On Pru Goward’s Satirical Genius

She may not have intended her opinion piece as satire, but it reads better if you assume she did.

On the 19th of October 2021, a former government minister with the Liberal Party of Australia, Pru Goward, wrote an extraordinary opinion piece for the Australian Financial Review. With a level of tone-deaf condescension that shocked readers, she outlined how Australia’s ‘underclass’, despite being damaged, undisciplined, and terrible parents, are a potential force for good that needs to be harnessed.

Despite generating significant outrage, Goward defended her piece. She claimed she had been ‘badly misunderstood’ and had hoped to provoke a rethink of those at the bottom of the social hierarchy. It seems she meant exactly what she said.

Nonetheless, I prefer in this case to follow Roland Barthes instruction, and assume “the author is dead.” Let’s leave intentions aside: if we assume Goward’s article to be a work of satire, it serves as brilliant social commentary. It holds up a mirror to the Australian middle classes and their unspoken attitudes towards the poor.

She begins the piece with stilted pseudo-intellectualism, invoking George Orwell’s references to ‘the proles’ in 1984, which triggered in her a ‘lifelong fascination with the underclass’. She refers to Orwell as ‘one of the 20th century’s greatest philosophers thinly disguised as a novelist’ — as if anyone were in doubt of his philosophical credentials. The reader is thrust into this parody of the liberal middle classes, for whom gross misinterpretation of Orwell is a popular past time.

We’re given some historical context:

Since the 1950s there has been a remarkable growth in the number of proles. The welfare state is not entirely to blame.

Goward might be a former Liberal politician who was part of the historical project of dismantling the welfare state, but as Professor of Social Interventions and Policy, she is surely aware that the welfare state did more to ameliorate inequality (and thus the conditions of an ‘underclass’) than any intervention in history. Here, we see parodied the wilful ignorance of the middle class to the causes and conditions of poverty. Of course, the default position is to blame the welfare state — we all know the poor are only poor because the government gives them too much, right?

The piece goes on to present a series of confronting and brutal representations of poor Australians. They are said to smoke too much, and eat poorly. They refuse to get vaccinated. They vote only on the basis of hatred of refugees and defending the national flag, as though ignorant of their own interests. They don’t do their housework, are undisciplined, uncommitted to their work, and appallingly bad parents.

Such representations are patently not suitable for polite, public discourse. Yet, for precisely that reason, they hold up a mirror. These are the views the middle class holds about ‘the underclass’ — the subject of casual jokes or under-the-breath complaints. I would be lying if I said I didn’t cringe while reading these parts of Goward’s piece, precisely because they’re the kind of attitudes I sometimes (silently) hold myself, but would never express. They’re the unspoken attitudes of the professional classes, most of whom have limited real-world exposure to the lives of the poor. They are precisely the attitudes that inform the strategies of populist politicians around the world, as they mobilise the working class against an out-of-touch liberal elite.

The undertone throughout the piece is a mix of anxiety, disgust, and desire. The underclass are a cause for concern, yet an irresistible resource, waiting to be tapped:

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.

The pivot in this paragraph is brilliant. Goward twists from the dreadful prospect of Malthusian population growth — that the professional classes might be outbred — to a recognition of the glorious potential this offers for exploitation. Yes, they are very good breeders, and if we play our cards right, might be an excellent reserve army of labour for generations to come.

The condescending tone of the entire piece is made possible by a distance from the poor which is typical of many of those who write about them. The poor are here a curiosity that one holds at a distance from oneself — exotic and irreducibly ‘other.’

Yet, Goward also makes hilariously laboured attempts to signify her proximity to the poor — as if this gives her piece some credibility. ‘As a shopkeeper’s daughter, I understood poor people,’ she boasts, in the introductory paragraphs. Yes, and we all know shopkeeper’s daughters do it tough. The reference to Margaret Thatcher is impossible to miss — another shop-keeper’s daughter and self-proclaimed beneficiary of the ‘underclass’ who ruthlessly undermined them.

“I know many of them,” she later goes on to tell us — like the white person dropping awkward reference to their black friend in conversations about race. She even tells us she likes them — despite everything — “I like them because they call us out.” And what a thing to like. It’s a wonderfully subtle expression of middle class privilege. Yes, it’s such a pleasant feeling to be called out, to contemplate and stroke one’s chin, and reconsider one’s assumptions — and then go back to living exactly as before.

Satire or not, the fact that a Professor of Social Interventions and Policy at Western Sydney University could pen something like this is shocking. I’m unsure of Pru Goward’s educational credentials, but I believe this speaks to a growing trend of political appointments to academic positions across Australian universities. No one with any deep disciplinary grounding in the social sciences could write something so tone deaf.

Nonetheless, I think there may be something edifying in reading this as satire — it gives a parodied expression to appalling, unspoken attitudes, that may be more common than we think amongst the decision-makers of this country.