It is one of the more scathing critiques of the ALP even if it is six decades old.

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"When I joined the Labor Party, it contained the cream of the working class. As I look about me now, all I see are the dregs of the middle class," Kim Beazley snr grumbled to the party's state conference. What would he see now?

For a self-describing egalitarian nation, class consciousness is still strangely locomotive in our politics.

As Beazley did in 1970, we valourise "workers" in whom we see the virtues of production and honest toil in contrast to a growing plinth of rent-seeking professionals in vaguely "clever" occupations, like journalism, academia or law.

At a time when voters are wriggling free of the two-party order, it is interesting to think of this very "Australian" interplay between class, identity and possibility. Especially so in light of puzzling phenomena like the sudden rise of One Nation and the stubborn non-rise of the Australian Greens.

The latter though, has a plan. Upon changing its leader last week, it signalled a new cost-of-living emphasis. A fascinating socio-electoral experiment looms. Assuming voters notice, that is.

New leader David Shoebridge is in some ways more of the same. He is a lawyer, as was the leader he succeeded, Larissa Waters, and the man she succeeded, Adam Bandt. But he is other things too - more combatively left-wing, more rhetorically aggressive and more ruthlessly focused on a Labor Party he says has betrayed its centre-left mission.

What's interesting is that the two minor parties have been around for decades but have fared so differently in this period of disaffection and flux.

The key is in their origins. One Nation is a longstanding fringe party of regional-rural working-class grievance. It heaves with contradictions.

Its wellsprings........

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