“Indeed a better question for tonight's discussion might have been ‘would Ben Chifley be a train driver today?’ … I believe a young Ben Chifley would probably have toughed it out, won a place at university (even as a mature student) and excelled.”

These comments by Labor's national secretary surely mark the party's final repudiation of that quintessential working class hero, whose iconic status rests on his rise from engine driver to prime minister. The comments drain all meaning from the Chifley legend, just as they drain all meaning from Labor's tradition as the party of working people. The contemporary party, it seems, has no use for those without a university education.

Worse still, the national secretary promotes a misconception that is bedeviling Labor's attempts to formulate an election winning strategy. In the same Fabian Society address, he said: “Don Aitken … states that in 1954, 2 per cent of young people went to university. Today it is around 50 per cent, if allowance is made for the fact that some of today's cohort won't actually go to university until they are in their 20s and 30s.” The implication is that we live in an increasingly professionalised and gentrified society, and that Labor must adapt its agenda accordingly.

It is true that the proportion of young people proceeding from school to university is considerably higher now than in past decades, but it is well short of 50 per cent, even allowing for deferred studies. In 2004, 27 per cent of school leavers continued to full time higher education. (A further 14 per cent undertook full-time vocational education, mostly at TAFE.) Another 2 per cent or so combined part-time higher education with part-time work. The national secretary presumably derives his 50 per cent figure by adding the 27 per cent of school leavers at university to the 22 per cent of young adults (aged 20-24) attending university. But most of the latter are from the earlier cohort of school leavers who continued directly into higher education. In short, the correct proportion of young people who proceed to university (either immediately after school or later in life) is not one in two, but one in three.

In this regard, it is useful to examine the occupational composition of the Australian workforce. In 2001, 18.3 per cent of the workforce belonged to the Australian Standard Classification of Occupations (ASCO) category “professionals”, while 7.2 per cent were “managers and administrators”. A further 11.5 per cent were “associate professionals”, a category often conflated with “professionals” but which includes many occupations not traditionally considered professions, such as hotel managers, shop managers and police officers. Despite the tendency to include associate professionals in a wider concept of "knowledge workers", it represents a diverse group of occupations, many of which are not associated with tertiary education.

Just as the importance of professional workers is often overstated, that of routine workers tends to be understated. In the same address, the national secretary asserted that “the flaw in this debate is that it's based the romantic notion that somewhere there is a still large body of voters who identify exclusively with the self-educated, blue collar, male elite of Chifley's time”. Leaving aside the confusing reference to “elite”, thousands of Australian blue-collar male workers would be surprised to learn their existence is a romantic notion. A large body of these workers does exist, even if it constitutes a relatively smaller proportion of the workforce than used to be the case.

In 2001, 22 per cent of the 8.3 million people in paid employment were male “blue collar” workers as commonly understood (that is, from one of the major occupational groups “tradespersons and related workers”, "intermediate production and transport workers” or “labourers and related workers”). Even on this artificially narrow occupational and gender division, this represents a substantial slice of the Australian workforce. Not only do they exist, but many of them live in electorates Labor needs to retrieve from the Coalition, not least those on Sydney's western outskirts. “The highest concentrations of blue-collar workers occurred in the western suburbs of Sydney, stretching from the Canterbury region out to Blacktown in the west and to Campbelltown in the outer south-west”, says the ABS.

The ALP cannot formulate a winning strategy unless it understands Australia's contemporary workforce – all the more so considering the growing polarisation of cultural values linked to education, occupation and place of residence. Academics and commentators Katherine Betts and David Burchill have shown, based on analysis of the Australian Election Study (AES), that university-trained professionals tend to be far more socially progressive than the rest of the population. Labor commits a potentially fatal error when it overestimates their present and future numbers and influence.

Returning to the national secretary's proposition about Ben Chifley, he could well be an engine driver today but it is less certain that he would vote Labor. Why would the boy from Bathurst support a party that is determined, if failing, to win office as the flagship of inner-city professionals?