Adelaide – Athens of the South’s long, slow decline

This is a story of the slow decline of the City of Churches, the Athens of the South or as the painter Jeffrey Smart once called it, with some distain, 'Adders'.

I lived in Adelaide until my late 20s but moved to Melbourne for work in 1988. My wife's parents live in Adelaide and as they are ageing quickly, we moved back to help three years ago.

There are serious problems in Adelaide: A stagnant and contracting employment market, fear of the new, 'recruitment apartheid' and nepotism, to name just a few.

The closed shop syndrome

Anyone who has lived in a country town knows what I mean when I say Adelaide is a 'closed shop'. This is not to suggest that people from other states won't get a job. They will and the fact that one out of 50 interstate applicants will be hired, will be lauded as 'evidence’ of rising jobs demand or satisfying the ubiquitous demand for 'skills.'

The closed shop syndrome has its historical antecedents in the fall of the State Bank in Adelaide in 1991 and the gradual decline of the local manufacturing industry. Large and small employers sacked thousands of people (even the State Government will sack 4000 public servants over the next three years). Not only was money tight in the local economy, but also consumer and employer confidence was shaken to the core.

Add to this the casualization of the workforce, the slow creep of HR bureaucracy in to corporate life and you have the conditions for a closed shop. Employers only employ people they know – or who can be vouched as safe by an authorative second party.

Over the last thirty years, the best and brightest employees have fled to the eastern states or overseas. Adelaide needs them back urgently but the welcome mat is threadbare. When they do return, ex-pats are forced to apply for lower ranked and lower waged positions where they have more qualifications and experience than their managers. Naturally, few succeed.

Other states, especially Queensland and Western Australia, are poaching nurses, accountants, aged care nurses, engineers and a raft of other professions and trades by offering them higher salaries and training. It is gutting whole sectors. Adelaide can't compete.

So what does this mean for the state and especially Adelaide? If you look at the economic indicators such as exports or mining, they say that Adelaide is 'doing fine' but alas, the real politics, the lived experience, is very different. Adelaide is slowly dying.

GSP by state

On a measure of Gross State Product (GSP) South Australia (Adelaide has about 75 per cent of the population) is ranked just above Tasmania at $47,466 and it is falling.

This is a very poor result considering all of the brouhaha about low wage inflation, high income from mining and defence project spending. Indeed, South Australia contributes just over six per cent to Australia's GDP.

Source 2010 December, Wikipedia

As the population ages the state will need to find more monies to pay for services. It will need to increase taxes on its residents to fund infrastructure upgrades and it will become even more reliant on handouts from Canberra.

Retail in South Australia is stagnant, sales in the Rundle Mall (the main CBD shopping area) are catatonic, building approvals for new residential and non-residential are comatose. There is not a crane to be seen on the CBD skyline. New vehicle sales are trending down and according to DEEWR's May 2011 statistics, skilled jobs are down 50 per cent from 2007 and ANZ job advertisements are down a whopping 60 per cent from 2008.

South Australia has Australia's oldest workforce and is also the most rapidly ageing, with a public sector averaging 47 years of age and some sectors averaging more than 50 years of age.

From June 2009, only 14.8 per cent of the public sector was aged below 30, while 37 per cent of the public sector workforce was over 50. The state is on the precipice of a 'retirement cliff' with valuable skills and experience lost.

A bee in amber

Many years ago I read about a prehistoric bee that had been trapped in amber, forever preserved in that last instant of its life, many millions of years ago.

I got much the same feeling returning to 'Adders.' I re-met old acquaintances who were still, to paraphrase the Paul Kelly song 'Adelaide’, were sitting in the same chairs they were sitting in 25 years ago.

Some were still addicted to drugs. Some were still underpaid and undervalued in the service industry. Others used art, not as a vector to explain our place in the world, but as a psychological crutch to shore up dashed dreams and tattered ideals.

Of course others had done very well – especially those who had started small niche businesses in IT and web design. They went out on their own and 'made it happen.'

