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First published in 2006 Copyright © Brendan Gleeson 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email:
[email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Gleeson, Brendan, 1964–. Australian heartlands : making space for hope in the suburbs Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 1 74114 721 2. 1. City planning – Australia. 2. Community development, Urban – Australia. 3. Urban renewal – Australia. I. Title. 307.12160994 Set in 12/14 pt Centaur MT by Midland Typesetters, Australia Printed by Southwood Press, Australia 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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contents Acknowledgements
ix
1 Heart Murmurs
1
2 Settled in Suburbia
9
3 The Great Australian Unsettlement
25
4 The Sea of Uncertainty
51
5 Siege of the Realm: The War on Terra Publica
80
6 Toxic Cities: Urban Australia and the Young
103
7 Cities in the Sand: A Chant of Urban Doom
123
8 Making Space for Hope
145
9 Making Hopeful Spaces
162
Notes
187
Index
206
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This book is for Patrick Troy
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Acknowledgements There is no such thing as a sole authored book. This book tries to distil the wisdom that has been offered to me over the years by colleagues and friends and it condenses the love and material support that I have also received from many generous people. One person has made a major contribution to the book in all of these respects, Ulrike Jung, my adviser and lover. She is, amongst other things, a source of immense intellectual and emotional wisdom on the raising and well-being of children. This wisdom has directly informed my thinking and writing on that subject. No-one will ever properly know how strong the contributions of this remarkable woman to this book were. She rescued the manuscript many times from flaws that I had inflicted on it. She tolerated the intolerable behaviour that frequently afflicts those burdened with book contracts, especially in the latter stages of writing. A salute to my cherished co-author in all things, Ulrike. Praise also for my beloved son Julian, who endured without complaint my complete absorption in the writing of this book. He continues to teach me what a child friendly city must look and feel like. The arrival of his sister, Alison, during the genesis of the book gave added purpose, and additional urgency, to the writing project. Ear plugs are a remarkably useful writing aid. It’s good to name other people who have helped me through the years that led to this book. Patrick Troy has been acknowledged via the book’s dedication. He is simply one of the best people I have ever known. During his extensive and varied career he has made an enormous and selfless contribution to Australia and deserves the gratitude of the nation. That statement will embarrass and perhaps even appal a man who is egalitarian by instinct and by action. He has refused many material rewards in the cause of civic improvement. ix
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I am glad of the opportunity to dedicate this book to him. It is a modest symbolic honour for Australia’s greatest urbanist. Another person who deserves my deepest thanks is Bill Randolph. We toiled together for a number of years in the groundbreaking Urban Frontiers Program in western Sydney, where Bill was director. I learnt much about urban scholarship from him. I believe that Bill is one of the most talented social scientists to have analysed the Australian city. With support from Darren Holloway and Ray Bunker, he has helped to renew the substance of urban studies in this country. Some of Bill’s published work is cited in the pages that follow, but I take the opportunity here to acknowledge the enormous general contribution that he has made to my training as an urbanist. The writing of the book was supported by the award of the Iremonger Prize in 2004. John was a great Australian intellectual and publisher who I had the privilege to know in the last years of his life. I hope he would approve of this book—at least its themes and directions if not necessarily all of its arguments. To receive the inaugural award named in his honour was a moving, not to say overwhelming, experience. I have been much reassured about the award and the writing project by the support and interest of John’s partner, Jane Marceau. John was known for the rigour of his editorial style; certainly that was my experience of him as a co-author, with Nicholas Low, on an earlier writing project. A good editor is surely the best protection that an author has from self-inflicted flaws in design and execution, which can take many monstrous forms. During the writing of this book I was profoundly fortunate to be guided by a passionate and rigorous editor, Rebecca Kaiser. I cannot imagine what the book would have been like without her wise and thoroughgoing counsel and criticism. Rebecca made several painstaking passes through drafts of the manuscript and rescued me from many disasters, both in style and in substance. I thank her deeply for this exceptional contribution.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
xi
Finally, there were others whose help along the way made the writing of this book possible. Pat Fensham, dear friend, always inspires me with his unique and insightful assessments of urban conditions in Australia. He has a special genius in that regard. Paul Mees has also contributed to my thinking on cities. I value greatly his acerbic insights and I am inspired by his struggles with the ecocidal forces that are harming our cities. Ruth Fincher and Nicholas Low taught me much about writing over the years. I count them amongst the most important social scientists working in Australia. I am especially fortunate to have them both as mentors and colleagues. Glyn Davis rescued me from a sinking academic enterprise some years back and encouraged me to continue, with others, the project of reviving Australian urban studies. Glyn is an inspirational scholar and leader. At Griffith University, I have benefited from the intellectual stimulation provided by colleagues, especially Neil Sipe, and from the support of its leadership, notably Ian O’Connor, Lesley Johnson and Lex Brown. The manuscript was given a final polish at University House, Australian National University, and I thank the Master, Professor John Richards, for the indulgence of an extended stay. The soundtrack for this book is The Go Betweens.
