An Economy is Not a Society (6 page)

The strange fact that the sign remains seems a symbol of something important, although it's not easy to say precisely what. A bureaucratic stuff-up, perhaps? Evidence, maybe, that the bureaucrats who closed the school have a strong sense of irony? Or proof that, when it all comes down to it, no one
really
cares what happens in Doveton, and that the destruction of places like this doesn't even count as a source of political embarrassment? That's my guess. What we do know is that the government public-relations expert who once commanded the sign to be raised couldn't even be bothered to order it taken down.

I take one last look at the sign before driving off to another abandoned school site – this time my old primary school, which is in a similar state of neglect. To my surprise, I find it surrounded by a three-metre-high fence, which must have been erected after I exposed the school's scandalous state in the national press the year before. I later take Panda back to it, and we walk across the remains of the old adventure playground where we first became friends. He tells me that at least people are listening, even if the only effect has been to encourage officials to try to hide the place from view.

As I scale the old school gate to cross the road to have a look at my cousins' old house – which is in a state almost as shocking as that of my own old family home – I look back to the school and think of Shelley and his romantic poet friends who had something to tell us about forgotten civilisations. Around the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands of official indifference stretch far away.

If a picture paints a thousand words, then the image of a shuttered shop is an essay in social decline. You can see the shutters by day, up high, wound around their covered rollers like aluminium foil in its cardboard box. But at night they come down with a rattle and a thump, in a noisy indictment of a society that has gone wrong.

There are no shutters above the frontages in the wealthier shopping strips, despite there being a lot more to steal; go to Albert Park, for example, and you won't see them at all. (For this we can thank supply-side economics, which helpfully supplies depressed neighbourhoods with necessary numbers of the young, the unemployed, the drug-addicted and the idle.)

And from memory there were no shutters in our shopping strip when I was a child. It's five minutes' walk from my old street, and about three from my primary school. My mother worked on the cash register in the milk bar; it must have been before 1972, when she started at Heinz. Walking back into the milk bar now evokes the strangest feeling, because while it has changed completely, it has yet remained completely unchanged.

I remember the glass counters full of stock of all descriptions – lollies which we used to buy in five-cent mixed bags, tea, coffee, biscuits, cakes, breakfast cereals, cheese and cold meats. There was a big metal meat slicer, from which my mother would produce slithers of sweet ham or continental sausage into our palms when the shop's owner wasn't looking. A large freezer contained Peters and Streets ice creams, and cheap toys stood on the shelves on the wall behind the counter, which Mum would occasionally buy for us as small treats. It was never a fashionable delicatessen; perhaps closer to a bright and cheery 7-Eleven. But now …

The best word I can use to describe the old milk bar now is
poor
– in the economic sense. Looking around, it seems not a lick of paint has touched its walls for half a century. My guess is that the only thing in the place that has been replaced is the refrigerator – which was probably made in China. The floor, then brightly coloured concrete, adorned with painted footprints advertising a now defunct childhood confectionary, has been discoloured and worn down in the places of highest traffic, like the stone floors in ancient churches. The almost empty shelves are watched over by a proprietor who, I guess from the kitchen-like smells of the place, might live out the back.

On my first visit back to the shop I get chatting to the cashier. I figure she's most likely the proprietor, as it's hard to see how any shop as poor as this could possibly support a living wage; it has to be family-run. I tell her how my mother once worked here, and how I haven't been into the shop for about thirty years. When I say the shop hasn't changed much, she tells me in return that the neighbourhood has changed enormously over that time. It's no longer safe, she said, and I should be careful walking around, even though it's only mid-morning.

As I walk down the strip and drink my Coke, I see a policeman photographing the smashed window of one of the adjoining stores. A young man with the broken physique one normally associates with severe addiction approaches me for a strange conversation about daytime television; he soon walks off, carrying a six-pack of pre-mixed drinks. The danger seems more comic than scary; I can't imagine feeling afraid in a place like this, where I'd felt so safe as a child, but then I don't live there anymore. And the cause of rational fear is, after all, cumulative negative experience.

