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Adelaide – heaps indifferent! (Part one)

By Malcolm King - posted Tuesday, 13 May 2014


· 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.

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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

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"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.

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About the Author

Malcolm King is a journalist and professional writer. He was an associate director at DEEWR Labour Market Strategy in Canberra and the senior communications strategist at Carnegie Mellon University in Adelaide. He runs a writing business called Republic.

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