Art by Lauren Luchs

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ulp’s 1995 Brit-pop classic, “Common People” embodies the working-class woes in its witty attack on the ignorant upper classes who “want to live like common people”. A song that only “common people” can truly comprehend, lead singer Jarvis Cocker drawls, “never fail like common people” and echoes a desperation as he advocates for societal recognition of  poverty’s realities. The song questions the continued romanticisation of class tourism, a phenomenon that is easily identified in contemporary Melbourne . Whether this impulse is manifested through dressing in thrifted clothes and labourer-inspired styles, inhabiting sharehouses located in historically working-class/immigrant suburbs that are nonetheless cool and artsy (often gentrified) or robbing Woolies because prices are up, the perpetual boredom of the upper class seems to emerge from a longing for something to complain about. Despite egalitarianism’s centrality to its national identity, ripples of the oppressive British socio-economic class system remain present within Australia today. Cocker’s words are seared into the skin and lived experiences of “common people”. For us, failure could come knocking on our doors any day now, eviction notice in hand.

Jarvis Cocker’s words have been spinning in my mind for weeks and not just because of Brit-pop’s revival following the commencement of Oasis’ reunion tour.My dad’s side of my family mostly resides in the UK, having grown up post-WW2 in Thatcher’s England. I’m acutely aware of how this class system has affected how I’ve grown up, as well as the ways in which it continues to be violently weaponised as a colonial tool. Both my parents have university educations and have travelled. Emigrating to Australia was a choice for them. In many ways, I grew up quite privileged because of this. For instance, I went on exchange to the UK and travelled throughout Europe, where I learned so much about the privilege of lacking responsibility. Yet on the other hand, I live out of home for university and grew up in a rural area. I’m from the Northern Rivers in New South Wales, which has the highest ranked housing costs in Australia. I’m stained by the feelings of potential and imminent failure. 

As a student receiving Youth Allowance and rental assistance, my ability to pursue university in Melbourne depends on these external payments. My parents are unable to support me financially for many reasons but plainly because they cannot afford to pay their own rent alongside mine. Recently, this feeling of failure faced me in its more gruesome form. For the first time in my young adulthood, I was unable to pay my rent. I was in the process of applying for jobs and my rental assistance had ceased due to a complex issue with my lease. A sense of sinking felt enormous, because not being able to live in Melbourne meant not being able to graduate university meant having no path when my life was just starting. I felt like a failure to my parents, to my mum who immediately began helping with bills while I tried to sort things out. I felt awful, depending on her once more; after I had watched her struggle financially when I was a teenager. Even after coming back from this (it is a rare privilege to revive oneself), it clung to my clothes like a foul stench. I never want to feel that way again: irrevocable defeat. But it’s a constant reality for so many, one into which I merely dipped my toes. This really got me thinking about class tourism and how many students like myself are struggling to keep themselves above water. 

Class tourism is exercised through fashion and aesthetics. In Australia, it’s evident in the elitist private-school-to-prestigious-university pipeline. Students coming from outrageously lavish backgrounds and completely exclusive social circles, most prominently in Melbourne and Sydney, dress poor. For the youth, there has always been a cyclical popularisation of workwear. The resurgence of Doc Martins (starting in the 2010s) along with distressed clothing trends such as Grunge, a pop-culture emerging from 1990s Lumber-jack working class Seattle, are prime examples. Music too drives these aesthetics. In Melbourne, the electronic self-produced music sub-genres, such as house and UK garage actually have their roots in post-industrial working class cities such as Chicago. 

