I acknowledge the Wurundjeri Woi‑wurrung people of the Kulin Nation, on whose lands we meet today, and pay respect to their elders.
Thank you to Jenny Chesters, Penny Toth, TASA and the Social Stratification Thematic Group for convening today's symposium. Professor Chesters and I worked together at the Australian National University many moons ago, and it has been a pleasure since then to watch her build a body of work that has deepened Australia's understanding of education, family background, opportunity and social class.
Thank you for the chance to join you virtually to consider one of the biggest questions any nation can ask itself: who gets what chance, and why?
Let me start with a story.
Picture a young worker in her twenties. She has a job in childcare, hairdressing, disability support or aged care. She likes her work, but the pay is modest and the rent keeps rising. One day, a better job comes up. Higher pay, shorter commute, perhaps a roster that makes life a little easier.
Then she remembers the contract she signed on her first day.
Somewhere in the pages, perhaps after the probation clause and before the leave provisions, there is a non‑compete clause. It says she cannot work for a competitor for a period after leaving. She does not know whether it is enforceable. She does not know whether anyone would sue. She does know that a letter from a lawyer would be terrifying.
So she stays.
A clause that may have looked harmless to the person who drafted it becomes a barrier to the person who signed it.
That is the sort of friction I want to talk about today.
Australian likes to tell ourselves an egalitarian story. In Battlers and Billionaires, I wrote about some of those habits: we call each other mate, we recoil at knights and dames, we tend to think of ourselves as a country without too much bowing and scraping. But a national style is different from a national structure. Just because we use first names does not mean we have equal chances.
Class is often discussed through the indicators we can count: income, wealth, education and occupation. Those measures are essential. They show us the structure of inequality.
But class also appears in the moments when people try to move. To move jobs. To move suburbs. To move into training. To move through a health system, a school system, a housing market, or a government service.
Some people meet a friction and barely notice it. They know who to call. They have a relative who has seen the form before. They can pay for advice. They can wait out a delay.
Others meet the same friction and stop.
To some extent, class is revealed through movement. A society can look open at the entrance, yet be sticky at every doorway.
Non‑competes are a good example. For a low‑paid worker, it can feel like a set of handcuffs written in 12‑point type. Even if they're legally unenforceable, they can impede someone from moving to a better job. When a worker believes they are trapped, the trap has already done part of its work. We call this the 'chilling effect'.
That distinction between what is formally true and what is socially experienced has long been a feature of sociological research. Economists can tell us what is in the contract. Lawyers can tell us what a court might do. Sociologists can help us understand how a worker reads power when it arrives on company letterhead.
The same is true of credentials and licensing. Australia is one country, yet a worker moving between states can sometimes feel as though their qualification got confiscated at the border. Inconsistent licences may sound like administrative inconvenience. For a worker with savings, they are irritating. For someone who lives near a state border and lives paycheque to paycheque, they can be horrendous.
In human services and the trades, those frictions have a class dimension. They fall on people whose work is essential, whose pay is often stretched, and whose time is already claimed by caring responsibilities and commuting.
Childcare offers another example. The old rules were written to test activity, eligibility, hours and documentation. On paper, they might have looked tidy.
In family life, their effect could be perverse. That's because children need early learning precisely because their parents' work is insecure, intermittent or hard to document on a form. When access depends on proving the right kind of labour market attachment, the children who could benefit most may be the ones who find the gate hardest to open.
Then there is housing, where frictions become painfully concrete (though maybe it's the lack of concrete that's the problem!). A thicket of regulations make home‑building costlier. For a renter hoping to buy, it is another year of inspections, another year of saving while prices move, another auction where someone else arrives with family help. Another form or a slow approval can sound technical. Together, they shape who gets to live near jobs, schools, family and transport.
The bank of mum and dad is a housing phenomenon. But in a sense, it is also a friction phenomenon. Family wealth helps people absorb delay. It turns uncertainty into inconvenience. It converts a locked gate into a manageable queue.
Wealth inequality has risen dramatically in recent decades. In Battlers and Billionaires, I estimated that from 1983 to 2024, the wealth share of the top 0.001 per cent of Australian adults rose more than fivefold, from 0.7 per cent to 4.2 per cent. The top 20 Australians now have twice as much wealth as the bottom 2 million households.
Wealth lets people wait, appeal, relocate or retrain. The same obstacle that is a nuisance to one household can be a dead end to another.
As this symposium recognises, perceptions and indicators of social class belong together. Indicators tell us where inequality sits. Perceptions tell us how inequality travels through daily life.
A person's class position is partly their income and assets. It is also their sense of entitlement to ask for help, challenge a fee, switch providers or question a contract. Class shapes how people read institutions, and how institutions read them back.
We often design policy as though citizens experience programs one at a time: a childcare rule here, a licensing rule there, a housing approval somewhere else, a health form in another place. But people experience them cumulatively. Friction compounds.
A parent dealing with insecure work, a long commute, rental stress and childcare uncertainty experiences those pressures as one life.
So the task for government is partly to ask a different question. Instead of asking only 'is this rule defensible?', we should ask 'who finds this rule navigable?' Instead of asking only 'is this program available?', we should ask 'who can actually reach it?' Instead of asking only 'does the market offer choice?', we should ask 'who has the confidence and spare time to switch?'
That is where your research can improve public policy. Social stratification research does more than describe inequality. It helps identify where opportunity is being lost in the machinery of ordinary life.
Some frictions are necessary. Standards protect safety. Means‑testing helps target resources we're they're needed most. Checks protect vulnerable people. Planning systems can preserve amenity and environmental quality. The answer is not a fantasy world with no rules.
The goal is a system in which rules do their real job without becoming class filters. A system where safeguards protect people, rather than deter them. A system where the confident and well‑connected do not have a private fast lane through public institutions.
Australia has long liked to imagine itself as easygoing about class. Many of us sit in the front seat of the taxi. We don't have private areas on our beaches.
But the egalitarian legend isn't enough in itself. If we want a country where opportunity is widely shared, we need to study the places where people get stuck.
Sometimes class is visible in a balance sheet. Sometimes it is visible in a school zone. Sometimes it is visible in a rental ledger, a job contract, a licensing portal or a childcare form.
The promise of today's symposium is that it brings together scholars who can study these patterns: in the data, in interviews, in communities and in the choices people make when the system feels as though it was built for someone else.
Thank you for the work you do. I hope today's conversations help us better understand class in Australia - and open doors through which Australians can move.