The next time I come back, a year later, the shop has changed completely. Not the décor, which is still untouched, but the food shelves, whose contents have been replaced by the cheapest junk from the crummiest factories in the world. The milk bar is now a mixed business, part milk bar, part plastic junk from Bangladesh or China. Outside, a lonely sandwich board stands on the footpath, looking like it has been painted by a child. It reads: ‘$2 Shop.'

At least there's only one $2 shop here. At the bigger shopping strip on the other side of Doveton I count three of them, plus a charity store run by one of the bigger welfare agencies. I recognised one of the $2 shops as the baby and children's clothing store that my aunt, Anna, had run back in the late 1960s and early '70s. The clothes she sold would almost certainly have been produced here in Australia. A lot of my and my sisters' childhood clothes came from there, made by women working in factories in Melbourne's northern suburbs.

That thought reminded me of a conversation with another aunt, Ena (one of Arthur Calwell's original beautiful blonde Baltic refugees who came here in the late 1940s), who told me how, when she worked as a salesgirl in the Dandenong Coles Variety Store back in the mid-1960s, she used to sell the very garments that her mother had stitched in a clothing factory in Bendigo. Thank God such things as clothes are all now made in Bangladesh, because the law of comparative advantage tells us clearly that there's no need for us to make them here, and it would be a sin to contradict the law of comparative advantage.

At the end of the strip is a real-estate agent's office that used to be a branch of the Commonwealth Bank. In its window there is a listing for one of the shops, a rather well-presented fruit and vegetable store, for sale to bids over $50,000. A whole double-fronted shop, with two car spaces, going for just north of fifty grand? In the inner city, just renovating a café or a restaurant might set you back a million.

The old Doveton Post Office is now owned or leased by some evangelical sect, which, no doubt in addition to undertaking sundry unspecified good works, believes in speaking in tongues, divine healing, a real physical hell and the imminent second coming of Jesus. They also post their BSB and account details on their website in case you want to make an electronic funds transfer to help out with the battle against Satan. Later, I come across a similar church squatting in a vandalised building in a street where an ancient factory once stood and a woman was savagely murdered last year. An economic development officer tells me that evangelical sects have targeted Doveton because of the cheap rents, and that one of the pastors here is infamous for inciting hatred of Muslims.

As I walk around the shopping centre, having bought in one of the $2 shops a $10 soccer ball for my sons (the stitching of which lasts just a few days), I think unkind thoughts about economic reformers. But isn't it refreshing to know that they have so successfully liberated all of us from the pathetically unsophisticated lives, crummy consumer goods and poverty of our past? The unemployment rate here in Doveton is ten times that of the wealthiest suburbs, and fully two or three times that of some other very proletarian-sounding places. And we're thirty years into an era of economic reform that was meant to make us all better off!

Then it strikes me: it's Doveton and other places like it that have paid the price for the gains the rest of country has made. It's only because places like Doveton are smashed up – their old communities dispersed, their factories closed, their unions broken, their skilled craftsmen forced to work two menial jobs to make ends meet, their political leaders left morally bereft and philosophically rudderless, their youngsters unemployed and drinking before midday, their cheery little corner stores turned into $2 shops, their front yards turned into scrapyards and their schools stripped of the metal from their roofs and the cables from their floors – that everyone else feels so prosperous. It's because of all the sacrifices that the people of Doveton have involuntarily made that people in more affluent places get to drive their Audis and BMWs, build their schools new campuses in China, send their boys on cricket tours of England and their daughters on gallery expeditions to Paris, make their children the leaders of tomorrow, convert their income to capital and super, rake in franked dividends from their Commonwealth Bank and Telstra shares, shop in New York, own five investment properties, and get their accountants to arrange it all so the taxman – so willing nowadays to turn a blind eye – doesn't know the half of it. It's only because Doveton is down that they are up, because Doveton is poor that they are rich, because Doveton has been made to feel inferior that they can feel effortlessly superior. Every coin has a flipside, every gain has a cost; for every winning team there's a losing one, for every Hawthorn and Point Piper and North Adelaide and Peppermint Grove there's a Doveton.

By coming to places like Doveton, you see plainly that wealth isn't just created, it's distributed, and you understand that the way it's created determines the way it's distributed. You see that in order for the economic reformers to unchain the nation, Doveton had to be placed in chains. And it's time Australia and its leaders owned up to the logic of what they've done.

