A Left without class can only be left behind by the culture wars

This backlash has confounded the Left of Australian politics that has been struck dumb by the culture wars; the Right continues to goosestep from victory to victory.

The Left needs to consider a simple question; why?

But even before this question can be answered one must examine the causes of the backlash.

Although racist attitudes and opinions have been stoked by right wing commentators, the corporate especially Murdoch press, and conservative political leaders nonetheless this is a stoking, not a manufacturing, of views that have grown more prevalent over time.

The transition from White Australia to multiculturalism was couched within a broader social contract between capital and labour. When the first wave of post war migrants came to Australia they came to an Australia committed to full employment, arbitration and conciliation as a means to codify this contract, industrial development, and social justice through the implements of a social welfare state.

Australian corporations, in turn, needed labour and this labour came through immigration. The migrants became more ethnically diverse as time progressed.

So it was then that the Australian working class was reconciled to large levels of immigration, and the social and cultural changes occasioned by such immigration.

The backlash against multiculturalism has come as a consequence of the breaking of this contract; the commitment to full employment, manufacturing industry, arbitration and conciliation, the welfare state, all have been torn asunder yet the migrants keep coming.

The Australian working class, to put it simply, is less reconciled to a multicultural Australia because it will not reconcile itself to a social order founded on its abandonment.

How, then, should this be a problem for the Left?

It is a problem in two senses.

Firstly, the Australian Labor Party, traditionally the party of the working class, no longer can be said to represent its interests, to the limited extent that we can say it ever did, and the same applies to the union movement more broadly it must be said.