Bogan benefits lost on smug intellectuals

ACCORDING to the authors of Things Bogans Like, this newly monied, aspirational tribe are responsible for littering the cultural landscape with endless Pink tours, the music of Kings of Leon and Krispy Creme doughnuts.

I'd argue that their opposite number the intellectuals are just as culpable for atrocities such as the high price of inner-city housing, disappearance of bars able to seat more than 12 people, $7 loaves of artisan bread and Q&A.

Intellectuals tend to look down on bogans but maybe the intellectuals shouldn't be so smug. Things Bogans Like tells us that working in the mines is an apex of many a bogan's career path, as they can earn $500 a day plying their basic catering or construction skills. Sadly, junior intellectuals are not so lucky, being trapped in the low-paid vortex of part-time, contract and casual work in the creative industries.

As there are more intellectuals than there are intellectual jobs, they have to share the spoils. Thus we have intellectuals doing part-time gigs teaching at La Trobe, undertaking part-funded, postdoctoral work at Melbourne Uni, writing for broadsheets over the summer break, being casual producers at Radio National or novelists on the dole.

The junior intellectuals deeply resent the older intellectuals who took all the good jobs the staff writers, tenured academics, the Booker Prize-nominated author, the film reviewer for The Monthly.

Under each junior intellectual's bed is a heavily highlighted copy of Mark Davis's Gangland, about how baby-boomer intellectuals hog the cultural, academic and media landscape.

This does not happen in Boganland, where the old bogans are more generous to the young, passing on their taxi licence or KFC franchise.

But the differences go deeper than this. While bogans are entertained by weeping illegals being detained on Border Security and receive their news from the hidden cameras of Today Tonight, there is nothing an intellectual looks forward to more than Monday nights. Then they don't just sit in a dark, cold terrace house watching TV on their Macbook; they are in 7.30ReportLand# where people just like them receive the weekly talking points.

On Monday night it's The 7.30 Report, Australian Story, Four Corners, Media Watch and then the biggest kahuna of them all Q&A, for which they turn the sound down and read Twitter: "Malcolm Turnbull looks WRONG in a leather jacket" or "Can Chris Berg pls sing Lady in Red LOL".

Both the bogan and the intellectual harbour deep fantasies about appearing on their favourite shows and receiving validation from their peer group the intellectual as a qanda guest, the bogan as a shouty, distressed customer who has missed his plane on a reality show at an airport. But it's in their nightlife that the difference is really clear.

While the bogan may make headlines with glassing attacks in a city nightclub or brawls at cab ranks, if you tallied them up drink for drink, the intellectual has a bigger alcohol problem. While the bogan binge drinks, the intellectual exists in a permanently sozzled state, with the hangover from the night before peacefully segueing into the first drink at lunchtime.

Have lunch with an intellectual and somehow at 9pm you find yourself still imbibing, this time at Jimmy Watson's (how did you get there?) where you have developed a hand tremor and the unpleasant sensation of an evening hangover.

Dinner at an intellectual's house is eerily reminiscent of the Wedding at Cana where wine appears as if by magic, with the intellectual liberating bottles from cellars, attics and cupboards, and port from under the sink. And certain intellectuals may secretly suspect that they are alcoholics otherwise they wouldn't have found the week in Cairo for the conference during Ramadan so damned hard.

Of course, the two tribes have vastly different concepts of the "holiday".

As the intellectual has many part-time and contract jobs to juggle to make her $32,000 a year, the concept of having four weeks off a year is foreign.

She is employed for about 30 weeks of the year, yet paradoxically is always working writing the next book, drafting a grant application or designing the next art installation. As a consequence, intellectuals don't really have holidays they have periods of time when they are liberated from Australia.

The young intellectual will then spend three or four months subletting via Craigslist a flat in Berlin where she will spend her time with other semi-employed global intellectuals and come back with tales of "this really outrageous anarchist's squat in Kreutzberg" or this "really unbelievable fetish bar in Mitte" or the "nude ping pong in the Tiergarten".

Older intellectuals with more secure jobs will take their 12 weeks a year in France or Italy, staying in the villa of a friend of a friend where they will gorge themselves on local cheese, olive oil, authentically nobly shaped artisan breads and, of course, wine.

So in conclusion: bogans earn more money, have shorter holidays, more generous elders, terrible taste in television and are more likely to end up in a bar brawl but less likely to be on the waiting list for a liver transplant.