A letter to Adelaide's youth – stay or go?

The following is an example of a closed system. Operating standards in many SA organisations are so regressive that executives especially hired from interstate, stay less than a year as they battle white anting, nepotism and group think, before hightailing it back to Sydney or Melbourne.

There can be no more punitive action on the state's brand (so popular in SA), than to hire opinion leaders in one state, get them to Adelaide, humiliate and degrade their professionalism and then effectively force their resignation.

Here is another example. As the Boomers and Gen X'ers have found to their chagrin, when they return to Adelaide to look after ageing parents and hunt for work, young recruiters knock them back in favour of fresh-faced candidates. They stay just long enough to put Mum or Dad in a rest home and then leave, taking their 20 or 30 years of work experience, savings and superannuation with them. Closed systems kill cities.

Some of South Australia's retrograde attitudinal problems can be traced directly to its daily newspaper. It supports a deeply orthodox political mindset. Through its trenchant commitment to parochialism, it has partitioned Adelaide from the social and economic realities of Australia and the world. To be fair, no alternative political ideologies or business philosophies were savaged. They simply were not reported.

In Adelaide, 'media facts' rule in the old print media. Inflated figures in a government media release on international student numbers, tourists or jobs, are published unchecked. Those figures are then quoted back in a Minister's speech as a fact and reprinted again and again, creating a 'media fact'. Spin has replaced economic 'true north'.

To make matters worse, reports from'happy clapper' think tanks, such as Deloitte Access Economics, Bank SA and the University of Adelaide, show 'green shoots' and 'considerable optimism' in the local economy when it's going to hell in a hand basket. When poverty meets hypocrisy, the former comes off worse.

Binary thinking is now so common it's difficult to remember when there were multiple and competing explanations for social and economic phenomena. People either blame the ALP or the Liberals; they blame the unions or the public service. It's either this or that. Only InDaily has broken away from this straight-jacket thinking and is publishing articles 'outside of the square'.

The current batch of politicians don't want objective economic criticism. They call it 'talking down the economy'. It's like rejecting a medical scan because one is frightened of the result. The ignorant want 'happy clapper' stories.

These interlocking and failing systems support a crumbling status quo. The future for a large portion of the state's workforce is insecure and casual work where blue and white-collar men and women struggle to survive.

Leave Adelaide and build a career working with people who value hard work, true workplace democracy and the truth. Then come home and vanquish the dead hand of mediocrity that has reigned over this city for 30 years.