We're constantly told that this sort of thinking isn't the way we should go; that it's ‘class warfare' and ‘the politics of envy', and that it seeks to drag others down when the goal is to lift everyone up. But that's a cheap and easy line and nothing more, because Doveton and places like it remind us that while the economy has been unchained for thirty years, the reformers' promise of lifting everyone up hasn't been fulfilled, and places like Doveton have actually gone backwards. If there's been an outbreak of envy, it's among the well-off who envy the unemployed for their dole and welfare payments, which they have savagely reduced to help even up the score.

It didn't have to be this way. We could have modernised differently, with a little more thought for what was going to happen to the people at the bottom, the people for whom our now destroyed old society had been built. The Labor Party, at least, should have thought about this. Now it's time to choose another way.

Bouncing my ball, I make my way back to my car. I take out my camera and lean on the bonnet, looking over at the shops, hoping to get a shot of the shutters coming down; it's already after five. But of course for the owners of such shops, the long day doesn't end at the traditional closing hour.

Something about it all makes me want to rebel, but my sadness is impotent in the face of a decline so profound and irreversible. I can't reopen the factories and give Cheryl and her workmates back their overtime, or restore my old streets, schools and shopping strips to their former, sunny glory. A writer – even one who is politically well connected like me – can do little except put words in a speech, and those are easily ignored and forgotten, even when spoken by a prime minister. How, I wonder, has it all been allowed to happen without anyone in power saying, ‘Enough'?

The answer is simple: there was a revolution. We just called it something else.

CHAPTER 4

THE LOST REVOLUTION

T
he smart backpacker chooses his travel reading carefully, preferably a single paperback equivalent in size to
War and Peace.
That's how in 1985 I ended up reading E. P. Thompson's
The Making of the English Working Class
by a pool at the University of California. It must have been near an air force base because my memory is of watching B-52 bombers taking off and lazily circling to cruising height, off on patrol, perhaps even to their failsafe points, should the balloon suddenly go up – which I thought ironic, given Thompson's role in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Thompson's book – 958 pages of small, close-set type – was one that every serious left-wing historian of the time had to read but few did, the way every serious Christian one day plans to read the Old Testament, and every Young Liberal Ayn Rand's
The Fountainhead.
As a book it was so intellectually overwhelming that one needed a gap year to take it on, which is what I now had. I had spent the previous half-year since completing my BA doing shift work in various canning and assembly factories to save for the trip, so in important ways I was in the mood for Thompson's message about how the working-class communities that reached their zenith in places like Dandenong and Doveton created themselves out of the violence of the Industrial Revolution.

For reasons that will become obvious, Thompson's thesis is worth recounting briefly. At the end of the eighteenth century, the English working class of handloom weavers, agricultural labourers, ironworkers, miners and the like still lived a largely rural existence, employed at home or in small workshops, with strong connections to village or parish life. Yet by the early 1830s many had been agglomerated into large factories under the discipline of the overseer and the mechanical clock, and their once middling towns like Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds had been transformed into the ‘dark satanic mills' of Blake's poem, with thousands upon thousands of factory hands crammed into dangerous slums, where they died young and poor. The old world had been physically transformed: bricked over, blackened, cheapened, uglified.

In the long run and on average, Britons ended up wealthier, the economists tell us, but the economic transformation was carried through with callousness and violence, according to a set of economic ideas imposed from on high, totally unrelieved by any sense of participation in a common project for the national good. Its ideology, according to Thompson, was that of the masters and the masters alone. In barely thirty years – the same period of time that spans from the mid-1980s to today – an economy that had previously served the whole community now served a narrow class of winners, practically enslaving the rest. It wasn't until the political system caught up half a century later that the material benefits began to be spread with any degree of justice. Thompson's book suggests a question: did it have to be done that way? This, in some ways, is our question too.

