Top Blokes Quotes

“Class in most places is about making the differences visible," say novelist Richard Flanagan, who grew up in a working-class mining community before receiving a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. "Class in Australia is about making the differences invisible".”
― Lech Blaine, Top Blokes: The Larrikin Myth, Class and Power

“It all changed," he says. "The miners in Ipswich joined a union and voted Labor. But young ones coming through didn't think of themselves as working class. They moved to the Sunny Coast. Four-bedroom house. Couple of cars. Most of them became anti-union! Dumb fucks thought they got paid 200k just because they're good at their jobs. Nothin' to do with my generation and my dad's generation, and the sacrifices we made by going on strike”
― Lech Blaine, Top Blokes: The Larrikin Myth, Class and Power

“According to Robert Menzies, Morrison deserves the social and economic advantages provided by geography, education and nepotism: "To say the industrious and intelligent son of self-sacrificing and saving and forward-looking parents has the same social deserts and even material needs as the dull offspring of stupid and improvident parents is absurd." The short shrift: eat shit, serfs! This moral justification for poverty is a central pillar of Morrison's political beliefs and and Pentecostalism. The problem is that it deeply contradicts Australia's self-mythology about being a bastion of the fair go. So Scott John Morrison - a tall poppy from the eastern suburbs - needed to reinvent himself as ScoMo, a top bloke from the Sutherland Shire who loves rugby league. In doing so, he plagiarised the nickname and personal hobby of Anthony "Albo" Albanese.”
― Lech Blaine, Top Blokes: The Larrikin Myth, Class and Power

“Scott Morrison rocketed to the top of a mock meritocracy populated by mediocre GPS boys, who scratched each other's backs until there wasn't any skin or fingernails left.”
― Lech Blaine, Top Blokes: The Larrikin Myth, Class and Power

“He [Mickeal Towke] had forgotten the golden rule: never let merit get in the way of a GPS boys with mates in high places.”
― Lech Blaine, Top Blokes: The Larrikin Myth, Class and Power