A week ago, I was talking to a friend about the cost-of-living crisis. I mentioned that the last time I’d contemplated not filling the tank and just putting in enough petrol to get me through a few days, I’d been in uni. My friend smiled and said quietly, “those days have never ended for us.”
I instantly felt embarrassed. Money is a blind-spot for a certain kind of middle-class person and here I was being that person, proving that lack of self-awareness is a luxury of the powerful. The conversation stayed with me because in part until recently I’ve rarely felt the need to talk about money as part of casual conversation.
As the cost of living rises and money is coming up more frequently, I’ve begun to realise that the category “middle class” is so broad that it doesn’t begin to explain the varied experiences of people who fall within it.
For years there have been three basic measures of social class: poor, middle class and wealthy. But a few years ago, a team of researchers from ANU developed at six-tier scale ranging from those living in precarity to those who are considered “established affluent” – what they describe as the closest thing Australia has to an aristocracy.
I fit firmly into the established middle, which means that I have “slightly lower full-time employment rates compared with new workers,” but like others in my class, I am “more entrenched and comfortable in my social status.”
Until the recent cost of living increases, that has meant I can fill my petrol tank with reckless abandon because my solid university education and a lifetime of good financial habits have set me up to believe that I am immune to the pressures of the market. I’ve always credited my mum for this.
When I got my first professional job 20 years ago, she sat me down and helped me split my first paycheck into three parts. The first portion went to my grandmother, to let her know (as is customary among many cultures) that I was grown up now and was now in a position to thank her and to contribute to her upkeep in old age.
The next portion went into my checking account and was for daily living and monthly bills. I was living at home, so my expenses were low.
The last third went into my savings account. The money in this account, she said, would ensure that if I ever needed to walk away from a terrible work situation or a bad relationship, I could. Over time I began to call it my “dignity fund”.
As an African woman who understood that hard work and discipline would never insulate her children from the ugliness of racism and sexism, my mother knew that I’d need a lifelong safety net, and it would have to be one that I could control. I remember her telling me that the money in this account was mine and mine alone. She had a lifelong marriage to my father, but she was smart enough to insist: “No husband or boyfriend should ever have access to this money.”
The more fundamental investment my mother made in ensuring that I was economically secure began when she taught me to read and write and insisted that I study hard. Research shows that in Australia, during recessions, the workers who lose their jobs first are those who are least educated.
While she was right in many ways, the data makes it clear that I have also been the beneficiary of tremendous generational privilege. It turns out that my mother’s wisdom was contextual.
Today, the advice she gave would only take my kids so far. My mother’s advice was predicated on the notion that I would have secure employment and that the job market would offer numerous options.
As the Victorian government’s 2021 submission to the Senate select committee on job security points out, in 2017 – for the first time since statistics have been collected – the proportion of employed Australians filling a standard job fell below 50%.
The implications are profound. The submission notes that “less than half of employed Australians now work in a permanent full-time paid position with basic entitlements (like sick pay and paid holidays)”. In addition, 72% of new jobs created since the lowest moment of the Covid-related economic downturn have no paid leave entitlements.
The kind of long-term secure employment I took for granted is only available to a diminishing number of young people – often the kinds of kids who belong to the aristocracy referred to in the ANU study on social class.
For other young people – like Chloe, a woman in her 20s who told me she has moved four times this year and her rent has gone up by $160 a week – doing it tough means living through multiple crises. She told me rising inflation “feels like a sucker punch.” It comes on the back of insecure work (she’s an arts worker who juggles multiple casual contracts) and is compounded by a lifting of the moratorium on rents that had been put in place by the WA government during Covid.
Her whole cohort of friends have been affected.
In this environment, it is hard to see how the stage-three tax cuts will help anyone other than the established affluent – the aristocrats who control 40% of the economy and have never needed to think about how much petrol they put in their cars, how much rent they pay, or what strategies to put in place to buy themselves some dignity.
There has been much critiquing of the comfortable myth that Australia is a classless society over the past few years, but we are now in danger of those classes becoming even more deeply entrenched if we continue down a path of insecure work combined with a flattening of the tax system.
Sisonke Msimang is a Guardian Australia columnist. She is the author of Always Another Country: A Memoir of Exile and Home (2017) and The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela (2018)