It's not surprising that people resisted this change, sometimes violently, by smashing up the power looms and threshing machines that had taken their jobs, and by forming unions, some of whose members were transported to Australia for their troubles. We have too easily forgotten that the horrors of the industrial revolution – the fourteen-hour days, the pregnant women down mines, the stunted children up chimneys, the life of hunger followed by an early death – existed in the folk memory of Australia's working-class settlers. (The same nightmare still haunts trade union officials whenever they hear the term ‘WorkChoices'.) These horrors are what many early settlers came here to escape. Their idea of Australia was a society that worked for everyone, not just mine owners and factory owners and landholders. After crossing the Atlantic on my backpacking trip in 1985 I went to the Belfast streets where my parents grew up; I saw the cramped, dark flat in which they lived when they were first married and immediately understood why they had got on a ship to Australia and never gone back. In Doveton, life was stupendously better.

Something similar to E. P. Thompson's story of England in the first three decades of the 1800s has happened in Australia between the mid-1980s and today. Not the immiserisation (obviously, thanks to the victories of social democracy over the last century in creating a welfare state, there is no equivalent to the mass destitution of that time), but the pace and scale of social and economic change. The transformation from the industrial to the post-industrial era has been so total as to constitute the sociological equivalent of an extinction event.

The queues of workers' cars lining up to get into the factories – gone. The publicly owned banks and utilities – gone, or about to go. The union movement, which once covered half the employed workforce and rivalled the state for economic power – mostly gone (it's down now to just 12 per cent coverage in the private sector, replaced in part by the welfare lobby, which has had to step into the breach to speak up for the working poor). Secure, full-time employment, with its guarantee of holidays, sick pay and promotion – in many industries long gone.

And along with these changes to the world of work, the expectations of equal chances in life are also gone for many. The dream of home-ownership for all – gone. The levelling idea of the public school, attended by the children of factory manager and factory worker alike – gone. The easy-to-get apprenticeships that enabled young working-class Australians to get a toehold in the economy – gone. The hope of natural advancement through a firm, backed by in-house training – gone. Just as England's green and pleasant fields were paved over with brick, its vocations replaced by the machine, its pastoral life rent asunder by industrialisation, in just thirty years our little world, with its factories and the communities they supported, has been made extinct, wiped out like the dinosaurs by Professor Schumpeter's fiery asteroid. By a revolution.

The big problem for the creative destroyers is that the political, social and economic values of the Australian people were formed during the long post-war era of success, before the factories and the factory communities began to be smashed up. Australians still want their country to make things, still want laws that limit the boss's prerogatives, still want business and the better-off to pay a decent share of taxation, still want more training for their children, and still want a decent social safety net and universal health and education services. This egalitarian and nation-building outlook, which was formed in the post-war period of economic and social success, is the essence of the Australian national consciousness. It is the opposite of what the economic theorists want to impose upon us, and it is the thing that pulls them up every time they overreach. It is only because the Hawke and Keating governments tempered their creative destruction with imaginative and egalitarian social policy that they got as far as they did – and still, by the end, the electorate was waiting for them with its baseball bats. John Hewson ignored egalitarianism completely and failed completely. John Howard kept within eyesight of egalitarian sentiment for a while, but then tried to give Australia WorkChoices. Creative destruction is nothing if not unpopular.

Time and again the economic narrators smugly remind us of the scale of their revolutionary achievement. But they never tell the whole story. Between 1983 and 2015, Australia experienced a social and economic revolution as profound as any in our history; contrary to what they tell us, it has not all been for the good, and it could have been done differently. Those from working-class communities who have failed to gain a higher education, start a business or become successfully self-employed have lost a great deal, even when their take-home pay has increased. As E. P. Thompson put it, writing about the Industrial Revolution: ‘People may consume more goods and become less happy and less free at the same time.' Understanding this fact is essential if we are to build a future that works for everyone.

My sister's old workmate from Heinz, Cheryl, articulated this better than anyone else could. Her working life – and, hence, her life –
was
better before the old economy was wiped out, and no MBA-toting economics adviser can tell her otherwise. And her example is representative of what has happened to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of other working-class Australians.

The national secretary of the National Union of Workers, Tim Kennedy, tells me he has another way of representing this. At gatherings of warehouse workers just like Cheryl (it's in warehousing that many former manufacturing workers now work – my other sister, Pamela, being another), he asks employees to line up from youngest to oldest, and asks how many started their working lives as permanent, full-time employees. Only the oldest workers put up their hands. Then he asks how many started with a full-time job. Those over forty years then put up their hands. Then he asks how many started as casuals. Almost everyone under forty then raises their hands.