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CHAPTER
1
Heart Murmurs Credere quia absurdum Believe because it is absurd
e live in a time of prophets, a political and business elite whose theology is neo-liberalism—a fundamentalism we often term ‘economic rationalism’. It is a theology that takes a very dismal view of governments (although it likes their guns and laws) and frowns upon public endeavour in general. It sees markets as the natural organisers of human affairs. The fundamentalism of the market stands in contrast to the distressing uncertainties of war, terrorism and bewildering social change. Of course, a successful fundamentalism is always able to distance itself from the very chaos and uncertainty it helps to create. Amongst the powerful, belief in this creed remains unshaken by the mounting testimony of its absurd and destructive impacts on Australian society, and most especially its cities. This book is an exercise in social criticism and intends to question the economic and social ‘fundamentals’ that the prophets assure us are correct, if never quite realised (hence the need for ceaseless reform). It focuses on the nation’s heartlands, Australia’s cities and suburbs, which have shouldered the burden of reform and whose foundations are now straining under the accumulating economic, social and environmental debts generated by neo-liberalism. There has been much political attention given to the reform program’s disastrous impacts on rural and regional Australia.
W
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Pork-barrelling has been used in an attempt to silence the cries of anguish from the bush. No such attention, however, has been given to the cities which, it is assumed, have prospered during the era of freewheeling globalisation and chronic restructuring. The silence about the impacts of these great disruptions for the cities has been remarkable. Perhaps it reflects a popular consciousness that wanted to assume that somewhere was benefiting from all the dislocation and agonising uncertainty. ‘No gain without pain!’ the prophets have ceaselessly chorused. Rural Australia thus points an accusing finger at the cities and their indulged suburbs: so this is where all the gain has been hoarded, we want our share! In fact, the cities themselves have been terribly injured by structural reform—perhaps more so, if one accounts for their demographic significance—than has rural and regional Australia. In recent years, even the neo-liberals seem to have given up on the idea that repair and renewal will eventually follow the devastation that reform has visited upon rural Australia. When the even deeper injuries inflicted on the cities manifest, the prophets will doubtless also urge that we adjust to these new unchangeable realities. The position of the less extreme neoliberals is that reform has been a machine for human improvement, only that the benefits have been concentrated in the cities. The task, therefore, of a moderating politics is not to change neo-liberalism, but to better distribute the fruit that falls from this marvellous tree. The view is deeply faulted, if well intentioned, because it fails to comprehend the ways in which cities themselves have been impoverished not enriched by globalisation and restructuring. On the face of it, money and material artefacts have piled up in the main urban regions. This has understandably caused distress, and even fostered envy, amongst those outside the elite metropolitan circuit. But even here, indeed most especially here, in the hubs of the miracle neo-liberal economy, there has been a relentless plundering of social and environmental resources that impoverished the major cities. The legacy is hard, and hardening, problems that will resist any straightforward solution. Money or ‘techno fixes’
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won’t acquit the soaring debts, which include increasingly divided, antagonistic and insecure communities; and mounting ecological dysfunction and resource uncertainties. There is a broad, if disorganised, political awareness that something is wrong with the current model of national development. The injury claims from the regions are only one manifestation of this. But the potential of that awareness to crystallise into an alternative politics of national development remains stymied by two things: the extent to which it continues to allow neo-liberalism to define the boundaries of conventional wisdom (market rule is inevitable, there’s a natural limit to what governments can do); and the fact that the reform program’s damage to the cities and suburbs remains unexamined and unrecognised. It will not be possible to set the compass towards a sustainable not destructive course of national development until the force of these two magnetic distractions is nullified. At the time of last writing (January 2006), neo-liberalism remains ascendant, supported with a variety of minor qualifications by the Commonwealth and every state and territory government. The worm is still at work in the nation’s heartlands. The tasks of criticism and political renewal are urgent. Before making a contribution to these ends, it is necessary first to clear away a major contemporary distraction that is clouding national attention on the problems facing Australia’s heartlands, and the origins of these threats. The distraction is, perhaps, simply the contemporary manifestation of Australia’s long disavowal of its urban character. The cities and the suburbs remain our heartlands. There has been no seachange of heart. Let’s clear this up first.
