period educational reforms. ............