What sort of society are we becoming?
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That's the question to be addressed by social researcher Hugh Mackay at a free public seminar in Wollongong today.
Professor Mackay believes he witnessed a brief surge of political engagement - a time of widespread summits, talkfests, idea-sharing and high hopes - but that this troughed after the Rudd government was elected in 2007.
"America suffered the same thing with so-called Obamania - there were completely unrealistic expectations about what he could achieve," he said.
"We thought there was a new world order and it's turned out not to be.
"It's a very difficult mood to read at the moment, but I think there's definitely a sense that we got involved, our hopes were raised, and now we're frustrated."
A professor of social science at the University of Wollongong's Institute for Innovation in Business and Social Research, Professor Mackay will look to Australia's high divorce rate, low birth rate, shrinking households and IT revolution in his bid to paint the bigger picture for an audience likely to include students, academics and the general public.
He will look to the country's shrinking middle class, noting 20 per cent of households now earn more than $330,000 a year, while another 20 per cent survive on less than $30,000.
"It's a sort of unprecedented gap," he said.
He points to the recent stoush over misogyny in federal politics as proof that the gender wars are not over, suggesting the incident flushed out "pockets of male resistance" to equality between the sexes.
"There's still a lot of males who either haven't really got it, or have been quietly waiting, hoping it will go away - that they, the male supremacists, would rise again."
Professor Mackay, who has three books in the pipeline and "doesn't have time" to engage on Twitter or Facebook, said he liked to give free talks to a diverse audience that would benefit from a deeper understanding of the society they lived in.
The talk, called Advance Australia … Where? is at the University of Wollongong UniCentre today from 3-4pm.