Australian Idyll A century after Australia Felix disappeared into the jungles of Paraguay,1 it seems that a new Antipodean paradise has been found—this time, most agreeably, very close to home. This New
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Australia is a utopia for sceptical times, a postmodern paradise where sea glimpses not visions provide inspiration, and where all is built on sand. Bernard Salt has announced a ‘Third Australian Culture’, a newly ascendant ‘Culture of the Beach’ that has ended the tiresome old city–bush contest by establishing itself as the real Australian Idyll.2 According to commentary, the new national penchant for surf, sand and rust has been made possible, not to say compulsory, by rising prosperity, technological change (telecommuting) and the discovery that ocean views are vital to happiness. Dream catchers (media) and dream weavers (advertisers) have joined in misty-eyed unison to praise the great national trek from the billabong to the beach. Bush ballads, and other dusty landlubbery, are giving way to sea shanties that promise buried treasures for those sensible enough to take to the seaside. One must be moved by the infectious joy that seems to possess the seachange choristers. Expert observers and advocates doubtless rejoice in the (well remunerated) part they are playing in the great restyling of national life that is producing the Seachange Lifestyle™ in TV dramas, weekend colour supplements and real estate glossies. Their seachange anthem extols a Commonwealth of coastlines, ringed now with superannuated surf communities and their legions of buffed, tanned beachwalkers in earnest observance of the new laws of freedom. The reality of coastal urban change across Australia is much more complex, and a good deal more socially and environmentally problematical, than the choristers would have us believe. This book is about Australia’s cities and will not examine in detail the coastal shift.3 It needs to be pointed out, however, that the so-called Big Shift to the coast has been overplayed. We have long been, and remain, a nation of city dwellers, as Paula Hamilton described us with simple eloquence nearly three decades ago in her book of that name.4 Today, nearly two out of every three Australians resides in one of the large urban regions that ring our state capitals, and there is no sign that this ratio is diminishing.5
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Most Australians prefer to live in the major metropolitan regions, which continue to offer the greatest opportunities for economic, social and cultural satisfaction. Cities are still the main game and occupy the centre fields of Australian life, though, curiously, they are relentlessly denied their proper significance in public discussions. As the Australian geographer, Clive Forster, reminds us: It is in city environments that most of us make our homes, seek employment, enjoy recreation, interact with neighbours and friends, and get education, health care and other services. Our cities determine how we live.6
Public disavowal of our continuing deep commitment to city living is nothing new. Anti-urbanism is a heart murmur that the nation was born with. Clive Forster quotes the New South Wales Government Statistician, T.A. Coghlan, who in 1897 lamented that ‘the abnormal aggregation of the population into their capital cities’ was a ‘most unfortunate element in the progress of the colonies’.7 This refusal to recognise our seemingly innate urbanism, and the pleasure and productivity that we have derived from our cities, is one national trait worth abandoning. It weakens us because it keeps us in constant denial about the true state of our settlement patterns, and reduces our willingness and capacity to understand the real shifts that are always transforming our cities. Seachange inspires rousing songs of liberation because it affirms our innate— though wholly rhetorical—anti-urbanism, celebrating the mass release of the citizenry from urban confinement. This is an intoxicating but deeply misleading vision of Australia as it enters the third millennium. There is no mass urban entrapment: Australia’s long marriage to city living remains as faithful as ever, though nowadays more are prone to the Seven Year Itch, reflected by increases in holiday home purchasing, leisure travel and other getaways, including the budget escapism of free-to-airhead commercial television (lifestyle
