Learn from the mistakes of others

From mary:
But this whole notion of "family values" is a myth which exists in the minds of a bunch of comfortable middle class BBs. Did J Howard, or P Costello, or K Beazley do it tough when they were growing up? Not on your nelly.
Cast your mind back to your contemporaries at university in Arts/Law or Commerce/Law or whatever the heck you did. If they were like mine, then they were pretty much uniformily from a comfortable middle class background, with aspirational professional parents (one or both), good fee paying schools, an environment which led to a high entrance score without too much pain, enough money to make 6 years of uni study comfortable and so a bit of a doddle through the courses and the subsequent PLT or whatever.
Where do some of the strongest proponents of the "family values" paradigm come from? IMHO, a paradox is that J Howard (with his vision of a "relaxed Australia") and P Costello (wanting Oz women to have one for mum, one for dad and one for the nation) have no idea that their policies are pushing Oz in the opposite direction to that white picket fence, mum, dad and the kids vision of Oz. Even worse, because of their comfortable middle class upbringing, they have no real experience or understanding of the troubles and the stresses that many of their fellow Australians now experience as a result of those policies.
Feh!