CHAPTER 2
THE SUBURB THAT WAS MURDERED
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not …
— PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
At the centre of any great place to work is a top-rate subsidised cafeteria. Anyone who has ever worked in a large organisation, with the possible exception of the federal parliament, can tell you this. Just ask a journalist in a great newspaper, a student in a great college, a machine operator in a great factory. The cafeteria is the place you look forward to, a place to escape the job for an all too brief moment, talk with friends, have a cup of tea and of course eat. Boyfriends and girlfriends eye each other across the tables, dates are arranged, hens’ and bucks’ nights are organised, wedding invitations are handed out, and photographs of babies and grandchildren are swapped.
The H. J. Heinz factory in Dandenong, just next door to the GMH plant, had a truly great cafeteria, and for twenty years beginning in 1972 my mother operated the cash register there, which put her at the heart of a self-contained little world. As you entered the factory, waving at the security guards as you passed through the gate, the cafeteria stood to the left. You couldn’t miss it; it was another of those 1950s modernist designs that would have looked as appealing to the assembly line workers back then as the palatial entry halls of office towers do to accountants and merchant bankers today. (Today the professionals work amid beauty, while workers toil in cheap, functional, concrete prefab boxes; it wasn’t always so one-sided.)
I have in front of me the official record from the factory’s opening ceremony, held on 7 November 1955 and attended by Prime Minister Robert Menzies. A whole page is given over to what are called STAFF AMENITIES.
Modern and pleasant staff amenities are provided, with an entire building devoted to this purpose. In this building are lockers, toilet rooms, showers, etc., with each employee provided with an individual locker; a Cafeteria with a seating capacity for 500 people and where a wide variety of food is served, providing a pleasant and restful room for all employees to enjoy lunch and tea-time breaks. A well-equipped First-Aid section is included in this building and a qualified nursing staff is maintained whenever the factory is in operation. With this new Factory providing every modern facility, we look forward to a long and prosperous association with the communities of Berwick and Dandenong.
What strikes you from this passage – apart from the fact it is written in clear prose, not the public-relations jargon of today – is the lengths to which companies like Heinz felt they had to go in order to impress unskilled factory hands. We must remember that factories like these were built in an era when capitalists knew they had to be nice to working-class people if they wanted them to work for them, and when they still felt a moral obligation of sorts to make their employees feel happy; at the very least, they calculated that happiness would make their employees more industrious. Note that the cafeteria had to be ‘pleasant’, and that breaks were to be ‘enjoyed’. Can you imagine a workplace for the working class being designed with such sentiments in mind now? Another era indeed.
In the cafeteria, tea and coffee were free, and three meals were served a day, including a cooked breakfast if you were the sort who could get to work early enough. You could get a three-course meal at the lunch and evening sittings, including soup, full roast dinner with choice of meat, potatoes, fresh vegetables and salads, plus dessert. Many people regularly had their main meal at work because they liked it so much. I remember the cafeteria well because I once regularly ate there too.
For working-class university students like me back in the early to mid-1980s, the end of semester meant one thing: shift work. Education had opened our eyes to wider possibilities, and lying on the beach in Queensland with my new friends would obviously have been far preferable, but the money was fabulous – or at least it seemed so at the time – and turning it down was inconceivable. (This was, of course, in the days before universities got so expensive that even middle-class students had to work in low-paid service industry jobs all year round.) In retrospect, I feel fortunate, because across many sites, sometimes for up to six months at a time, I got to know factory life.
One day during the summer holidays leading up to my third year of university, my mother happened to tell the head of the factory laboratory while he was paying for his lunch that her student son was looking for work; did he have anything suitable? It just so happened that he did, and soon afterwards I found myself part of the tomato season casual intake. The word laboratory probably leads you to think I was filling test tubes in an antiseptic room alongside scientists. Wrong; I was a sort of go-between for the lab and the production floor.
My task was to operate a huge industrial kettle the size of a delivery van. Perhaps seven or eight times a day I would climb up a metal staircase, pour a bucket of a selected variety of tomatoes into the kettle (for some reason I remember UC-82s, which were oblong and harder than ordinary tomatoes), add given amounts of water, reduce them down to a set volume of pulp – a process which took around half an hour – and run a sample from it through the factory to the lab, where it would be analysed for sugar levels, viscosity and other qualities that would help make better tomato sauce and baked beans.
