Introduction

The roles available in the highly scripted, highly charged repertoire that passes for much public debate on politics and public policy are by now so well known as to have become generic. First there is a beleaguered, ‘silenced’ ‘mainstream’ of ‘battlers’ who inhabit the ‘real Australia’ of the suburbs and the bush, and whose fears and concerns are systematically ignored. Second are those who would silence them – the ‘latte sipping’, ‘politically correct’, inner city dwelling, ‘new class’, ‘cultural elites’ of an all-pervasive Left, who peddle their ‘bleeding heart’ causes out of self-interest and against the popular interest, supported by ‘nanny state’ government regulators and credulous, left-leaning accomplices in the publicly owned media. Finally there is a third group of selfstyled defenders of the ‘battlers’, who are the arbiters of this stand-off and who set the rules of the game: a retinue of permanently outraged commercial radio talkback hosts, chronically incredulous conservative newspaper columnists, high profile conservative politicians, and even billionaire magnates, who nevertheless portray themselves as anti-elite friends of the ‘little people’ on whose behalf they speak. Their role is to endlessly promote the above divide and its sustaining narrative that society's so-called ills, from cruelty to asylum seekers, to sexism and the inequality of women, to racism and multiculturalism, to global warming, are little more than the pure-spun product of the fevered imaginations of a ‘politically correct’ Left.

This, then, is the terrain of the culture wars, so-called because they are fought out not across the traditional class and religious–sectarian divides that once defined Australian politics, but across the supposed stark and intractable cultural differences between Left and Right, between ‘mainstream’ and ‘cultural elites’, between the inner city and the ‘real Australia’ of the suburbs and the bush, between the (white) national interest and a threatening, benighted global cosmopolitanism. But if this culture-based politics might seem like something ephemeral, a sideshow to distract from ‘real politics’ that underestimates a deeper historical shift in the way politics is enacted. Many high profile policy debates, over such things as gay marriage, global warming, Aboriginal rights, and asylum seekers, are now transmuted through the lens of the culture wars, configured primarily as ‘left-versus-right’ issues rather than being understood primarily in policy terms.