The filmmakers of Oranges and Sunshine– a film about English 'orphans' sent to Australia in the 1950s, 60s and early 70s - chose Adelaide as a location because its skyline looks like Perth' s did in the 70s.

This might be seen as a victory for those who despise development, growth and change but it's a visual – and slightly comic - indictment of stagnation and complacency in the City of Churches.

Just as worrying as the structural degeneration, is an odd form of 'decline and fall' negativity by urban cultural elites who, on the one hand, decry Adelaide's parochial attitude and on the other, attack those who want to build a new $1.5 billion hospital in the city.

The employment market– 'recruitment apartheid'

It's difficult for job seekers from other countries and interstate to understand Adelaide's 'unique' recruitment establishments and employment market.

Some Adelaide recruitment establishments so slavishly follow the directives of their clients and in the name of 'cultural fit,' exclude everyone from well qualified executives (read: over qualified and possibly a career threat); young women (read: child bearing age), educated abroad (read: people of colour or Muslims) and professional men over 45 years of age (read: too old/will need training) – and that's just for starters. While the age worker revolution is taking off in the eastern states, Adelaide is sacking older workers.

Not every recruitment agency is a cringing toady. But there are enough around to hear them croaking. What basic assumptions are at work in the City of Churches to allow this sort of 1950s mentality to reign? This is fear at work - or not at work - as the case maybe.

Adelaide is not a conservative city. It is a fearful city and this is nowhere more present that in its employment culture and hiring practices. It banishes new thinkers and 'doers' to the dole queues. Yet those people and their ideas are the future of Adelaide. The term 'cultural fit' is a synonym for recruitment apartheid.

Leaving in droves

In the 2009-2010 financial year, 26,300 South Australians left the state with those aged 20-39 making up half of this figure. On average about 9000 people arrived from interstate. Of these, 35 per cent came from over seas.

Australia recently slashed its migrant intake by about 17 per cent. That's bad news for SA. They comprise new blood for the beleaguered state. They would be 'new blood' if they could get a job. SA's aged care industry could not survive without people from South East Asia and India working as orderlies and attendants.

The SA Government claims that over an eight year period more than 111,000 jobs have been created since 2002 - about 13,000 jobs a year. Yet according to the ABS, about 12,000 people die per year, so the death rate just lags behind the job creation rate.

It's a statistical nonsense, but one commentator with tongue-in-cheek claimed that when the death rate surpasses the job creation rate, Adelaide's employment prospects will improve – although another wit claimed the jobs go with them into the grave.

Australian Bureau of Statistic figures show SA is losing people to other states at a greater rate than it gains them. Since 1971/72, there has only been four years when more people have moved to SA than left.

One fundamental problem with Adelaide is that it's a branch office economy. Most of the major international and national corporates have their headquarters in Sydney and Melbourne.

Adelaide's economy won't crash over night. There are large mining developments in the north of the state and South Australia's agricultural and meat exports are up, although the high Australian dollar is hurting commodities.

How long a so-called modern undiversified economy can last based on mining, agriculture and meat is anyone's guess – but probably not more than 30 years.

While Adelaidians may gnash their teeth and lambast the State Government, the problem lies beyond the scope of any government to fix. It is not a political problem but one of economic degeneration over two generations; the decline of the manufacturing sector and of the many SME's who were dependent on it.

Only in Adelaide

While its relatively common to see gay and lesbian people being affectionate in public in Melbourne and Sydney, it's a rarity in Adelaide. The local gay scene has gone underground or rather; it never came out of the closet. While Adelaide likes to think of itself as 'socially progressive' this is a mythic hangover from the days of Don Dunstan.

In 2010, a Thai restaurant refused a blind man entry because one of the staff thought his guide dog was "gay." A statement given by restaurant owners said one of the waiters genuinely believed that Nudge the blue heeler, who had been de-sexed, was now gay.

While this probably doesn't explain why gays keep to themselves in Adelaide, it certainly explains why the 'best and the brightest' head east.

