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.
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 Dovet
on 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
There 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 simila
r 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.
INTRODUCTION
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.
CHAPTER 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).
CHAPTER 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.
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