If you find yourself struck wordless when asked to define the fabled Australian “bogan”, fear not. To forever resolve the confusion – is it a grunt-like derogation for “blue-collar”, or a convenient collective identifier for nasal-inflected Cold Chisel fans? – one can now simply buy a “bogan test” app for 99c and answer 100 multiple-choice questions. To qualify as a bogan, you need to score a mere 5/100. Perhaps because of my advanced knowledge of the "beer-snake", I scored a cool 33.

For a bogan like me – whose pride in knowing how to clean horseshit off Ugg boots and the basics of chainsaw operation has sometimes sat uncomfortably with three universities degrees and a career in the arts – the test has brought great relief.

Of late, you see, my bogan identity has become destabilized. Bogans have been culturally complexifying, and their habit of doing so in must-win suburban marginal seats has seen the co-opting of their identity as necessary to the 2013 electoral strategies of both Labor and the Coalition. Simply put, to win the upcoming election, one must win the bogan vote – and so both parties are fighting hard to graft their ideological priorities onto this uniquely Australian social group. But who, in return, should a bogan like me vote for?

Not so long ago, bogans were solid supporters of a Labor Party that fought for jobs and a welfare net. Before the 1990s, the bogan class wasn’t hard to read or identify. The word and its geographical variants were a homogenizing term for a culture encompassing the ghettoized Australian working class. Called “westies” in Sydney and “booners” in Canberra, the Melbourne term triumphed as the catch-all – no doubt because it best accommodated the nasal accent of bogans themselves.

In the 1970s and 1980s, bogan social identifiers were banger-driving, bong-pulling and flanno-wearing because wages were low, unemployment was high and these pastimes and playthings were cheap. Back then, middle-class sneerers mocked bogans for their accents as well as the awkward social behaviour they displayed around institutions (like the media) that excluded them. That, and sporting a “westie haircut” was the 1980s schoolyard equivalent of having testicular crabs.

The mullet's golden age: Warwick Capper of the Sydney Swans. Photograph: Getty Images Photograph: Getty Images

But in the 1990s, the bogan class transformed – and it wasn’t due to the end of the mullet. What had kept bogans in their Zippo-lit ghetto was a lack of social mobility opportunities. Sure, university education had become free in the 1970s – but “affordable” and “accessible” are not the same thing.

It was working-class boy-made-good Labor prime minister Paul Keating, who as treasurer and then prime minister oversaw the two largest policies which prompted the bogan class’ metamorphosis. The first was an expansion of the education system that built university campuses in the heart of the communities where working-class people lived, offering not only traditional liberal arts courses but also vocational training. Technical and further education colleges were expanded, apprenticeships formalized. Trade qualifications finally offered meaningful alternative career opportunities.

The second major transformation was financial deregulation that allowed new businesses to borrow the investment capital that had been famously denied to Keating’s own father. The deliberate effects of Keating’s policies were the creation of wealth-making opportunities for the working-class.

Jacqueline Clark, a friend of the author, in typically 'bogan' new 1980s suburb developments. Photograph: Jacqueline Clark

There were, of course, kids like me who embraced the new accessibility of universities to pursue not entirely profitable vocational callings like avant garde theatre practice (sorry, dad). My friend Jacqueline (pictured above), like many others, took advantage of the regional university expansion to get a degree at Wollongong university. My bogan cousins, on the other hand, pursued a combination of training and capital investment opportunities that have served them and their ilk entry into a wealth bracket unimaginable to our family as recently as two generations ago.

But despite their relative wealth, bogans have retained many of the visual signifiers of their cheap-and-cheerful history, as well as the colourful dialect that developed during the time that bourgeois gentility didn’t visit bogan suburbs. This was the birth of the “cashed up bogan”, a confusing phenomenon producing a social grouping with working-class interests and middle-class wealth. Footy is now watched on very big plasmas, barbecues take place on very nice decks. Of course, the traditional Australian middle class likes to rails against this perceived vulgarity. The “cashed up bogan” term itself, as well those like“McMansion”, contain implicit value judgment.

While minted bogans owe their wealth to the policy achievements of Labor governments, as bogans have moved out of unionised workplaces, the ability of Labor to communicate directly with the class they created has been eroded. And with new wealth also has come an anxiety to protect new affluence.

The victory of the Howard’s Coalition between 1996-2007 was to sell supposed wealth-protection to the bogan community. It offered aspirational catch-phrases about a “shareholding democracy”, as well as the vocal persecution of anyone who could be painted as threatening bogan wealth. This included people like me – who, despite having spent my childhood in the same backyards as my cousins, were carefully depicted as innercity “elites” siphoning tax dollars into incomprehensible arts and culture projects.

Damnably, the Coalition also created a convenient bogey-monster of the tiny numbers of desperate refugees arriving on our shores. But the popularity of this discourse in such ethnically diverse new money communities suggests that the mania for “border protection” may not be as simply racist as it is a kind of financial xenophobia. Playing the “they take our jobs” and “it’s our tax money” cards were easy and cheap electoral shots for Howard to tak, as the pro-culture and pro-refugee voters were never supporting his party anyway.

Tony Abbott unveils a Liberal party billboard highlighting the number of asylum seeker boats arrived in Australian waters under the Labor government. Photograph: AAP/Lloyd Jones Photograph: AAP Image/Lloyd Jones

It’s now accepted that what brought down Howard in 2007 was the sin unforgivable to the new-money bogans – the WorkChoices legislation that impacted their potential earning income and working benefits. Bogan families remembered what it was like to be poor – or at least they’d heard their parents talk about it – and a forced return to those conditions was unthinkable.

In 2013, despite the well-known financial triumphs of Gillard and Swan – particularly Swan’s heroic Keynesian handling of the Australian economy when it was vulnerable to the global financial crisis – Abbott has been careful to play on financial fears and target the government’s spending record. Time-poor bogans who get their news from soundbites in popular media are being repeatedly hammered by right-wing mantras: Gillard leads the “worst government in Australian history” and, despite our AAA credit rating, the nation is afflicted by a “debt crisis”. Abbott has also continued Howard's demonizing of asylum seekers with an energy bordering on the maniacal.

Sentiments expressed by Abbott betray that he is no supporter of bogan culture or bogan dreams. His recent speech at the Institute of Public Affairs dinner in particular exposed a dedication to “traditional roles” that would return the vulgar denizens of the footy-watching, iron-free-chinos community to the ghettoes from which they sprang – not to mention subtly dismantle the working, social care and educational opportunities that Labor provided in the 1990s.

So where does that leave me? As a socially-minded neo-bogan voter with the environment and social justice on her mind, my first-preference vote has been going to the entirely pro-single parents and free education Greens for some time. When it comes down to the two main parties, though, this spawn of the nasal working class votes Labor – and I certainly hope my cousins do, too.

For all Abbott's efforts to paint himself as a sport-loving, TV-viewing "one of us", he is unlikely to pass the bogan test without York Notes and some serious cramming. His surface styling is just that; unlike Keating, Rudd or Gillard, Abbott's mission is not to make an Australia of more affluence for more people. His lifelong investment is instead in the traditional values of the conservative movement – that is, keeping labour cheap and threats to established wealth and big business at an absolute minimum. In this vein, Abbott’s ideological zealotry for the austerity fad currently hitting Europe and the US is a threat to social mobility – one that all bogans would be very sensible to recognize.

We were very lucky to cop the breaks that got us out of our dusty backyards and rusty Monaros; it would be true tragedy if our own votes sent us back there.