An Economy is Not a Society (13 page)

Here are the human results of three decades of economic devastation and humanitarian settlement – babies, toddlers, children, adolescents and their second-generation-unemployed parents – concentrated into a single place that's meant to be a crèche, kindergarten, primary school, secondary school, welfare agency, even canteen. It mixes together the old poor with the newly arrived poor, the long-term unemployed with those unable to speak English. Why is it, I ask myself, that poor people always have to do all the heavy lifting for other poor people? The wealthy think they do it through progressive taxation, endlessly calling for more tax relief, but they're kidding themselves, as usual.

I want to be wrong, but it seems a hope against hope that Doveton College will be able to make up entirely for the one thing that is more likely than anything else to account for Doveton's problems: the total lack of jobs suitable for the students' parents. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't, although it's worth a try – but when Panda and Jimmy and I and our other friends were children in Doveton, we didn't need schools that were designed as welfare agencies because our mothers and our fathers and our older brothers and sisters all had jobs. Give the parents jobs and the school might work as a springboard to success, as the old Doveton High School which my friends and I attended did. Try as they might, schools on their own cannot make up for the failure of the economy to deliver affluence for everyone, and it's hard to believe that serious policymakers haven't thought about this and done something more besides. But they simply haven't. It's about class, not classrooms.

On my way home, I stop to get a Coke at the old milk bar, now $2 shop, near where I lived. I notice that the front windows have been smashed but not fully replaced, and are being held together by some temporary transparent film. This is the second smashed window I've seen at this strip shopping centre since my study began. I ask the young man who serves me, who looks to be about eighteen, what happened. His father caught some juvenile shoplifters, who, resentful at being so accused, returned after midnight to throw bricks through the window in revenge. Perhaps they got the bricks from the wreck of my old local primary school, just around the corner.

He's a nice kid, and when I tell him this was where my mother worked forty years ago, he tells me that his family bought the shop the year before and are doing it up to make it into a cafe. The walls have recently been resurfaced and painted, and I can suddenly see that things just might improve – after the windows are replaced, that is. It's another ray of hope, if a small one. A good cafe might just make the place a little busier and more pleasant, and perhaps encourage a few people with jobs to buy into the area. Who knows? I resolve to return later in the year for a coffee and some of his mother's homemade Serbian cake.

During my journey home, I'm caught in a traffic jam next to Melbourne Grammar School at pick-up time. In front of me, a mother in a black Porsche SUV searches for a parking spot. (A
Porsche
SUV? I can't figure out what angers me more – the fact that Porsche makes such ridiculous cars, the fact that someone feels the need to choose such a vulgar status symbol, or the fact that Australia's car factories had to close to make this degree of automobile choice possible.) Through a sea of Audis and BMWs, I can see students in expensive-looking blue sports uniforms playing soccer on the lush sports grounds next to the Shrine of Remembrance, the late-afternoon sun glowing. It strikes me that these schools – with their sense of entitlement and all their talk of moral leadership and
noblesse oblige,
which get so much but give so little, and which actually got their Gonski funding guarantees while poor old Doveton College got none – should be the ones who have to take on the educational disadvantage of Doveton. Why not make schools like this take a busload of kids from places like Doveton in return for all the funding they get?

If that sounds mad, it's only because society has lost its capacity for moral reasoning. If only, I muse, I could be education minister for a day …

Thoughts like that bring me to a conclusion of sorts. During my journeys back to Doveton, something has gradually become apparent to me, and it hits me between the eyes on my last days there. When it comes down to it, few outsiders care about Doveton – and I mean
really
care, in the way necessary to actually change things. I think some of my friends in the Labor Party care, but sometimes perhaps not as much as they care about productivity. If they really cared, things wouldn't have been allowed to get so dire.

At the Dandenong Magistrates' Court, where I sat in for part of a morning, hearing case after case in which the real problems were unemployment and family breakdown and heroin and ice, a magistrate tells me that, almost without fail, even the saddest cases – and there are 20,000 a year at this court alone – agree that what they really need to turn their lives around is a job, a home and someone to love. A job, a home and someone to love – it seems pretty basic, doesn't it? But for all our supposed policy sophistication, for all the claims that we're better than our parents' generation at running our country, we don't get this. We can't conceptualise social problems in human ways anymore, and we have only managed to turn parts of our society into a pipeline from school to gaol. It's one of the prices you pay for the single-minded pursuit of productivity.

