Adelaide is dying

Spare a thought and pass the Xanax as print journalists battle cognitive dissonance. They must produce stories based on a contrived and relentless optimism, but also report real news about South Australian families imploding due to unemployment, under employment and soaring divorce, debt and suicide rates, as petrol prices rise and power bills soar.

There's a historical analogy for the plethora of 'happy face' stories in Adelaide. In the 1960s, the US Secretary of Defence, Robert McNamara, introduced 'war by statistics'. Every military action was measured in terms of killed or missing Viet Cong guerrillas, across a raft of nonsensical indexes. Quantification was used to measure the progress of the war and to pacify American citizens. It was an abject failure.

The same bogus methods are used to pacify South Australia's citizens.

Before I left Adelaide, I tried and failed to get researched and sourced stories placed in the local print media. These included the role the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Associationand the Catholic Church play in the Labor Party, the extraordinary power large consultancy groupssuch as Deloitte and KPMG have in the state, and the true number of Holden workers who found ongoing work after the closure (it's about 35 per cent not 80 per cent).

These stories challenged the networks behind Adelaide's status quo. Some editors seethed with thin-skinned anger, incensed that I should question their mole-like news sense.

Young people

The real victims of Adelaide's fall will be young people. Around 1978, the first major exodus of young people moved to Melbourne and Sydney. Unfortunately, many large corporate headquarters followed them.

Today, less than half of 25-34-year-olds own their own home, compared with 61 per cent back in 1981, according to the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute.

The competition for graduate jobs is worst in South Australia, with 46 university graduates fighting for each job.

According to the Commonwealth Department of Education and Training, there were 11,895 domestic bachelor degree graduates from the three major South Australian universities in 2016. Including postgraduates, this figure rose to a whopping 19,680 graduates.

Many students do find a job two or three years after graduating but it's not the same as career-targeted employment. Some are graduating in to poverty.

I've never seen so many systemic blockers to progress. Adelaide people are fighters but they're not given a chance. The combination of an unrelenting economic spiral downwards and a raft of punitive psycho-social factors, is pauperising them.

As Landy wrote, "Decline mostly takes time and happens by imperceptible steps … but when the steps are taken together it matters dramatically…"

Australians can be so smug when we see the economic problems of our South Pacific neighbours. Yet in our backyard, Adelaide is an economic 'shame job', worthy of international attention.