The Murdoch media and commercial TV news has fed South Australians bulldust for 30 years. It's mindless obsession with sex murders, endless 'I'm OK/You're OK' feel good pieces and monopolistic monomania, has undermined public confidence in the very product they sell – the news. Some commercial TV news stories are 48 hours old. The sooner The Advertiser closes and its journalists set up their own online niche newspapers, the better.
Indeed, News Corporation's Sunday Mail - which is almost finished as a newspaper - created a 19 page liftout called 'Inspire SA'. It was chock full of boosterist stories on 'how the future is looking good for us Croweaters'. Some suggest this is brand positioning. I suggest its mollification and pacification of the populace. The message is – 'don't worry. Be happy.' It's a propaganda technique that both Aldous Huxley and George Orwell included in their dystopia novels.
One wit wrote in The Advertiser blog:
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"At least were not as badly off as Greece", we'll say. We'll still be engaging in ongoing parochial frog-cake boosterism and blaming Abbott/the "GFC"/planetary alignment or something else. We'll be stoked that the desperately poor can live in repurposed, otherwise-vacant office buildings. "We're Australia's education hub", we'll say, "because one of our remaining two universities is ranked in the top 200 for cleanliness." Our top business leaders, being the state managers of Woolworths and Centrelink, will be local celebrities. And we'll celebrate our 100th plan/vision/strategy/round-table/blueprint to lift SA out of its "temporary economic doldrums".
Once people get angry – angry enough to do something about their own backyard – these ridiculous soft sell stories and self-serving PR reports by Deloitte and others, will disappear.
With the exception of InDaily and the ABC, much of the Adelaide media, its readers and listeners, are trapped in binary thinking. People either blame the ALP or the Liberals; they blame the unions or the public service. It's either this or that. Binary thinking is now so common, it's difficult to remember when there were multiple and competing explanations for social and economic phenomena. None of these institutions by themselves has any hope of countering the micro and macroeconomic forces which are besieging the state. They have been so drained of kinetic energy, vision and ideas, they are husks of their former selves.
Ageing of population: effects
The state has also failed to consider the economic and social effects of high numbers of old people living in its environs. The late and great Prof Graeme Hugo's research showed that the number of people in Adelaide aged 65 and over will double by 2050 - to about 370,000 compared to 183,300 in 2011. Young people aged 15-24 will increase by about 23 per cent or 197,100 people compared to 160,400 over the same period. Here comes the zimmer frame empire.
The good news is that many expatriate Boomers with national or international experience are returning to Adelaide, usually to look after ageing parents. The bad news is when they apply for local positions, young recruiters knock them back because they are too experienced. They're too good. They are not only knocking back those with national or international experience and their business contacts but also potentially millions (if not billions) in superannuation spends. It's a non-virtuous circle, which has created a closed environment.
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Retrograde organisational cultures
The operating standards of many SA organisations – and I include the public service – are so low and regressive, that executives especially hired from interstate, stay less than a year as they battle incompetence, white anting, nepotism and group think, before hightailing it back to Sydney or Melbourne.
Seven CEO's and program directors of large organisations such as TAFE SA, the Adelaide Market and the new hospital, quit their positions recently. I interviewed three of them. They fled the 'Punch and Judy' antics and reactionary mindset of their senior staff and boards. There can be no more punitive action on the state's brand, than to hire opinion leaders in one state, get them to Adelaide, humiliate and degrade their professionalism for a year or so, then effectively force their resignation.
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