Our policymakers have no answer to all this. From talking to them, one gets the distinct impression that even the local leaders would rather that Doveton, which sits as a grim postage stamp of dysfunction on the maps of their otherwise expanding and booming municipalities, is a hopeless case, best kept hidden lest it draw too much attention away from all the good news stories that can be told (of which there are many). They've reconceived Doveton in their minds, changing it from a destination in which people live to a place people travel through to get to somewhere better. The place has become a highway for as yet unmet aspirations rather than a community in which true happiness for the majority can flourish. You see, Doveton doesn't matter as a policy problem, because its community doesn't exist as a reality – much like Heraclitus's famous stream into which you can never step twice. By such feats of economic reforming logic we seem to have concluded that Doveton and other places like it don't exist. But drive thirty-five kilometres from the city and there it is.

Any former policy wonk, even one like me with an aversion to the inanities of managerialism, could easily reel off a long list of things that might help solve Doveton's problems, if we really cared enough about them. I'd start more concretely (and no doubt more naively) than the economic development experts: get the government to subsidise a company to build a big factory, and demand that it gives unskilled and semi-skilled jobs to the unemployed people and school leavers from Doveton; spend millions repainting houses, replacing gutters, planting trees and resealing the footpaths to brighten the place up as part of a comprehensive neighbourhood regeneration project; offer young families with jobs incentives to move in and add some energy and affluence to the place; perhaps even bus the high-school kids to Melbourne Grammar.

In other words, I'm saying that if people are jobless, give them jobs; if their houses are eyesores, beautify them and remove the stigma; if new blood is needed, bring it in; if an education will solve everything, give them the best one money can buy.

As Panda tells me, small steps have been taken in these directions, but perhaps nowhere near enough. There is a community farm, where my sisters' grandchildren regularly have their birthday parties, and where there is an annual agricultural show. An impressive wetland wildlife sanctuary, built using local unemployed labour, now adjoins it. Panda tells me that my old street is being populated by a new generation, including refugees from countries like Afghanistan who couldn't be prouder of their new homes. They too are spawning new small businesses. Keeping this going will cost, and plenty, but how much have we spent in the last thirty years, through our welfare system and our mental health system and our prison system, paying for failure? These people are worth it! (And how much, for that matter, have we subsidised property prices through negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount?)

Positive proposals like mine are the sorts of things we used to do. It's how Doveton was created in the first place, and how it gave me and my friends happy childhoods and a decent start in life, and our parents a standard of living they could get nowhere else. And it's when we stopped doing these things and put our misplaced faith in the hands of the creative destroyers that it all began to fall apart.

But these ideas are beyond our policymakers today, and there's little point in offering them up for discussion. If we are to give new life to places like Doveton, we must first change the way we think – and this goes especially for the Labor Party, whose heartlands (real
places of the heart)
suburbs like Doveton once were. Our imaginations have been stolen from us. We need to lift our minds beyond the ideas of the now stale revolution of thirty years ago, and beyond the narrowing philosophy of economic reform, with its enervating cult of managerialism and its monomaniacal pursuit of productivity. We need to think wider and deeper, and see things in moral terms once again. We need to build on the past, not wipe it out. We need to recapture, if we can, the romantic, animating, Promethean fire of the imagination that once led us to try to create a country ruled by the idea of decency, and which gave people in places like Doveton things almost impossible to conceive of today: affluence, success, happiness, perhaps even just a job, a home and somebody to love.

Most of all, we need once again to care about places like Doveton – to
really
care, the way we once did – because if we don't, nothing will ever change.

Ask yourself: do you care? Really care? Do you?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T
here are indeed good people who care about Doveton and the manufacturing industries that once supported it. While I was writing this book, so many people stepped forward, eager to help. It's their story too, after all.

This includes family members: Audrey Glover, Fred Miles, Dawn Sutherland, Pamela Slivarich, Ena Gilliland, Anna Gregory and Jackie Gregory. And it includes friends: John Pandazopoulos (who helped me rediscover much, and has devoted his life to serving the people of Doveton), Jim McVicar (you never had a best friend like you did when you were twelve), Michael Hendricks, David Rowlands, Grant Coulter, Nick Zomer, John Wylie, Chris Cullin, Neil Moles, John Miles, Henry Torres and George Marin. I also want to acknowledge the many former employees of Heinz who spoke to me at the factory's fifteen-year reunion, especially my sister's friends from the packing line: Cheryl, Anne, Lorene, Louise, Shane and Wayne.