The media

There is a high quotient for the irrational in Adelaide, in part whipped up by a parochial and slightly bonkers media. Adelaide's media is worth a book in itself, but I will cite only one example.

Some time ago Tony McGuinness, the former captain of Adelaide's most popular and revered football team, the Crows, allegedly had an affair with the wife of a former member of the Hell's Angels Adelaide chapter.

McGuinness was the co-founder of a well-regarded Adelaide charity called the McGuinness McDermott Foundation, which had raised a large amount of money. It was especially popular amongst the eastern suburbs 'young movers and shakers.'

McGuiness is married (at time of writing) to Channel Nine's weekend newsreader Georgina McGuiness, (who was recently was sacked). She is popular and held in high regard by the media and public alike. They were a celebrity couple.

The cuckolded husband and former Hell's Angel was recently jailed for three years for drug offences. Tony McGuinness has since scarpered.

This story made The Advertiser three times over a two-week period and was reported on Channel Seven and on the ABC over the same frequency. And that was about all. But in Adelaide, a small city, why didn't this story run for weeks, if not months?

You can have bodies in barrels in Snowtown, the murder of six young men by a group of homicidal maniacs and the rape and murder of young women in Truro in the late 70s, but when it comes to 'icons' (fallen or not), the media powers say 'limited coverage, thankyou.'

If that story didn't 'bounce' what other stories lay dead on the editor’s desk because they were guaranteed to offend? What basic assumptions would this reporting traduce?

Adelaide has some fine reporters but parochialism has trashed news sense and the media treats its consumers like idiots.

A conclusion of sorts

The credo of the TV sitcom The Addams Family was Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc – '"we gladly feast on those who subdue us." But in Adelaide the threat is more like an autoimmune disease – complacency and the 'closed shop' mentality will ultimately consume the host.

Like an ageing lady, Adelaide declines slowly. The State Theatre Company will still run shows to half full houses and the same opinion writers will still write their columns about their pet hates.

The Sunday Mail will still be handed out free at the football on Saturday night and people of colour leaving a crime scene will still be described by the electronic media as '"people of Aboriginal appearance." Hoon drivers and cars crashing in to houses will be over reported. Hard news will be under reported.

But the untrained eye will begin to notice more buildings for rent as businesses and shops close down. The CBD will remain a desert at night. There will be jolts as major contracts for defence or mining come to an end.

The signs of decline and fall can already be found in the hollowing out of primary and high school enrolments in the 10km radius from the CBD. Less young people means less students and less students means less schools.

The media will play a role too in the decline of Adelaide as a city-state. It won't report it. It may report the symptoms, but its function as an 'attack dog' over the last twenty five years makes it entirely unsuitable now to change its collar and suddenly start to report. It's a part of the problem – young people know that. That's why they don't buy newspapers or watch TV news.

Without sounding ghoulish, Adelaide needs brains – and lots of them. I don't just mean "Thinkers in Residence," who fly in with a whole lot of whiz bang ideas and then fly out again.

Adelaide's greatest contribution to culture is not through the arts. It is through its ability to attract international students and migrants to settle.

The international education industry poured $1.05 billion into the South Australian economy in 2009/10, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). Adelaide continues to attract record numbers of international students, with 34,000 choosing Adelaide as their study destination in 2010.

Rarely have I seen a city so in need of new ideas, new blood and new ways of doing things. Adelaide's innovative spirit has been bred out and it's entrepreneurial heart crushed by nanny state regulation and complacency.

'Adders' must look to Asia for new models of action. It must look for movers and shakers, not in frilly party dresses born from privilege and status. But, draw down the kind of ethos born from single-mindedly and aggressively pursuing a commercial vision.

The academic Pierre Ryckmanns (aka Simon Ley) put it wonderfully when he wrote in an essay on provincialism, "Culture is born out of exchanges and thrives on differences. The death of culture lies in self-centeredness, self-sufficiency and isolation."

Difference is not an easy idea to sell in Adelaide.