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programming and ‘reality’ TV). Infidelities may be on the increase but the divorce rate remains extremely low. For most city dwellers, an oil change is a more pressing prospect than a seachange. This mass of ‘ordinary’ citizenry conduct lives that are ‘too uneventful’ to be recorded in social conversations, such as media commentary and often, regrettably, scholarly analysis. And yet, it is within the domains of the ‘ordinary’ urban citizenry—the middle and outer suburbs of our metropolitan regions—that the future of our cities is being shaped. A big shift is underway in these urban lifeworlds that is of far more consequence to the future of our cities, and therefore the nation, than the sandrush currently afflicting the coast. The first three decades after the Second World War were marked by convulsive growth in the cities, but also by social stability and an absence of major class fault lines. There was almost none of the precipitous block-by-block social division that characterises cities in the United States. Class differences were there, but they were painted in broad brushstrokes across the landscape of Australian cities. There were separate regions inhabited by the rich, by workers, and a large middle class—but also areas where mixing occurred. None of this was deeply unsettling. Things began to change rapidly, however, from the 1970s which saw the shift towards more restless and divided class landscapes. The principal solvent for these settled bonds of social position and regional landscape has been the neo-liberal program of structural adjustment that has been carried with bipartisan fervour across the political horizon for nearly three decades by successive national governments. It has been a destructive, ill-examined program, resting on absurdly antiquated and historically invalidated ideas. Laissez-faire political economy failed dismally in the nineteenth century and proved to be a threat to human health and well-being. It helped to produce hellhole industrial cities that took a long time to repair and make safely habitable. Countless lives were tossed into the furnace of unfettered industrial growth before it was
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brought back under control by reform politics. By the second half of the nineteenth century, even elites had begun to panic about the slide towards self-destruction, whilst working class anger flared to revolutionary levels and simmered afterwards for a century. Now the beast has been unleashed again, only thinly camouflaged by the rhetoric of neo-liberal reform. Neo-liberalism is laissez-faire in drag. It may be good to believe in the absurd if this means hope in the highest human values, even if these hopes have been repeatedly dashed through history. But a belief founded in an absurdly dismal view of human beings as selfish, cynical takers and competitors is the creed of despair. This creed has guided the restructuring of our cities and their communities in recent decades, and continues to do so. Its followers have broken up our cities and speeded up the longrun process of environmental ruin that began in the industrial era. Our unwillingness to acknowledge and discuss the profound significance and unique qualities of Australia’s heartlands has left these landscapes vulnerable to attack. It is telling that the agents of reform regard urban policy and urban debate as anathema. No wonder, for if the stresses within our heartlands were really exposed to public view there would be serious political consequences for neo-liberalism. The early years of the third millennium have been marked by mounting public distress about breakdown and division in our cities and suburbs. A public debate about the state of Australia’s heartlands is surely awakening. New critical assessments by commentators, activists and scholars point to the damage done to our cities and urban communities by the reform project. Some in the media show a new willingness to air these criticisms and to consider proposals for alternative reform directions. One instance is the public attention given to the book Children of the Lucky Country? by three prominent specialists in childhood well-being, Fiona Stanley, Sue Richardson and Margot Prior.8 Published in 2005, it is a thoroughgoing indictment of neo-liberalism and, amongst other
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things, points to the ways in which our cities and communities have been made harmful to children. The strong popular reception for the book suggests that the Australian public senses reform is dragging us to the precipice of self-destruction. It has seized upon a book that refuses the path to annihilation and which offers a clear vision for an alternative, child-centred society. The rekindling of popular interest in the state of our cities, and their most vulnerable populations, confirms that the pulse of civil society was not completely extinguished during the long years of reform. Now it grows louder in our suburban heartlands. Despite the difficulties that lie ahead, it is not absurd to believe that we are re-entering hopeful times. Our cities and their suburbs have been wounded by reform. Yet they retain the deep affection of most Australians and will surely be the rallying points for a new politics of environmental and social renewal. And wholesale renewal of our cities is required. We are well past the time when a program of moderate repairs might have sufficed. The politics of renewal will require hope and courage. The beast that has harmed our suburbs remains at large and will not relinquish its hold on us without a battle. Those committed to a sustainable and fair Australia must not flinch from this struggle to reclaim our heartlands from the politics of despair.