Thanks also to the former and present senior managers and executives of General Motors Holden who spoke to me – Ian McCleave, Russel Nainie, Barry Crees and Geoff Mowthorpe – as well as to Mounir Kiwan of the Federation of Automotive Parts Manufacturers, who put me in touch with them. And to municipal economic development officers Paula Brennan (of the City of Dandenong) and Tom Szolt (of the City of Casey). Adrian Boden of the South East Melbourne Manufacturer's Alliance gave me the background on industry in the Dandenong region. The acting principal of Doveton College, Greg McMahon, and his staff and students spent precious time telling me about their gutsy efforts on behalf of their local community. Magistrate Pauline Spencer from the Dandenong Court allowed me access to her busy court, and shared many important insights about the dire social problems experienced by many local residents. Tim Kennedy, National Secretary of the National Union of Workers – one of the brightest union officials in Australia – gave me the perspective on change from warehousing workers. Adjunct Professor Lisa Heap of the Australian Catholic University and the Australian Institute of Employment Rights discussed with me similar issues of manufacturing unemployment elsewhere in Australia and Detroit. The social researcher Tony Vinson pointed me to places similar to Doveton. Deputy Labor Party leader Anthony Albanese, who grew up in a place not unlike Doveton, gave me insights into working-class life in other parts of Australia.

Zoe McKenzie provided her beach house as the perfect writer's retreat where the final draft was completed. It is always highly appreciated.

The team at my think tank, Per Capita, have been supportive and inspiring. As always, I salute them, especially Emily, David and Anthony, whose ideas and intellectual ambition have influenced this book enormously.

My editor from Black Inc., Julian Welch, has done a terrific job removing the rhetorical excesses to which this speechwriter is inclined, and in panelbeating the manuscript into its final shape. I thank Julian and his colleague Chris Feik for commissioning the book.

Finally, I thank Fiona, Toby and Teddy for cutting me the slack without which a husband or parent could never write anything.

NOTES

The epigraph is from the ode ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood' by William Wordsworth.

I
NTRODUCTION

The quote from Heilbroner is from
The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers
by Robert L. Heilbroner (Simon & Schuster, 1980), p. 311.

C
HAPTER
1

Parts of the story of my crescent and my father's life story were told in the
Age
and other Fairfax newspapers on 8 February 2014; the piece was reprinted in
The Best Australian Essays 2014,
edited by Robert Manne (Black Inc., 2014).

C
HAPTER
2

The epigraph is from Percy Bysshe Shelley's ‘Ode to a Skylark'.

My tomato-stained copy of
The Grundrisse
is
Marx's Grundrisse,
edited by David McClellan (Paladin, 1973). The sections on creative destruction are at pp. 100–101 and pp. 111–112.

The NATSEM figures are from
Prices These Days: The Cost of Living in Australia,
NATSEM 2012, p. 21.

Unemployment figures for Doveton and Dandenong come from
Small Area Labour Markets,
December Quarter 2014, Department of Employment, Commonwealth of Australia.

Historical income and inequality statistics about Doveton and workforce totals for the Big Three come from two previous studies of Doveton –
An Australian Newtown: Life and Leadership in a New Housing Suburb
by Lois Bryson & Faith Thompson (Penguin, 1972) and
Social Change, Suburban Lives: An Australian Newtown, 1960s to 1990s,
by Lois Bryson & Ian Winter (Allen & Unwin, 1999) – and from Australian Census QuickStats for postcode 2011.

C
HAPTER
3

The epigraph is from ‘Ozymandias' by Shelley's friend Horace Smith.

The closing poetic paraphrase is from Shelley's version of ‘Ozymandias'.

C
HAPTER
4

The epigraph is from Shelley's ‘Ode to the West Wind'.

The Making of the English Working Class
by E. P. Thompson was published by Gollancz in 1963. I have used the Penguin 1982 edition. My quotations are from the Preface and Chapter 6.

My discussion on productivity owes something to my reading of the many columns on the subject by the
Age
's economics columnist Ross Gittins, although the conclusions are my own.

The insights on America come from
The Unwinding: Thirty Years of American Decline
by George Packer (Faber & Faber, 2013).

C
HAPTER
5

The epigraph is from George Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The quote from Friedrich Engels comes from
The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels
by Tristram Hunt (Allen Lane, 2009), p. 107.

C
ONCLUSION

The epigraph is from a letter from Mary Wollstonecraft to Gilbert Imlay, taken from
Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer,
by Richard Holmes (Harper Perennial, 2005), p. 27.