An Economy is Not a Society (12 page)

Go out and look for it, because it is still there.
Sous les pavés, la plage!

CONCLUSION

TO REALLY CARE

I
thought I'd finished my modest little story about Doveton, but I decided to spend another week or so searching for some positive things to say – some green shoots, a little hope; God knows the place needs it.

I'll admit my motivations for doing so weren't totally honourable. When you write honestly about somewhere going through hard times, you inevitably encounter criticisms of the ‘How dare he?' type. ‘He's a blow-in … he's talking the place down when what it needs is talking up … he's not here battling away every day like us … he's overlooked all the positive economic development that's going on … why didn't he talk to me?' and so on. All of that, obviously, contains an element of truth, even if you ignore the fact that I've cared enough about my old home town to spend half a year writing a book about it. Anyway, it's just as big a mistake sometimes to artificially talk a place up. There are affluent people in Doveton, certainly, but writing about Doveton to illustrate affluence is about as enlightening as writing about Toorak to illustrate the adverse effects of unemployment – it might exist, but it's hardly typical.

I spend a day in meetings with economic development experts in the City of Casey and the City of Greater Dandenong. (Doveton, which lies on their boundary, is technically in the former but historically linked to the latter.) I'm impressed by the economic development efforts being made and come away with a folder two inches thick, full of glossy strategies, plans, partnerships, regeneration initiatives, stakeholder newsletters and the usual offspring of the marriage between management consultants and highly committed municipal officials.

And it does indeed seem that there is much going on, some of which I can see from the cafe at which one of the meetings takes place. The cafe is part of a Revitalising Central Dandenong initiative, which opens up the city centre and links it to the railway station and a new shopping plaza – the locals refer to the new development as the Pompidou Centre. Panda – who, as the former state member for the area, was involved in the planning – had taken me on a tour of it a couple of months before, and locals rightly regard it as a symbol of how things can be improved if you try hard enough. The problem is that from my seat in the café, looking out into Dandenong's main street, it's all too obvious why this new development and a lot more like it are needed.

At the end of the meeting I take a walk down the street, and in two blocks count forty-three shopfronts, of which four are untenanted, four are $2 shops, one is a pokies venue, one is a charity shop, and three are variations on the ‘buy, sell and cash loan' businesses that in generations past would have been called pawnbrokers. I walk into one of them and see the usual collection of household items offloaded by people desperate for cash, some of whom, perhaps having already disposed of the kids' Xbox for $100, are standing at the counter and negotiating desperately needed loans which, in the long run, will likely make their finances worse.

This brings back a bad memory of a single desperate moment my father had when he and I were alone together in Doveton, and it strikes me that the owners of these businesses are attracted to poverty like sharks to a school of pilchards. Don't you hate them? I also find the Coles Variety Store outlet where my Aunt Ena sold the garments her mother made; it is now one of those discount chemist chains filled with disorienting fluorescent lights.

A few days before my meeting in the new Pompidou Centre, local manufacturers used its forecourt to put on a display called ‘Dandenong on Wheels'. Featuring sophisticated trucks, trams, buses, emergency vehicles, garbage trucks and campervans, the exhibition showed off some of the high-tech manufacturing going on in the area. It was reported prominently in the
Age
the next day, but the
AFR
went instead with a feature story on an amazing high-tech Siemens factory in Amberg, in south-east Germany (where, coincidentally, Aunt Ena was interned in a Displaced Persons' camp at the end of World War II), and another about how deregulating the car import market further will slash the price of a Ferrari from $525,000 to just $343,000. Now that they've stopped people like my father building cars, they're planning to stop them selling them too. It's clear that creating jobs for the little people in Doveton is of zero interest to the readers of financial newspapers, even though their investment decisions might make a positive difference.

It's obvious that manufacturing is gradually regaining a toehold here. Could it be the hope the people of Doveton are looking for? Later, after talking to the organiser of the local manufacturing alliance, I decide to take a tour of the great manufacturing conurbation that is opening up to the south of Dandenong, stretching all the way to Mentone and Frankston. Driving along with massive trucks tailgating me all the way, I explore huge industrial parks (there are six on the map I am given), where concrete buildings are going up to house a mixture of medium-sized and boutique modern ‘factories'. This is going to grow – that's obvious. The caravan manufacturer Jayco, for instance, where Fred worked for a while after leaving Heinz, recently put on another 200 workers, taking its workforce to 1000, and is even doing its best to give jobs to locals with drug, alcohol and other problems; more power to them, I say. It's not on the scale of the old days, when GMH alone had between 4500 and 5000 workers on its payroll, but it's impressive nonetheless.

Still, I can't help but point out to the economic development officials that while manufacturing appears to be returning, unemployment in Doveton, very literally just over the road from some of these factories, is still significantly over 20 per cent. How can that be? They tell me, as a sort of afterthought: the sad reality is that despite the efforts of companies like Jayco, the new manufacturing jobs being created in the area are unlikely be filled by many people from Doveton. The clean, sleek futuristic factories (like the Siemens factory in Amberg), with their high-tech processes, need employees with medium to high-level trade qualifications, and even university degrees, but poor old Doveton has one of the least educated and least qualified populations in the state. And because it has become a destination for the least-educated refugees and asylum seekers from the poorest communities of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, much of Doveton's workforce can't even speak enough English to read a health and safety sign, never mind operate complex computer-based equipment. Many, because of their asylum seeker status, are not even legally permitted to work.

I decide to attend the National Manufacturing Week exhibition in Melbourne, where I'm told employers from the Dandenong region will be present in large numbers. It's obvious the moment I walk in that manufacturing in the future is going to be lean – perhaps too lean for places like Doveton to benefit.