As factory jobs went, it had its benefits. On my way to the lab with my tomato samples I could stop and talk to my sister Dawn, who worked with her friends on the packing line watching cans full of cooked food move along a clanking conveyor belt. (My other sister, Pamela, worked at the Cadbury factory.) I could wave to my mother’s partner, Fred (my parents had separated in the mid-1970s), who was a forklift driver. Or I could talk to one of the young female lab assistants my mother seemed to approve of more than my then girlfriend. Occasionally I would get squirted with water by one of the factory cleaners, who later served as a minister in the Rudd government.
While the tomato pulp was boiling down, there was little to do apart from tidying up and filling in a few forms, which enabled me to catch up on my university homework, so in fifteen- to twenty-minute blocks I would be standing up high on my machinery in my white overalls, working boots and earplugs (it was a loud factory, which I thought explained why my sisters always seemed to yell at each other, even when they were being friendly) and reading political philosophers like Karl Marx. I still have one of those books – an edited edition of The Grundrisse (in essence, the outline of Das Kapital) – which is stained with splatters of tomato sauce. (Flicking through it again now, I can see that this is where Marx outlined his own theory about the creative destruction inherent in capitalism, which Schumpeter developed further.)
Even at the time I thought it both an absurd and ironic image: the young proletarian intellectual reading Marx as he operated the very capital that was stealing his surplus value. But when you think about it, there’s probably no better place to read socialist philosophy than on the factory floor, and no place more likely to make you realise that while working-class people could be bolshie at times, they were not natural revolutionaries. (Marx, of course, turned out to be partly wrong: my factory workmates were staunch Labor voters, and perhaps this groundedness explains why a lefty like me stayed in the moderate Left of the Labor Party, while the upper-class Marxists I knew at university slummed it for a while in Trotskyist sects before selling out and entering business.)
Back in the cafeteria, my mother was taking on capitalism much more effectively, not with revolutionary philosophy but with kindness. Her blind eye was routinely turned to the most important of rules. She always gave me too much change from my lunch, which everyone else knew full well and laughed at. Anyone who was short of cash to pay for their meals – usually younger workers who would blow their pay well before the end of the week – was fed nonetheless with mountainous portions and given an honour system; Mum simply recorded their debts in her little black book and entered the transaction on pay day. No one ever failed to pay. The manager knew of this ruse but officially pretended not to.
This sort of spirit was the oil that kept the factory running: people who had to suddenly leave work for an hour for important family or medical reasons were covered by their friends; those coming in late were occasionally clocked on and off by others on their shifts. If Fred had to start early, for instance, the managers looked the other way while he ducked home in the car to pick up Mum, who couldn’t drive, so she could be there when the breakfast shift ended. Family members and friends were given jobs. (Do they call it nepotism at the big law firms and broking houses when the partners give their children a placement, then a job and then a partnership in the business?) Looking at the old factory newsletters today, a few things catch my eye.
BIRTHS To Dawn Sutherland (filling floor) and Andrew a daughter Tenisha. Grand-daughter to Audrey Glover (canteen cashier).
That’s the announcement of the birth of my sister Dawn’s first baby, my first niece, in 1989.
RETIREES Max Moore (fitter and turner Factory Engineering). Max gave more than 24 years’ service to the company and almost as many as a shop steward representing his fellow employees. A tough negotiator, Max was principled and caring. He has purchased a new car and intends to spend some time travelling the country during his retirement.
That was the union rep – a part of the team, for all his faults. It’s a good bet his new car had snaked past Dad on the assembly line in the GMH plant a few hundred yards away. He could drive it across Australia knowing it gave employment to his neighbours and friends.
THE NIGHT OWLS Engineering back shift consists of a team of 12 people under the supervision of Doug Tarbeck, with Roger Venn as Leading Hand. Including Roger there are four fitters, three trade assistants, an electrician and a greaser plus three services personnel, a boiler attendant, trimmer and a pump house attendant. It may be the nature of the job, or the people themselves, but working while others have gone to bed seems to encourage a certain independence of thought and self-reliance. Perhaps they become used to decision-making and sorting things out for themselves.
