From a double dissolution trigger over unions to the call for a banking royal commission, this election will be all about class warfare and fairness. So who do you trust, asks Tim Dunlop.

Everything about the lead up to next election - the trigger for which was secured in the Senate on Monday night - stinks to high heaven of class warfare.

Let me explain what I mean by that.

You sometimes hear it said that Australia is a classless society. But whenever somebody says it, you just as quickly hear someone else point out that, no, it really isn't classless, and they list any number of examples of divisions to prove their point.

The thing is, both claims miss the point. As historian John Rickard has put it:

The unique and, to many, the perplexing achievement of Australian democracy has been to combine an egalitarian tradition with the politics of class. The contradiction is more apparent than real. Lacking a titled aristocracy and leisured class colonial society encouraged an egalitarianism of manners. Such manners reflected not the absence of social stratification, but a means of coming to terms with it in a new setting.

In other words, it isn't that Australia is classless - no society is - it is that we managed to come up with a particularly egalitarian accommodation with class, an accommodation represented in various institutions that have sought to equalise the power imbalance between various stratas of society.

Parliament itself has been at the heart of this, and Australian innovations in democracy - including secret ballots and paying members of parliament a wage so that representation wasn't limited to the wealthy who could afford the time to participate - were designed to equalise power and wealth differentials.

Other institutions have evolved over many years and include everything from arrangements about work and pay (today, via the Fair Work Commission); a form of universal health cover (Medicare); a retirement pension; along with government-supported primary, secondary and tertiary education.

Even in the early 1980s, when Australia, along with every other developed nation, adopted the policies of neoliberalism (privatisation, floating dollar, financial deregulation and the rest), it happened in a uniquely Australian way, driven by our underlying approach to class.

The grand bargain - the Accord and beyond - between government, labour and business, sought to offset wage restraint against various forms of increases in the social wage. These included health care coverage, unemployment benefits, various industry plans, and more recently, the superannuation system and National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).

The basic framework of this accommodation has held reasonably well over the ensuing years. It wasn't until the government of Tony Abbott and their first budget in 2014, that the warriors on the elite side of our national accommodation with class decided to test their arms.

The demoralisation of Labor after the Rudd-Gillard years emboldened them, and then treasurer Joe Hockey's budget was a calculated r(abbott) punch to the soft tissue of egalitarian Australia. It not only broke a slew of promises on which Mr Abbott had campaigned, its austerity measures were, according to the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling, targeted largely at the poor.

The fact that this manoeuvre failed so spectacularly - contributing to the removal of Tony Abbott by his own party and the subsequent retirement of Joe Hockey - did not mean class war was abandoned. Indeed, under Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull it has arguably accelerated because he leads a party internally divided over any number of issues, including his own leadership.

The basic problem is that the Liberal-National Party Coalition is no longer an institution capable of herding the like-minded into a coherent party of government or opposition. It is instead a squat for factions of the aggrieved, from Christian fundamentalists to agrarian socialists.

The one matter that has a chance of bringing them together - at least long enough to get through an election - is class animosity.

Thus it is no coincidence that the proximate cause of the double dissolution we are currently facing is the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC), an organisation designed to police union behaviour on building sites. If there is one thing the LNP can unite over, it is their hatred of trade unions.

The ABCC legislation stokes class fires through various provisions that are profoundly undemocratic. As even the Australian Law Council has declared:

A number of features of the Bill are contrary to rule of law principles and traditional common law rights and privileges such as those relating to the burden of proof, the privilege against self incrimination, the right to silence, freedom from retrospective laws and the delegation of law making power to the executive. It is also unclear as to whether aspects of the Bill which infringe upon rights and freedoms are a necessary and proportionate response to allegations of corruption and illegal activity within the building and construction industry.

Of course, for the LNP, these democratic shortcomings are not a bug of legislation, but a feature.

The class animosity gurgling on the surface of this election doesn't end there, nor does it end with Coalition. The banks have already threatened a campaign against Labor's proposed royal commission into that fetid industry, with one spokeswarrior saying that he had "no doubt the banks can run a campaign that will turn ... a royal commission into an electoral nightmare for Labor."

Meanwhile, employer groups are promising to go after penalty rates for low-paid workers.

Beyond all that, as economist John Quiggin has noted:

The class war aspect [of the upcoming election] is pretty much undisguised... [T]he tax reform fiasco has pushed Turnbull to a position where, according to leaks, the only tax measures in the forthcoming budget will be a cut in company tax rates and the abolition of the budget repair levy on high income earners... Then there's health and education. Abbott was thrown out, in large measure, because he broke promises to match Labor on the Gonski and NDIS reforms. Turnbull was part of the LNP government elected on the basis of those promises, and is bound by them just as much as Abbott was. But, like Abbott, he is breaking his promises in a class-war fashion. In order to keep the (bipartisan) promise that no rich school would be worse off, he is breaking the promises made to poor state schools.

So what is at stake in the forthcoming election are the various practices and institutions ordinary people have fought for over the years that make Australia a fairer place than it would otherwise be.

These issues go to the heart of how voters view Australian democracy, and the Government knows it. It is no coincidence that recent leaks about the content of proposed election advertisements suggest that Mr Turnbull and Mr Morrison are considering some attempt to appear more even-handed and less in thrall to the big end of town.

Which should be fun to watch.

The bottom line is that this election is going to be all about fairness, fairness and more fairness, and the question we all have to answer is: which side of politics is more likely to deliver it?

Tim Dunlop writes regularly for The Drum and a number of other publications. He hosts the podcast Washington Dreaming, discussing the forthcoming US Presidential Election. His new book, The Future Is Workless, will be released in September 2016. You can follow him on Facebook and on Twitter.