What stands out most are the robots. There are dozens on display, some of which look like programmable lathes and saws, but others which look like one-armed factory workers. I decide to make a pain of myself by asking difficult questions about the economic and employment effects of these human-like devices. It turns out that robots will save manufacturers serious money by reducing their wages bills. The salespeople give me calculations based on differing wage rates and on-costs.

For example, at a 3 per cent interest rate, a $25,000 robot that works twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week (including Christmas Day and Good Friday), costs just twenty cents per hour, plus electricity. My sister's friend Cheryl costs $16.86. But when I press the point of what this is going to mean for unskilled workers, I'm told that it will have no effect on unemployment. ‘You see, the business owners who introduce robot workers aren't doing it for financial reasons, but to relieve their valued employees of boring, repetitive tasks.' They're philanthropists, philosophers even, doing their employees a favour.

But after fifteen minutes of pressing for an answer, I'm told about a model factory in Belgium where 150 robots are supervised by just six humans, making it incredibly profitable. And anyway, you can't get good human help anymore, even when there is high unemployment – the lazy proles just don't want to work. This claim is illustrated by anecdote after anecdote about languid factory hands who don't pay attention to their tasks.

At one display I spot three of the $25,000 robots performing simple, repetitive tasks next to each other in a sort of mock assembly line. I ask the engineer if they could be put to use on a food canning and packing line, say, at Heinz. ‘Oh, yes,' he says. ‘That one could put on the lids, that one could put on the labels, and that bigger one could lift the cans into boxes, then cart them off to a truck on a computer-controlled conveyor belt.' I tell him I'm naming them Audrey, Dawn and Pamela, after my mother and two sisters whose jobs they would have taken, had they been around a few decades before. He isn't impressed.

My line of questioning is a little unfair, I admit, as the robot salespeople aren't philosophers, just decent business-people trying to keep their own companies (located in China, Japan and Switzerland) alive, but I find this inability to engage in serious discussion of the social consequences of their technology a little annoying. One day we're all going to pay for this unwillingness to think through what eliminating millions of low-skilled jobs will do to our society. Places like Doveton already know. When the computers eventually come for middle-class jobs – a process already underway – every suburb is going to get a taste of what it feels like to live in my old home town.

I guess it comes down to the fact that the old factory world provided an organising principle for a society that worked, if not perfectly, at least reasonably well. It provided jobs, skills, a sense of purpose, generalised affluence and even a democratic political logic – with parties for labour and parties for business that, over time, balanced each other out to a tolerable degree. Looked at this way, there's something inherently democratic, even social-democratic, about an economy based on mass-employment manufacturing, because in an economy in which their labour is in demand, the little people are in charge – or at least not easy to ignore. This is what democracy is supposed to be about: people power. But what sort of society is a robotic economy going to produce? One with even more places like Doveton. And perhaps one without a viable social-democratic Labor Party – a process that may already have begun.

If the next generation from Doveton is to get a toehold in this new economy, where are its members to get the necessary skills from? To find out, I visit a refuge of otherwise abandoned optimism: Doveton College. It sits on top of the highest hill in the suburb, next to the swimming pool at which Panda, Jimmy and I learned to swim, and on a sunny day in autumn it feels like a sunbeam of hope is shining down upon it. The principal, Greg McMahon, has been sent in to rescue the place after a not totally satisfactory beginning when the college opened in 2012. A good citizen, the wealthy health-industry entrepreneur Julius Colman, pumped serious money from his foundation into a joint plan with the Labor state government of John Brumby to regenerate schooling in the suburb by amalgamating four existing schools – the ones now being smashed up by vandals – into a ‘birth to Year 9 community learning centre'. It's very literally that: bringing together babies in childcare, toddlers in play-based long daycare, and Prep to Year 9 school students in a comprehensive project to combat the effects of social disadvantage.

In fact, the school goes much further than Prep to Year 9, because to succeed in helping these children, it has to educate their often unemployed and semi-literate parents as well. About 20 per cent of the pupils, McMahon estimates, come from troubled families afflicted by long-term unemployment, domestic violence, mental-health problems and trauma related to torture or civil war. While I'm there, a police unit arrives with some unpleasant duty to perform. The school also has to take on some basic tasks such as feeding the children, many of whom get more than three-quarters of their daily nutrition while at school. Asylum seeker children, who aren't legally entitled to attend the school, also have to be sought out and helped in a sort of extracurricular duty. No one else is going to do it. These people, I conclude, are saints.

Principal McMahon is extremely generous with his time, and after a chat takes me around to meet some students and teachers at lunchtime. He seems to know just about all of them by name, and we have purposeful conversations with kids of all ethnic backgrounds, who are mixing and playing well together in the playground. We meet one little girl, about five or six years old and bright as a button, who happily tells us that she has just got a new book from the school library; she shows it to us proudly. We stop and help her phonetically spell out the title,
Jam for Nana.

We also visit the childcare centre, where some children are having their afternoon nap, and another one runs up to hug us and say hello. We meet mothers having lunch who are doing Certificate III courses in Education Support, with the objective of becoming classroom assistants. Having the parents attend like this, McMahon tells me, is a good way to ensure their children also come to school each day; here, that is not a given. He also tells me that while the Gonski school funding model was designed for places like this, and the school would have got more money than any other, Doveton College hasn't seen a cent. All those promises the managerialists made, and not a cent.

You can't come away from a place like this without having at least some part of your heart warmed. These people are doing the toughest job there is; they, not the overpaid principals of the better private schools, are the unsung heroes of our education system, and they need more help. But I have misgivings about the place, and they stem from something not of the principal's doing and not in his control: the school has been asked to make up for the total collapse of the local economy and the society it supported.