What follows are details of how the twelve had streamlined the night shift production processes, saving the company serious money. Here, the skills of working people and their contribution to efficiency and profit was well recognised by the management team. They didn’t have degrees but it seemed they knew what they were doing and did it well.
There are also stories about the success of the three Heinz netball teams, the Heinz women’s indoor cricket team, the Heinz running team and the twenty separate Heinz ten-pin bowling teams, whose season culminated in a grand final and an awards night at which everyone got a trophy; these factory workers didn’t bowl alone. A long story covers the fun had at the end-of-tomato-season ‘Academy Awards Night’ for departing casual workers, organised by permanently employed volunteers. Even the casuals were treated like human beings by having their service acknowledged; often, if the managers could keep them on, they did.
Our little community’s strengths extended beyond the factory gate. At bingo nights at the Dandenong Workers’ Club, where many of the factory workers were members, someone in hard financial times might suddenly find that they had won the jackpot. When economists and accountants make up numbers to prove their absurd theories or mislead the taxman, society is the loser; at Heinz the faked figures were on the side of the angels.
That’s how life was for the 1200 souls (up to 1600 at the peak of the tomato season) in the republic of Heinz back then. The economic reformers today would scoff and label their community-minded antics as inefficiency, luxury and ‘entitlement’, and some of the more ideological analysts at right-wing think-tanks like the Centre for Independent Studies or the Institute of Public Affairs might even call it ‘theft’, but it’s hard to see how such trifling indulgences could sink so large a battleship as Heinz. Indeed, the original calculation was that the sort of friendly work environment Heinz created and tolerated for so long would build a strong, loyal and hardworking workforce, and it’s my bet that was right. But when the creative destroyers seized economic power in Canberra and began looking for award trade-offs, all that human decency, all that loyalty – all those things they couldn’t measure and therefore regarded as worthless – had to go. What gets measured gets improved, as they say; everything else gets vaporised.
In 1992 the Heinz workforce was halved, and a few years later halved again. Dawn had already left to become a full-time mother, although she returned for seasonal work. Mum took a package at about this time. Fred took his in 1997, after thirty-five years of service. And then in 2000 the factory closed its gates for good. Seven weeks’ pay and four weeks’ for every year, up to a total of fifteen. So a maximum of sixty-seven weeks’ pay – not bad for those who found other work straightaway, but for many it was the last full-time, permanent job they ever had. As Shakespeare might have put it: This happy breed of men and women, this little world, this precious stone set in the silver sea … this blessed plot, this factory, this company, this Doveton. All now gone.
Like the Holden plant, you can still find the Heinz factory: you turn down a laneway off ‘Progress Way’ in Dandenong. The guardhouse is gone but you can still make out where it used to stand. The footpath we all once took into the factory proper is still there. It used to take you to the changing rooms and the clock-on point, where you would press your card into the slot with a kerthump, before filing it on the wall. Now it’s just empty tarmac; in fact, I realise soon after stepping out of the car that I am standing pretty much on top of the cafeteria. It’s a parking lot. Joni Mitchell wrote a song about this sort of thing.
The space has changed so much since I worked here thirty years before that I find it hard to visualise where everything once was. Panda has come with me and is just as perplexed as me. At a large factory building his politician’s charm gets him talking to a young guy, who tells us he rents the space as a warehouse for his small business, which distributes the Yellow Pages to the surrounding suburbs. He seems genuinely sympathetic to our nostalgic quest to find out what had happened to the place, so he offers me a fluoro vest and tells me to feel free to walk around and take photographs; ‘just pop the vest back when you finish.’
As at Holden, I can see one or two people rattling around in the cavernous space. At the far end, which is leased by another company, trucks can be seen coming and going, but again there are only a handful of employees to be seen where once hundreds would have swarmed. We find that the old R&D building – where new food products and their marketing strategies were once devised – is now a logistics training space for Toll. Below the roof line you can still make out the words ‘Research and Development’, although the sign that once hung there is long gone.
