It’s hard to pick the exact moment when drinking lattes stopped being a real cultural signifier. It has to be well over a decade ago. You can now walk into an RSL, or a saloon bar in Alice Springs, and get one in the proper tall glass if you want to.
Every morning, lattes warm hands on building sites, spill across hi-vis and wash down Four N’ Twenty breakfast pies. Culinary class distinctions no longer mean much in a country where McDonald’s sells macarons.
But the latte-as-cliché seems to be indestructible. In the aftermath of Tony Abbott’s fall, scores were served up in conservative opinion pieces, as symbols of the nefarious inner city wankers who brought down their hero. It’s telling, that this supposed antithesis of Real Australia was embraced by real Australians years ago. Right-wing opinion journalism has reached a point where its clichés are no longer truisms, and the charge of “elitism” has to be applied to almost everyone.
Andrew Bolt even called The Australian's editor Chris Mitchell a member of the “chattering classes”. Turnbull would never have gotten his way, if it wasn’t for the looters and wreckers of these kulaks. The threat of this class enemy was summarised by Marxist-extraordinaire Brendan O’Neill:
“...the public mythologisation of his [Abbott’s] removal is revealing and terrifying. It speaks to the new intolerance, where anyone who refuses to buy into chattering-class orthodoxies can expect ridicule, and maybe even the termination of their careers.”
But the real scenario upsetting conservatives isn’t the “terrifying” prospect that historically unpopular politicians might find themselves out of a job. It’s that conservative social views now help make these politicians unpopular in the first place.
One of Australia’s leading political advocates of same-sex marriage is a former welder and a former farmer.
It’s undeniable: religious-based support for the traditional conception of marriage is now a fringe belief in Australia. Sentiments like “the institution is already under threat and should not be further undermined by this” and “same-sex marriages could devalue traditional marriages” are conservative bread-and-butter. In polling, they are affirmed by less than 25% of the population. Can you think of another view this unpopular, that doesn’t carry an electoral penalty?
Nobody can pretend that support for same-sex marriage is a chattering class orthodoxy, when it has become something akin to common sense.
I interviewed V8 racing car driver Leanne Tander at the end of the Abbott era. She is not a tattooed barista, nor a hipster, nor a twitterati, nor a chatterati, nor achingly cool, nor a fashionable sneerer, nor an elitist, nor a champagne or chardonnay socialist.
Yet she told me unprompted that it was “kind of embarrassing sometimes, to see the way Australia reacts to certain things. Marriage equality: it’s just so backwards – we’re sitting here arguing a basic human rights issue.”
One of Australia’s leading political advocates of same-sex marriage is a former welder and a former farmer: Liberal National MP Warren Entsch, further still from the clichéd café chatterer.
But in opinion land, lattes are often sipped (never drunk) inside abstract conclaves: bubbles, echo chambers, ivory towers, held together by spite and groupthink. But the borders of the bubble seem to have shifted.
Remember The Daily Telegraph’s “Sydney’s Muslim land” feature, Tim Blair’s lament for the last pub in Lakemba, threatened by the Islamic bookshop across the road? Ask yourself for a moment – for whom was it written?
Multiculturalism, support for marriage equality and a belief we should do something about climate change aren’t ivory tower edicts.
Its intended audience couldn’t have been anyone who’d actually been to Lakemba: they’d know about the flourishing bottle shop on the same block (this uncomfortable fact was left out, to retain the “Bart’s People”-style poignancy of the piece). And it can’t have been for anyone in wider Western Sydney either: there must be a dozen mini “Muslim lands” between the M4 and M5. You can’t drive a van between Marrickville and Fairfield without passing a Lebanese bakery.
This wasn’t new – or news – for anyone in the region. The truth is, pieces like this are for readers who don’t get out much. The same people who are terrified of Bankstown or Kings Cross, at least as ideas. And you never hear about how these people – mainly “conservative retirees”, in Chris Mitchell’s formulation – are out of touch with the real world.
But they are. Multiculturalism, support for marriage equality and a belief we should do something about climate change aren’t ivory tower edicts. They are simply a lived reality for most people, the same way that enjoying opera and fine paintings are a lived reality for others.
Especially the readers of Andrew Bolt’s blog, who are regularly treated to YouTubes of favourite arias and highlights from the Menzies Fine Art auctions catalogue.
Writer and broadcaster Richard Cooke has covered the Ashes for The Sunday Times and worked on ABC TV's The Hamster Wheel and The Checkout.