Plot that on a graph if you must, because it tells you something. These workers' frustration is obvious. Those who work for major companies are proud to do so and have great loyalty to their firms, partly because they know that direct employment means they will be comparatively well looked after. But those employed indirectly through labour-hire firms, with no direct contractual relationship to the people whose imported products they move from one place to another, are far from happy about it, apart from their relief at having any sort of job at all. Under such arrangements, two-way loyalty is impossible.

It's not unusual, Kennedy says, for warehousing workforces to be 60 per cent casual, 40 per cent permanent. Back at Heinz it was 100 per cent permanent, with casuals only being employed for seasonal work – an arrangement dictated by the logic of nature, not the logic of shareholder interests. And, he estimates, on the many current warehouse sites that once were factories, for every ten old factory workers there is barely one or two storemen or storewomen. Their jobs have gone, their work has intensified, they are not listened to, they are treated with less respect than their forebears, and managements are more ruthless and more tyrannical. Overall, their lives have become nastier and more brutal.

The economic reformers know this, of course; turning the nation's economy into the equivalent of a giant vacuum cleaner that sucks all the wealth and power to the top is the whole point. They don't call it exploitation; they just phrase it differently: it is ‘increased productivity'.

In his 2003 novel
Millennium People,
J. G. Ballard paints a picture of an England in which the professional middle class – de-unionised, largely self-employed, having to work all hours of the day instead of nine to five, totally at the whim of managers, enslaved to mortgages and private school fees, and suffering debilitating and soul-destroying anxieties as a result – is the new proletariat. In the neighbourhood of Chelsea Marina, its members form a new revolutionary class and begin a doomed revolt.

It's an intriguing concept that doesn't quite come off;
Millennium People
is far from Ballard's best book. But it did kick-start a train of thinking that is now, more than a decade after the book's publication, becoming widespread: the idea that while the new economy may have made us wealthier (on average, at least), it hasn't made us happier, and that we're left wanting something more, even if we find it difficult to define exactly what that is.

The reason Ballard's story of middle-class revolt fails is because his obsession with middle-class dystopia blinds him to the real truth about the new economy. In the new economy the true exploited proletariat is not the new middle class, it is the new working class – which is to say the old one, although robbed of its power, freedom and affluence. The new proletariat is made up of the millions of people just like Cheryl. And it is only the anger of these millions of Cheryls, expressed through the ballot box, that stops state and federal governments from taking economic reform to its absolute extreme. They are the ones who are keeping the productivity commissioners and CEO class in check. If our revolution has heroes, here they are.

So why won't all those little people just lie down and let history trample over them? Why can't they see that all this economic reform has been for the best? Why don't they cheer when the economists remove public support for their industries and close down their factories and make them and their children unemployed? How can they be so ungrateful as not to thank Paul Keating for liberating them from their dull, monotonous, supposedly unskilled and unimportant jobs making cars? Can't they read the statistics? Can't they see the upward trends in per-capita GDP that come from liberalised markets? Are they blind to the cheaper price tags on imported goods? Don't they realise their children will thank them for sacrificing everything they have and know? Are they stupid?

There is nothing new about these questions. The issue of whether working-class living standards went up or down between 1800 and 1830 is one of the great historical debates, and it is still being fought. The grandfather of all economic reform, Friedrich von Hayek, wrote about it, which is why right-wing think tanks here in Australia still prosecute the ‘yes' case in this 200-year-old dispute with such extraordinary enthusiasm. If the little people came out of the Industrial Revolution better off, the economic reformers contend, they will come out of our current de-industrial revolution better off too. E. P. Thompson's book leads the ‘no' case, believing that the little people were morally right to resist.

In Australia today, the greatest insult any economist can hurl at you, perhaps apart from ‘rent-seeker', is ‘Luddite', which refers to the nineteenth-century English clothing workers who fought against the introduction of the steam-powered weaving machinery that turned them from respected artisans into unskilled, low-paid factory workers. (In fact, on the morning I wrote this passage the term appeared prominently in the
Australian Financial Review
– in the column of a former Labor leader, no less.) Knowing what we now know about the comparative riches the economy had in store for these workers fifty years into the future, the ‘yes' case argues, they should have folded – taken it on the chin for the nation, so to speak.