Amid it all, where the Dry Goods building stood and barrels of cucumbers and crates of tomatoes once awaited canning, there is now a Hino trucks distribution and spare parts centre. I walk into the showroom and ask a friendly older man at the counter what he knows about the site. Not much, he says. I ask him how many people he sees walking around the site each day. He can’t really say, but he reckons that about forty or so work there for Hino. At least 1200 people once made things here; now well under 100 on-sell things made in places like China.
On my second visit I take Fred. Having driven a forklift around the site for more than thirty-five years, he calmly walked around it with me, pointing: ‘Sterilising, labelling and packing were there … The two-storey kitchen was next to that … The boiler house beyond that, at the end of the site.’ Some of the original buildings remain. The Yellow Pages warehouse had been the Finished Goods Store. ‘And over there,’ he says, ‘is where you worked.’ It was the Preparation Shed.
Ignoring the ‘Do Not Enter’ signs, I walk in. (In warehousing, it seems, the best camouflage colours are fluorescent yellow and orange.) Yes, he’s right. In fact, I can see the very spot where my little piece of surplus-value-extracting capital had been fixed to the floor, and where my Marxism had started to evaporate along with the tomato pulp. The familiar saw-toothed roof, with its thousands of square feet of glass, is intact, the dirty machinery is gone and the floor stretches out pristine, functionless and worker-free except for one or two men chatting next to an exceedingly clean-looking truck.
My bearings restored, I could now see it all again: sauces, beans, tomatoes and soups plopping into the sterilised cans; Dawn and her friends labelling and packing them after the lids were closed; Fred lifting them with his forklift onto trucks and off to the supermarket; Mum further beyond in the Cafeteria keeping the crew happy and contented; all well with our little world.
Some of the Heinz buildings remain, but what became of the people? I know about Mum, Fred and Dawn, of course, but what of the others? I am given a great chance to find out because I’ve been invited to the five-yearly reunion of the factory’s former employees. Despite the fact that the place closed fifteen years ago, the old social club committee still has 800 people on its books, nearly 400 of whom have managed to make it. The venue – the Berwick Bowls Club – looks eerily familiar; I realise I’ve been here before, having watched Kim Beazley deliver a speech I’d helped write on the evening of 9/11; he was still on his feet when the first tower came down and snuffed out any hope he’d had of winning the forthcoming election. That’s another story, of course, but had those planes missed those towers, things here might not have turned out so badly. Perhaps Kim would have made it more bearable.
I move around the room, chatting to people and taking notes. I meet people who worked at Heinz for twenty-eight years, thirty-five years and forty years. I meet the man who closed the gates on the day the plant closed; another who had been made redundant and was then rehired the next year to demolish the buildings, which took three years. He did well out of it, having received a hefty redundancy payout and plenty of super, followed by a job, but he tells me he’d have preferred to have kept his original job. I talk to people from Baby Foods, people from Marketing, people from Payroll who tell me of the gradual winding-down of the place; managers who claim the union’s unreal demands were to blame; other managers who tell me the factory needed too much capital injected into it to remain viable, there being asbestos in the roof and the boiler room that had to be removed; and other managers who come clean on the fact that there were un-unionised workers in New Zealand on half the pay and half the holidays and half the conditions (and who, I guess, were probably prepared to eat stale sandwiches in some cold and crummy shed they called a canteen), which made the decision to close a no-brainer. One former tradesman tells me he helped dismantle and ship the ‘hydrons’ – the giant hydroscopic sterilising units for tin cans – off to New Zealand, where our Heinz products are now largely made. It’s the old story: there was more money to be made where labour was cheaper, and it was all the unions’ fault. Isn’t it always?
I put this to Dawn’s friends, the packing girls Cheryl, Anne, Lorene and Louise, whose faces I vaguely remember and who have a different take on what happened. Sure, they had occasionally gone on strike, sometimes over big pay disputes and other times over matters that to the managers seemed trivial – but then the managers weren’t earning unskilled wages, and didn’t have to work when it was hot in summer, cold in winter and noisy all the time. I quickly realise, though, that the concept of industrial relations – which came naturally to me, having read Marx’s early draft of Das Kapital up there on my machine – is not what Dawn’s friends first think of when they talk of their work at Heinz. In their memories, Heinz wasn’t a series of strikes or class struggles, but more like a family. That sounds suspiciously like just the sort of sentimentality you might hear at a reunion after a couple of drinks, but when I pursue the idea I can tell that it is genuinely felt; even the managers say something similar. Being at Heinz, with its steady long-term workforce, its friendly cafeteria that was rather like a lounge room, its social and sporting clubs, its Christmas parties, its friendships and marriages (and divorces) and babies and grandchildren, its share of conflict and tragedies but also of common effort and achievements, its rhythms of soups and spaghetti in winter, tomatoes and overtime in summer, its sheer predictability and employment certainty, its air of being there not just for the boss and the managers and the shareholders but for everyone, was just like being in an extended family.
