Adelaide in ICU as economy and jobs collapse

In May 2020, 40,000 South Australians lost their jobs (20,000 were fulltime) due to Covid-19. They joined the 56,000 Crow Eaters who were already unemployed. That brings unemployment up to a whopping 96,000 people.

Now add the 134,200 people who are under-employed and who want to work more. Then add the 30,000 people who have dropped out of the workforce altogether.

There are about 850,000 people in the SA labour market but 260,000 of them are unemployed and under-employed and 30,000 have dropped out entirely. That's not a recession. That's a full-blown labour market Depression.

No state can survive with unemployment and underemployment this high.

The genetic spiral down

A key reason why bullying and nepotism are rife in SA organisations; why both the private and public sectors have trouble implementing major projects; why agencies from the arts to public universities fudge or obscure reporting figures, is due to a genetic spiral downwards.

Hundreds of thousands of the best and brightest minds have left South Australia since the late 1970s. This has created a 'capability canyon' which no migration or schooling program can bridge. Migrants have swum from the Marie Celeste to clamber aboard the Titanic.

The failure of the managerial class is unprecedented. Many are 'Elmer Fudd' caricatures who fight to protect their turf (sometimes empires) from the 'dastardly rabbit' (change), yet have no idea about strategic leadership. They should never have been given a computer or an email account.

The leaching of brains from the state, teachers who can't teach and the dumbing down of the news by the media (which came first, dumb people or dumb media?), has created an IQ vacuum which is all pervasive.

It's a Black Hole, sucking in smart, entrepreneurial young people and before they know it, they too are limbo dancing under the lowest common denominator. It's the tribalism of Lord of the Flies, writ large across Adelaide's organisational cultures and there is no hope of rectification, no redress, when the arbiters of justice are untroubled by deep thought.

Young people

Adelaide's young people are being pauperised. This will grow much worse as the Covid-19 restrictions destroy supply chains and the state's twin towers of institutional delusion and hypocrisy, come crashing down.