In recent weeks it’s been tempting to look for similarities between the re-election prospects of Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison. Even when the PR problem facing Boris has no obvious Australian parallel, we can rely on the resourcefulness of our radical left to supply one, and their friends at the ABC to give it currency.
‘Cakegate’, which mutated from ‘Partygate’ much as Omicron mutated from Delta, is just such a problem.
Launched by a photograph of Boris eating birthday cake while everyone else in Britain was having funerals and chemo sessions cancelled, Cakegate’s purpose was to concentrate the spray-shaming of everyone who attended No10 parties into a more targeted shot at their host, in the hope of triggering a leadership spill. At the time of writing, this strategy seems unlikely to succeed, but this has not stopped Mr Morrison’s enemies in the mainstream media looking for a ‘Coalition Cakegate’ and last week they found one in Breadgate.
Invited by The Drum presenter Ellen Fanning to comment on Mr Morrison’s confession on Seven’s Sunrise to being ‘a normal white bread, white toast man,’ Professor Nareen Young of UTS gave a response which seems to me to prove more conclusively than any Spectator Australia article of the last few years that the Australian Left is no longer on the same planet as the people whose interests it purports to serve.
‘Who eats white bread in this country?’ began Professor Young’s response. ‘Anglo men. I come from a working class background. We had brown bread because we were healthy. I think it (Mr Morrison’s comment) shows a deep lack of understanding about who works in this country.’
To get a clear idea of what a Grand Canyon-sized gaffe this was, it may help to deconstruct it. We start with that opening question to which, if she had left a slightly longer pause after asking it, Ellen Fanning might have supplied the answer herself. If Ms Fanning had ever walked down the bread aisle of a Coles or Woolworths that answer would have been ‘Most Australians’. Or, if she wanted to be more specific, ‘Most working class Australians’.
Then she might have added, ‘but most of the bread eaten by most Australian men of every ethnic and economic extraction is bought by their wives or their mothers.’ And it’s because they prefer giving their families white bread to brown bread that Coles and Woolworths stock and sell a lot more Tip Top and Wonder White than Helgas.
But the bit that tells us most about Professor Young’s intimate relationship with struggle street is what comes next.
‘I come from a working class background,’ she tells us (as if the title Indigenous Policy and Workforce Diversity Professor of the Jumbunna Institute of Indigenous Education and Research hadn’t already made that abundantly clear). ‘We had brown bread because we were healthy.’
Leaving aside for a moment what the average paediatrician or cardiologist would think of the assertion that being healthy is a prerequisite for the choosing of brown bread, as opposed to the other way around, the even bigger break with conventional medical opinion here is the suggestion that working class Australian families are healthier than their white collar, white bread eating neighbours. From which we can conclude that Professor Young has spent even less time in Australian hospitals and doctors’ surgeries than she has spent in Australian supermarkets.
Her assertion, then, that Mr Morrison’s comment showed ‘a deep lack of understanding about who works in this country’ is one that is, to put it mildly, hard to take seriously. Far from a rugged footsoldier of the revolution, Professor Young comes across as a pampered middle class Marie Antoinette, her tumbril remark being, ‘Let them eat wholegrain.’
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Breadgate: let them eat wholegrain - The Spectator Australia
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