Dawn’s friend Cheryl is the most voluble, although the others are nodding and butting in with comments, and she says she looks back on the closure of the factory with genuine sorrow. So I ask the obvious question: for her, was working life better back then? She stares at me with utter incredulity and says, ‘Oh, yeah!’
Then it comes out, like a message in a bottle that has just washed ashore and been uncorked. Fifteen years later, instead of working in manufacturing, she’s working as a storeman for a labour-hire firm in a warehouse, earning just $17 per hour ($16.86 to be precise, or $640.90 a week; the employers’ lobby wanted it to be just $630.70), with no union, no overtime, no real job security and not even a canteen; some fellow employees even have to buy their own safety boots, and no one gets the sort of Christmas bonus they used to get at Heinz. It’s no surprise she’s not enjoying it much at all. Worst of all, she says, is that as she is now living on her own, without a husband’s job to help support her, she can only just get by. Whenever she needs to get ahead, she has to take on a second job – not at double time, not even at time and a half, but at single time (yes, $16.86 per hour). The better life promised to us by all the managerialist politicians and their favourite economists and their boosters in the press clearly hasn’t been delivered to everyone.
A few days later I read a front-page story in the Age which reports that, after two decades of uninterrupted economic growth, there are now 1.5 million Australians living in poverty. Apparently, we haven’t reformed enough yet. Cheryl’s story is a narrative more informative and eloquent than statistical abstractions like Gini coefficients could ever hope to be. Her share of GDP has clearly been redistributed elsewhere, perhaps paying the school fees of an accountant living in some leafy suburb she will never afford, and her feeling of inferiority has become someone else’s feeling of superiority.
In the last scene of Rob Reiner’s terrific coming-of-age film Stand By Me, the central character, Gordie Lachance (played by Richard Dreyfus), who has escaped his home town and its constrictions to become a writer, is lamenting the loss of his childhood friend Chris (River Phoenix), who has just been killed in a senseless knife attack in a fast-food restaurant. The death pricks at his memory and inspires him to write the story that becomes the narrative of the film, a story about his old town, told in flashback. Thinking about how to end the story, Gordie turns to his word processor and writes: ‘I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?’
The movie became an instant classic because it appeals to a very human yearning most of us share: to know what has happened to the friends from our childhood. It’s the sort of impulse that makes us go to school reunions, often against our better judgment, only to leave early and disappointed. I’m now over fifty, and it’s one of the great satisfactions of my life that I’ve managed to keep in close contact with virtually all of the friends I had when I was twelve.
It’s a truism that every cohort passing through a school or college considers itself unique, somehow better than the ones that came before and after. We’ve all felt this, only to realise later that it was an error induced by perspective. But something tells me that my school friends were indeed extraordinary. Let me tell you about them briefly, because they’re central to my story about what’s happened to Doveton. Their names and nicknames are the sort you’d expect of boys of that generation: Panda and Jim I’ve already mentioned, but there was also ‘Chook’, ‘Hen’, ‘Molesy’ (there was an animal theme to our nicknames), Nick, Grant, Dave, Chris, John (who was ‘Pommy’, for obvious reasons), Henry and George.
For the sons of mostly factory workers they’ve all done incredibly well, becoming, in the order mentioned above, a state Labor MP and minister, a draughtsman and factory manager, an IT engineer and now small-business owner, a banker, another banker, an insurance executive, another IT engineer, an owner of a labour-hire company, an investor, a park ranger, an international development consultant and an accountant. Their wives, many Doveton girls, have done just as well. Some return to Doveton regularly to look after their ageing parents, but all have more or less left and moved to newer or fancier suburbs, even living overseas for a time in low-tax jurisdictions, and they’ve educated their children at supposedly better and definitely more expensive schools than our old high school. While I went the furthest academically, most would, I guess, be better off financially than me (and if not, the reason is divorce).
