So much for the fact: what did it spell for the bent of policy regime? Perhaps
the decomposition of social structure meant less of a protective mantle was
cast over wealth. The pangs of economic disparity were now less benumbed by
a congruence of that disparity with distinctions in social standing. These
pangs would now be more palpable as social ambitions and gratifications
receded. Economic conflict became more blatant,^4 and equalizing policies
were the upshot:‘selection’intended to share land; later, thefirst taxation
on Georgist principles, designed to break up large estates;^5 and, in 1915,
income taxation devicefully contrived to be progressive.^6 Social egalitarian-
ism, in brief, was the basis of economic egalitarianism.
Any explanation of economic egalitarianism by social egalitarianism is
sapped by the fact there was, inevitably, an accepted gradation of status in
Australia. The presence of social mobility is obviously not the same thing as
the absence of social gradation. And the fact that the social structure of the
parent society was not transferredholus bolushardly implies its absence in the
child. One immigrant complained,‘There is no place in the known world
where the different grades of society are so strictly marked as here’(Neil Black
quoted in Kiddle 1961, p. 100).
The suggestion that social egalitarianism is the basis of economic egalitar-
ianism is even more embarrassed by the observation that the society that had
still more social egalitarianism than Australia had much less economic egali-
tarianism: the USA. And this is not surprising: prestige, birth, refinement, and
culture are obviously no necessary ally of the pursuit of wealth, and in many
instances are hostile to it. Which is doubtless why the USA was socially
egalitarian: the pursuit of wealth was strong enough to secure a prestige
system that was squarely congruent with it, and was, in the minds of critics,
simply a stencil of wealth. This never happened in Australia: squatters’eco-
nomic success did not win for them esteem, but hatred.^7 Why the difference?
Perhaps because social disarticulation went deeper in the USA. Australia
inherited a considerable part of traditional status system; a pocket facsimile
of feudal structures;^8 the object of wealth as a means to secure or cement a
(^4) One British visitor at the beginning of the twentieth century saw‘a bitterness, a vindictiveness,
almost a savagery between class and class’(Fraser 1910, p. 213). Another may have put theirfinger
on the root of this estrangement:‘the [middle and upper]“classes”cannot exact deference from the
masses, but neither can the masses exact social recognition from the [middle and upper]“classes”’
(Rowland 1903, p. 21). 5
The Georgist creed has been popular in Australia, and it is one of the very few countries that
taxes unimproved land values. New Zealand enacted thefirst such taxation. Queensland followed
in 1879. 6
In 1915 the Commonwealth Statistician contrived an elaborate system of constantly rising
marginal rates of income tax, which was duly instituted and lasted in revised form until 1974. 7
8 ‘In Australia there is little respect for wealth as such’(Eggleston 1953b, p. 11).
In a telling contrast of the‘great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia' (Melville
[1851] 1972, p. 206) with the real America, Section 9:8 of the US constitution proscribes the receipt
by American citizens of any‘Title, of any kind whatever, from any King’.
William O. Coleman