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CHAPTER
2
Settled in Suburbia n the popular consciousness, early Australia often shimmers as a shapeless, wild landscape peopled by a collection of scoundrels, dreamers and larrikins. A motley crew perhaps, but all sharing the common fate of exile from ‘home’, meaning some part of the British Isles. This shimmering vision blurs, however, an assortment of social and economic differences that began to surface in the colonies as the first boat loads of émigrés and exiles arrived. These were hardly insular and homogeneous societies drifting in isolation on the southern oceans; the first migrants from Europe and elsewhere brought an assortment of languages, customs and faiths. These were overlaid— often violently—upon a dazzling array of unique Indigenous cultures. These were also societies that displayed distinctly urban tastes from their inception. By 1871, one-quarter of the Australian population lived in the six colonial capitals, and by 1901 this figure had risen to one-third.1 During the next century they claimed an everlarger share of the nation’s population. Doubtless huddling together in what seemed like a barren and alien continent made sense for some, but cities were also signs of progress that the new colonies were keen to erect. And what wonderful cities were built. Their growth from the mid nineteenth century onwards was increasingly absorbed by suburban expansion, much of it haphazard and speculative. In 1861, 40 per cent of Sydney’s residents lived in suburbs; by the time of Federation in 1901, the proportion had grown to 70 per cent. Some 70 per cent of Melbourne’s population growth during its boom era of the 1880s was in its expanding suburbs.2
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The growth wasn’t overwhelmingly chaotic, often following or accompanying expanding public transport networks. The historian Alan Gilbert writes: ‘Metropolitan transport-networks expanded rapidly after about 1875, with railway and cable-car systems fostering the commuter habits that the motor car would reinforce after 1945’.3 The English journalist R.E.N. Twopenny, who produced the book Town Life in Australia in 1883, observed that the ‘Australian townsman’ had ‘inherited so thoroughly’ the English love of suburban living, and seemed to happily bear the consequent daily commuting between home and work.4 The suburbs attracted early praise from visiting foreign observers. In 1905, the influential city planning advocate from the United States, Frederick Howe, wrote: ‘The great cities of Australia are spread out into the suburbs in a splendid way. For miles about are broad roads, with small houses, gardens, and an opportunity for touch with the freer, sweeter life which the country offers’.5 Colonial Australia, before the onset of drought and economic depression in the 1890s, was a brash, outward looking set of emergent ‘nations’ that built marvellous modern metropolises able to confidently host world exhibitions. These were technologically advanced cities, something that pleased the colonials eager to show they had improved on conditions back ‘home’. Melbourne and Sydney had integrated public water supply systems before London.6 Construction of the Yan Yean Reservoir, which supplied Melbourne’s water and took five years to build, created one of the world’s largest artificial lakes. The Victorians must have blazed with pleasure when Yan Yean made The London Illustrated News in April 1858. The industry and ingenuity of early urban Australia as it received, transformed and exported the rural and mining products that began to stream from the interior also contributed significantly to the early growth of the capitalist global economy. And while the major cities had their ills, including slums and disease, these were never as bad or as extensive as the afflictions of their counterparts in Europe or North America. Even in working