As Panda never forgets to remind us, the Labor Party made much of our success possible. Our old high school – Doveton High, long since flattened to make way for a housing estate – was given special ‘disadvantaged schools’ funding by Gough Whitlam and by Kim Beazley’s father, Kim Beazley senior, and ours was the first cohort of students to benefit fully. Ours was the first in a number of years to be offered the Higher School Certificate – before then, the smarter kids transferred to other schools close by – and after us, the sixth form lasted for only a couple more years, with smaller enrolments and a narrower subject range before it ran out of puff. And when we got to TAFE and university they were free.
Education has taken us far, but the true context that made our upward mobility possible was a local economy that gave every family one or more jobs. Moderate affluence, not economic deregulation, is the magic ingredient that gave us our start, and it can do it for others. In the absence of that moderate affluence in a deregulated world, downward mobility is the result. Doveton used to create success stories like that. The question is: can it do so again?
I’m generally against statistics – you will note their comparative absence in this book – not because of what they tell us, which can sometimes be useful, but because they make it too easy to ignore what is going on in front of our very eyes. It’s too tempting, isn’t it, to sit in front of a screen in a warm office, look at lines of averages on graphs edging upwards and believe that, for everyone, life is getting better. The big-picture studies so beloved of the managerialists, like those by the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling (NATSEM), suggest that over the last decade and a half, every section of the population has got wealthier, even if some have got far wealthier than others.
According to NATSEM, the lowest 20 per cent of income earners have seen their standard of living increase by 27.1 per cent since 1985, and even welfare recipients are 11.9 per cent better off (although those who get their income largely from capital saw a rise of 64.8 per cent). It’s abstractions and nationwide averages like this that make us complacent about what’s really happening in the places we don’t really want to know about. So what do the non-averaged statistics, the ones about places like Doveton, tell us?
Doveton was created by the Victorian Housing Commission in 1955 with the specific goal of providing housing for employees of the Big Three factories of GMH, International Harvester and H. J. Heinz. By its completion in 1966, around 2500 homes had been built. There were certainly plenty of jobs for the families living in them. In 1970 those three factories alone employed the following numbers of people in permanent, full-time jobs: GHM 4500, Heinz 1200, and International Harvester 1750 – a total of 7450. By 1995, this had been reduced to GHM 300, Heinz 350, International Harvester (now the truck manufacturer IVECO) 600, for a total of 1250. In 2015 the totals are GMH (now HSPO) 250, Heinz 0, IVECO 290 – a total of 540. That’s a net loss of 6910 permanent, full-time jobs.
To put it another way, in 1970 there were three jobs in these factories for every Doveton family; by 1995 there was one job for every two families; today there is just one job for every five families. Remember, this is for a community that was created with the specific purpose of housing employees for these three factories. If you take those jobs away but keep the houses there, and if you continue to fill them with the sorts of people who need low-skilled factory jobs, an interesting social experiment begins.
The net result? Consider this: in 1966 the unemployment rate in Doveton was less than 1 per cent (below the national average of just under 2 per cent), by 1991, at the height of the ‘recession we had to have’, it was 19 per cent (the national average then being around 10 per cent), and in 2015, after no fewer that twenty-three years of uninterrupted economic growth, it stands at 21.1 per cent (the national average being 6.1 per cent). Twenty years after the factories began closing down, the unemployment rate in Doveton is actually higher than during one of the most psychologically destructive recessions since the Great Depression.
During those dark recession years when the economic reform revolution reached its terrible apogee, my father, my mother, my youngest sister and her husband were all made redundant, meaning that four out of eight working adults in my family, all of whom were still living in suburbs adjoining Doveton, lost their jobs. (My brother-in-law, who back then was a unionised auto worker, has only once voted Labor since.) And this does not take into account the fact that the definition of ‘unemployment’ has changed, making the comparison even worse. In recent years, other jobs have been created in the warehousing and small-scale manufacturing hinterland to the suburb’s south, but clearly these jobs have not gone to the people of my old suburb. For places like Doveton, the recovery has been a largely jobless one. That is the problem.
