elite

In Australia it is fine to be one of the elite of the sports world but in any other context being of the elite is most likely to be held against you. This use of elite as a smear word is a very Australian thing because mostly in the rest of world elites have been regarded with respect and admiration, although with the rise of populism that is perhaps no longer true. In Australia we have always been suspicious of someone who is ‘clever’.  Patrick White’s character Chattie (in Voss) sums up Laura Trevalyn:  ‘Laura is sweet, too,’ Chattie sighed.  ‘But peculiar. Laura is clever’.  Cleverness is regarded as a peculiarity be dismissed with vague contempt.

As Stephen FitzGerald says:

As has been pointed out time and again, excellence is the very essence of our approach to sport, and the same applies to entertainment and gambling of various types — the offerings of ‘the good life’. The disturbing thing is that while we enlist ‘elites’ to bid for the elite prize of elite sporting competition, the Olympic Games, and in 1996 quarantined elite sport from savage budget cuts, we have never seen such strength of elite support for an elite intellectual, artistic or scientific endeavour, and the same 1996 budget reduced the funding of all these latter fields.

Is Australia an Asian Country? Stephen FitzGerald.

Certainly the right wing of politics is quick to jump on any sign of elitism.  Pauline Hanson spelled out who was the target:

‘The elite of the media, of academia and those others who see themselves above ordinary Australians’ and ‘dictate our future’ — an elite of ‘fat cats, bureaucrats and the do-gooders’.

Fair Observer June 20,2019 Hans Georg Betz

And now Peter Dutton and Senator Price have labelled The Voice as the work of the elite and put themselves in opposition to it because they claim to side with, not only ordinary Australians generally, but ordinary Indigenous people in particular.  The elite in this case is the mix of politicians, bureaucrats and media that make up the Canberra bubble. The defining characteristic of this kind of elite is not so much that they demonstrate excellence but that they have power over others.

I’m not sure whether to be proud or sad that the Australian habit of elite-bashing is still with us. We don’t want our culture to change, do we?