If you think the class war is over, you're not paying enough attention. The reason the well-off come down so hard on those who use class rhetoric is that they don't want anyone drawing attention to how the war's going. Illustration: Kerrie Leishmann All of them except Warren Buffett, the mega-rich American investor. ''There's class warfare, all right,'' he once said, ''but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning.'' The reason the wiser heads in Labor don't want to talk about class conflict, either, is they know it gets them nowhere. It alienates people at the top without attracting many at the bottom. This, of course, is why the well-off like me are winning. The workers are too busy watching telly to notice the ways they're being got at. It requires attention to boring things like superannuation when you could be up the club playing the pokies.

The significant thing about the looming change of government is not that the economy will be much better managed - it won't be; these days most of the key decisions are made by the econocrats - but that the Coalition will bring to its decisions about taxing and spending a different bias to Labor's. How can I say that? By looking at Tony Abbott's promises. If you do pay attention it's as plain as a hundred dollar bill. Let's start with that boring question of the concessional tax treatment of superannuation. It's by far the most expensive example of (upper) middle-class welfare. Super has always been a scheme heavily favouring those on the highest rates of income tax, who also happen to be those most able to afford to save. But towards the end of his time as treasurer, Peter Costello introduced ''reforms'' that made it far more favourable to the well-off by making super payouts tax free and opening the scheme wide to ''salary sacrifice'' by those able to afford it.

At the time, many economists said what they're saying now about Abbott's paid parental leave scheme, that it was so generous as to be fiscally unsustainable. And so it has proved. In its unending search for budget savings the Labor government has chipped away at that generosity in almost every budget (as I know to my cost). And as part of its mining tax package, Labor finally acted to remove one of the most iniquitous features of the scheme. It introduced the ''low-income super contribution rebate'' to end a situation where everyone earning less than $37,000 a year gained nothing from the concessional treatment of super contributions (while people like me saved tax of 31.5¢ in the dollar). Earlier this year, when Labor was making noises about doing more to make super less inequitable - and the big banks and insurance companies were putting up their usual furious fight - Abbott promised to avoid any further changes for three years. Labor later topped this by promising no further changes for five years. Who benefits most from this moratorium - aspirational families in the western suburbs?