Adelaide – heaps indifferent! (Part one)

She is prim and proper, she's cultured and refined. She is also sliding inexorably in to debt and decay. Adelaide has had her scandals – sex crimes and the State Bank fiasco – but she can no longer survive on moral rectitude, as she becomes the bag lady of mainland Australia.

You can study urban geography, demography or sociology for years and never get the chance see first hand a modern city slide into moribund retirement and debt. Let us look closely and forensically at the City of Churches.

Adelaide scrounges around an undiversified economy pining for the state domestic product she had in the mid 1960s. Her recruitment industry is riven with age prejudice and world's worst practice. Her manufacturing sector – once it's pride and joy – is on the skids. Adelaide won't die but its economy will contract significantly. As the song goes "How low can you go?"

The first thing that tourists notice about Adelaide is that there are very few other tourists. Adelaide used to have tourists but from the 1980s, Queensland, NSW and Victoria started running international campaigns in Europe and America. South Australia watched. Adelaide, like Chauncey Gardiner in Being There, likes to watch.

While other states were building modern, diversified and robust economies, Adelaide debated, formed committees and engaged in endless rounds of self-reflection. Now it has a projected debt of $14 billion and is living off defence contracts and GST revenues from the other states.

Just what is it that makes Adelaide so different, so appealing?

It's the people. I have travelled across God's great earth and except for the Scots, Adelaide folk are the nicest, most friendly people I have met. They are laid back and always willing to have a chat. That's Heaps Good*. It's their willingness to have a chat and not serve the ten people waiting behind me at the shop that undoes them. But as they say here, 'what's the hurry?' Even though the economy is becoming the new Detroit of the south, the locals keep smiling. When you smile, the whole world smiles with you – except investors, the money markets and credit rating agencies.

South Australia's economy is a basket case.

· SA's GDP is growing at 1.3 percent yet Australia is growing at 2.8 per cent.

· Unemployment rose over the last 12 months from 5.6 per cent to 7.1 per cent - The ABS trend rate is 6.6 per cent. The real youth unemployment north of Adelaide is closer to 40 percent. If we ignore the silly ABS test of working one hour per week to be deemed employed, then SA's unemployment level is about 11 per cent and rising.

· In the last 12 months 309 businesses out of 5210 Business SA members have closed down or become insolvent.

· Over 20 years, SA's share of national employment fell from 8.3 per cent to 7.0 per cent and is heading south.

· Private investment has fallen from 7.0 per cent in 1990 to 5.0 per cent in 2014. On current projections it will be 4.00 per cent by 2017.

· Our slice of the national economy has fallen from 7.3 per cent to 6.3 per cent and is going backwards.

If this was a school report card, then scrawled at the bottom would be the words 'Little South Aussie isn't trying'. More charitably, it's a repeat mugging victim by the forces of globalism, an undiversified economy and structural change in the labour market.

Part of the cattiness of the bourgeois in SA is to deride statistics (mine are ABS and Labour Force) by creating a whole new discipline in statistical interpretation. They say "the economy is doing very well thank you very much or else my name isn't Fotheringham-Graham-Reischbeth of Permed Hair Valley." Denial is a contact sport in 'Adders'.

Pump priming by spinning economic reports

Following closely on the heels of bad news, will invariably come a CommSec or Deloittereport that says that while there are problems with the economy, there is a glimmer of light on the horizon. Twilight's last gleaming is splashed all over the front page of the state daily newspaper, The Advertiser. People are mollified. It will be all right. No worries. Have a Farmers Union ice coffee.

Do you know what Ivan Milat's defence said when he was arrested for the Belanglo Backpacker murders? "It wasn't me". Even when they found items of clothing and one of the backpacks in his garage, he still maintained, "It wasn't me". Even when witnesses came forward and identified Milat, he said, "It wasn't me". Guess what he said when the judge sentenced him to life in prison? You got it.

When the fecal matter hits the fan, and keeps hitting the fan for 30 years, it's time to say 'let's do something about it'. You'd do it for your kids, wouldn't you? Not in Adelaide. Heaps bad.

Denial ain't just a river in Egypt

"I am a rock. I am an island", Paul Simon once sang. But in Adelaide it would have been reported as, "I am a sock. I live in Rhineland". The issue isn't the reporters. Some are very good. It's the editorial policy of the cities only daily newspaper, The Advertiser, that has kept the populace mushroomed for 25 years.

It has treated its readers like idiots and has set reader against reader by running only binary stories. By that I mean, rich vs poor, dole bludgers against all the rest, Liberal versus ALP, South Australian versus Victorians. SA readers have been choking on parochialism since the 1980s. You'd be better off asking your neighbour what's going on.

The Tiser's circulation is in free fall as is its advertising revenue. It's the only newspaper I know of that censors bloggers on its news site for being critical of how it frames its content. It has lost a whole generation of readers to the Internet (not the Tisers). Who can blame them? The journos know this better than anyone.

It has also lost its country readers. Why read a paper that doesn't mention regional issues at all? These are the invisible South Australians. Agriculture, forestry and fishing contributes about $4.5 billion of GSP. They are the backbone of the state and deserve much more recognition.

In Adelaide, 75 per cent of the stories are PR puff pieces and '101 things we love about SA stories'. The 'Isn't SA great?' stories have much the same effect as mollycoddling an over sensitive child. Why attack the hard things in life such as economic degeneration and youth unemployment, when one can get praise by simply eating a Haigh's chocolate and washing it down with a Coopers Ale?

Morning radio (except the ABC) doesn't break stories. It simply repeats the headlines from the Tiser, which were written the night before. The media conflict model of the last 30 years is dead. Unfortunately, it has left behind an uninformed public who predominantly think in binary terms or who resort to the default position: blame the ALP vs Libs or blame the unions and the public service.

The proclivity for blaming state political parties is a hangover from the days when state governments actually did something. In SA, the Houses of Parliament have as much influence on the long-term direction of the state economy as a lone tree does in blocking the wind. None of the problems facing the state can be solved by binary thinking, by blaming, comparing or drinking ice coffee.

If the public is disengaged, if there are not fierce arguments in the front bars of hotels, at dinner parties, BBQs and kitchen tables, about the direction of the state, then the state will continue to slide in to penury.

In the next episode to be published in Opinion Online, we'll talk about what the year 2017 holds for South Australia. I'll also provide some news on what Adelaide can do about its plight.