Here, the most obvious aesthetic people follow is Naarmcore. Often described as “the rich dressing poor”, it draws upon gritty street-wear fashion and intentional “unpretentiousness”. Primarily donned by these wealthy private school kids, it is their way of living like “common people” before returning to reality and taking over their dad’s oil business or something to that effect. Local Aboriginal social enterprise, Clothing the Gaps, condemns the aesthetic as a reduction of Indigenous culture in its appropriation and satirisation of ‘Naarm’, the Traditional language name for the Melbourne area. As a form of class tourism, Naarmcore boils Aboriginal cultures down into a reproducible internet trend while harmfully misrepresents those experiencing poverty.For, class tourism via cultural objects such as fashion and music serves to decontextualise subcultures of oppressed peoples and the original meanings rooted in minority groups. This means of expression is a far cry from a desire to express non-conformity and boredom for the “easy” upper-class lifestyle, an ennui in which ignorance and stagnancy fosters and diseases all privileged people. 

Youth from working/middle-class backgrounds are more hyperaware and concerned for their futures than ever before. We are no strangers to the fact that many of us won’t ever own a house and could experience extreme poverty and homelessness. Students and young people are among many who suffer the most from this crisis. As rent prices, the cost of education and essential food items continue to rise and living wages stay low, many people are struggling to make ends meet. In 2025, cost of living, followed by the cost of food was recorded as of the most pressing concern for Australians. The Salvation Army claims that in 2024, only 2.7 per cent of Australian rental properties were affordable to a family unit consisting of two parents earning minimum wage, raising two children and receiving parental payment. In the rental market, vacancies are at a diabolical 1.9 per cent, with prices rising significantly (by 6.4 per cent in the December quarter). 58 per cent  of renters have reported rent increases. A devastating 56 per cent of Australians are more stressed about their finances this year compared to 2024, with 15 per cent of Australian households having gone without essentials like food or heating due to lack of income. A further 56 per cent of Australians are concerned they won’t be able to afford essential food. A very real concern for irreconcilable poverty, failure and living life “with no meaning or control” is on the horizon for many people in this country.

Many are already living in this perilous state, and suffering the brunt of our cost of living crisis. According to the 2021 Australian census, over 3.3 million people live below the poverty line and over 122,000 people are experiencing homelessness in Australia. 23 per cent of this growing figure is young people between the ages 12 and 24. One-parent families and those dependent on welfare payments such as students receiving Youth Allowance are in the most precarious of positions. Along with this Greg Jericho, Chief Economist at The Australia Institute, urges that “support for students is inadequate”, the HECS-HELP debt system is doing more damage as it continues to swell and become in fact, a “financial burden”. A teeth shattering finding by ACOSS (the Australian Council of Social service) on Poverty in Australia shows that students contribute more HECS payments than foreign-owned gas companies contribute to the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax (PRRT). Introduced in 1988, PRRT was intended to ensure that Australians could at least earn money from the deprivation of supposedly collectively owned gas and oil in our country. Cost of living is an issue that faces all people but it seems that students, especially those that are both living out of home and faced with the piling debt are becoming the most at risk than ever. Especially when the future seems so uncertain in the lack of hindsight from our governments which would rather we be distracted. 

With the cost of living crisis being of universal concern in Australia, governmental solutions have never really gotten to the root of the problem. Australia’s recent anti-immigration “protest”, March for Australia which occurred on 31 August claims to want to preserve Australia’s culture and views halting immigration as a means of dealing with the housing crisis. It highlights similar xenophobic demonstrations internationally which blame an influx of immigration for lack of housing, in primarily western nations such as the US and the UK. 

Additionally, concern for cost of living has directly resulted in proposed caps for international students attending universities in Australia. A paradoxical position, seeing as the economy greatly benefits from international students and youth migration who come here to join Australia’s labour force or pursue highly specialised degrees. Immigration and the struggle for social status, wealth and making a home in Australia are deeply intertwined. Nearly half of Australia’s population have at least one parent born overseas. There is a refusal to criticise the real causes of the cost of living crisis, being the enduring neoliberal top-down system that allows for the financialisation of housing, turning already limited social housing into a business for profit. It is clear that hateful racist attitudes towards already struggling individuals is an easily orchestrated distraction. We must question the implications of class and how our own hatred and suffering is used as control. Maybe we all are living like common people, not necessarily ignorant and misguided with our anger, but rather all victims of the one per cent, climbing up and down the ladder in cargos and Salomons.