In October this year, the Australian Financial Review published an opinion piece entitled “Why you shouldn’t underestimate the underclass” by former Liberal Party minister Pru Goward. The underclass is, according to Goward, “damaged, lacking in trust and discipline,” and “highly self-interested.”

In Australia, Goward’s op-ed attracted widespread condemnation for spreading offensive stereotypes about poor people — and rightly so. The piece is a muddled exercise in bashing working-class Australians; its arguments are intellectually incoherent and empirically unsupported.

Of course, these are the kinds of invectives that we have come to expect from garden-variety Liberal Party ideologues like Andrew Bolt or Peta Credlin. But Prue Goward is no shock jock; she is part of the social policy elite. She served as a minister in the New South Wales state government from 2011 to 2019, after which Western Sydney University appointed her Professor of Social Interventions and Policy.