A possible explanation as to why in 2017 Liberal and Nationals politicians in Australia still hold the poor in such contempt?

In the 45^th Australian Parliament 86.9 per cent of Liberal MPs and senators and 59.1 per cent of Nationals/CNP MPS and senators have formal higher education/professional qualifications.  

A total of 175 of these 196 qualified Coalition parliamentarians graduated from university, with the majority of qualifications being in law, commerce, economics and finance. [See 45th Parliamentary Handbook of The Commonwealth of Australia]

As a group Coalition parliamentarians have a higher percentage of members with higher education qualifications compared with other parliamentary political parties.

By comparison, in the general Australian population 48.9 per cent of 35-44 year-olds, 38.2 per cent of 45-54 year-olds, 33.9 per cent of 55-64 year-olds had tertiary qualifications in 2015 according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development data.

Both Liberal and Nationals MPs and senators also feature prominently in a list of parliamentarians with significant investment property portfolios.

However, belonging to the current affluent political class doesn’t completely explain the level of arrogant entitlement our Coalition politicians display on the floor of federal parliament and elsewhere.

Unless for many in this affluent group a sense of privilege began generations before…….

In Australia a wide collection of rarer surnames, predominately of British/Irish origin, were used by Gregory Clark (University of California), Andrew Leigh (Parliament of Australia) and Mike Pottenger (Melbourne University) to study social mobility between 1870 and 2017.

Immobile Australia: Surnames show Strong Status Persistence, 1870-2017

In this paper we derive equivalent surname status correlations for Australia 1870-2017. These show that despite the fact that Australia was an immigrant society incorporating migrants from a wide variety of backgrounds, and without some of the entrenched social institutions and rigidities of England, underlying social mobility rates all the way from 1870 to 2017 were just as slow as in England. Also there is no sign of any increase in mobility rates in the most recent years……

In 1900-9 someone with the rare elite surname was 16.5 times as likely to get a degree from Melbourne or Sydney as someone with a common surname. Over the decades this overrepresentation declines, but more than 100 years later in 2010-17 the rare surnames are still 76% more represented among degree recipients than would be expected......

With this structure the social system behaves as though it has a longer memory of family status. The predicted status of children depends not just on the parents, but also on the grandparents, uncles, aunts and other relatives. In high status lineages, large short-term declines in status by a child tend to be corrected in the next generation, the grandchildren. For lower class families large upward movements in social status tend also to get corrected in the next generation.

Another feature that should be emphasized is that our data does suggest there will be complete social mobility in Australia, if we wait enough generations. The descendants of the Colonial elite are becoming more average with each passing generation, and will eventually be completely average in status. However, this process takes a very long time. The holders of rare elite surnames in table 2 had an average occupational status 1.54 standard deviations above the social mean in 1904. With an intergenerational correlation of 0.75 in occupational status their average status will lie within .1 standard deviations of the social mean by the generation of 2204. It takes about 10 generations, 300 years, for such an elite set of families to become effectively average.

It is not obvious how we should weight the two different elements of short run and long run mobility in terms of evaluating the degree of social mobility in Australian society. Indeed, policies that increase parent-child social mobility may be desirable even if we expect that there will be some reversion in the next generation. But it is clear that in terms of long-run social mobility, Australia has been just as immobile a society as its sclerotic parent England.

It appears that Australian society is as stratified as ever with dominant groups retaining high status through the generations and working class families remaining relatively fixed in lower status groups and, a genuinely egalitarian society in this country is not to be expected for another 300 years - if at all.