The effect of this on the material quality of life of Doveton’s residents has been dramatic. In 1966, 10 per cent were in the lowest income category, by 1991 that had risen to 37 per cent, and in the 2011 Census 34.9 per cent of residents were still classed as ‘low-income households’ – which means they earned less than $600 per week, or roughly the minimum wage of one working parent. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ standard measure of advantage and disadvantage – Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas, or SEIFA – Doveton is now the fourth-most disadvantaged suburb in Victoria.
Perhaps the saddest thing to contemplate is that there are many Dovetons – many once affluent public housing suburbs that were built to support thriving industries, but that have been left behind by the revolution. Doveton itself is probably not even the poorest of them. In Dandenong, immediately next door to Doveton, unemployment is 21.7 per cent. Norlane, a Victorian Housing Commission estate built around the Ford factory in Geelong, has an unemployment rate of 20.7 per cent. Broadmeadows, in Melbourne’s north, another Victorian Housing Commission site, which is highly dependent on the Ford factory in nearby Campbellfield, has an unemployment rate of 25.7 per cent. Elizabeth, in Adelaide’s north, is a South Australian Housing Trust site, developed in large part for workers in the nearby Holden factory, and it now has a frightening unemployment rate of 32.6 per cent. Remember, all these car factories will be gone before the end of 2017, when all Australian car manufacturing will cease, and their unemployment rates, which are already as high as or higher than Doveton’s, will be far higher still. These places are potentially heading towards a social catastrophe.
What we have done in places like Doveton is create a new economic class. It’s true that, for many working-class people, the changes of the past thirty years have been liberating. We’ve coined a name for these people – ‘aspirationals’ – and their success is something to celebrate. Much has been written about this aspirational class, which has many fair-weather champions, so I won’t detail its considerable success here, except to say that there are suburbs full of people like this not far from Doveton, and obviously many individual examples in Doveton itself. But while we lavish attention on the aspirationals’ success, we’ve turned our backs on their former workmates and neighbours who didn’t succeed when the economy was pulled out from under them. We didn’t do enough to help them succeed, but we should have.
So who are they? I don’t like the term ‘underclass’, with its condescending connotations of depravity and crime, and its assumption that the victims are themselves to blame for their misfortune. This is not a law-and-order issue but an economic and social issue. ‘Housos’ is another insulting and degrading epithet – and anyway, this isn’t about housing, it’s about people. Above all, this is an employment issue. So let’s call this class what it really is: the ‘non-working class’, or perhaps more accurately the ‘once-working class’. Our economic revolution has created it, and we collectively bear a moral responsibility to remove the ‘non’ and the ‘once’ from its names.
The economic reformers led us to believe – in fact, promised would probably not be too strong a word – that greater productivity, by leading to higher economic growth, would make the existence of this sort of class unlikely: that all boats would float as the tide rose and everyone could aspire to something better. Even they couldn’t have dreamed that their high tide would last for twenty-three years. But here it is: Australia rich, Doveton and other places like it poor.
A wise person might consider the possibility that the two results might be linked, and that the way we have pursued growth has prevented many people in places like Doveton from sharing in the rewards. In the past, people in these places were shielded from the full winds of the market to help us create a fairer and better society, but now the shield has been ripped away and such places have been exposed to a hurricane. This is more than just a quantitative change in our economy – it is a new economy without a heart or conscience. We used to create wealth by including places like Doveton; now we create wealth by excluding them. And in doing so, could it be that we’ve changed our economy in some fundamental way, without fully realising the import of what we are doing, removing not just the goal of equality from our calculations but removing moral considerations more generally? And could it be that in doing so, we’ve changed ourselves as a people? This is what the aggregated national statistics don’t tell us.
Doveton is the suburb that was murdered. And it is not alone. Its continuing existence is an embarrassment to the economic reformers because it proves that their theories were either wrong or heartless. When the suburb’s factories shut, Doveton suffered a mini depression that, like a runaway steamroller, smashed everything in its path. That steamroller is still on the loose across the land. Other places got the creation, but Doveton and places like it got the destruction. Twenty years on, little has changed, as I was to see.