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class areas, mortality rates were lower and incomes higher than in equivalent British urban communities of the time. Many people had the option of taking the ‘geographical cure’, escaping, at least eventually, to fairer environs in the suburbs or beyond. By 1900, around 50 per cent of Australians owned their homes, compared with just ten per cent in the United Kingdom.7 While the nation congratulates (and lampoons) itself for riding the sheep’s back to prosperity in the last century (its rural economy was certainly one of its richest assets), the role of Australia’s marvellous urban machines in securing the country’s much-heralded stability and economic prosperity of the twentieth century is rarely acknowledged in public debate. It is arguably Australia’s urban infrastructure—its modern cities and towns—that provided the conditions for stable growth of trade, industry and population during a period of otherwise unsettling, at moments startling, transformation. It is a curiosity which historians have laboured to explain that the nation’s denizens from the first tended to dismiss the contribution of the cities to the early survival and growth of the separate colonies, and to the immensely successful development of the nation that succeeded them. The rewards for urban fidelity were obvious but the love was rarely expressed openly. Alan Gilbert states that ‘The lure of the suburbs was a persistent social force in Australian society’ from its very beginnings, but goes on to chronicle the long history of anti-suburbanism that sought to deny or ridicule this deeply implanted urge.8 Urban denial was expressed, for example, in the idealisation of the ‘bush’ and the condemnation of city living by generations of balladeers, writers and poets. Suburbia was caught up in successive waves of cultural criticism that counterposed the bush (cast as the authentic Australian landscape) with the city (regarded as a blighted foreign import). Henry Lawson in 1888 found only ‘sallow, sunken faces’ drifting through city streets, indicating that his urban survey had not extended to the suburbs.9 (The bush
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eventually lost its cultural advocates, and criticism in the second half of the twentieth century tended to round on the suburbs.) For much of its existence Australian suburbia has been a heartland embraced physically but denied emotionally.
The Great Australian Settlement The confident, seemingly inexorable period of colonial growth came to an abrupt halt in the 1890s, which were plagued by drought, economic depression and bitter conflict between capital and labour. The cities shared the hardships of the era, but most— with the exception of Melbourne—continued to record solid population increases through the bitter years. By the first decade of the new century, all six capitals were again experiencing rocketing growth. With the birth of the Australian nation in 1901, a new balance was struck between capital and labour. The political commentator Paul Kelly has depicted this new national resolution as the ‘Australian Settlement’, an informal concordat between the social classes and their political parties that enshrined the ideals of income, justice, employment and security.10 This compact was realised in laws, policies and institutional practices that aimed to secure a stable and fair path of national development. Its external dimensions included immigration legislation that sought to maintain racial purity (the ‘White Australia’ policy), high tariffs to encourage the growth of domestic industry and, finally, a close alignment of foreign and trade policy with those of a superior, protective state (first Britain and later the United States). Its domestic architecture included a system of wage arbitration that guaranteed fair incomes and the state provision of infrastructure and key economic lifelines (notably, energy, communications and transport). The main intent of these measures was to encourage the development of a ‘raw’ and underpopulated land in a manner that would
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guarantee security and a high standard of living for all. The errors of Europe—especially its class antagonisms—were not to be repeated here. Nor was the exaggerated enthusiasm of the Americas for individual freedom and the market to be regarded as a perfect model for emulation. The Australian nation, from its inception, was rather suspicious of the ideal of liberty; in too great a measure it seemed the antithesis of the national preference for cultural homogeneity, economic fairness, political quietude and orderly development. Regardless of its ethical and political merits, the Australian Settlement was a practical success for much of the twentieth century. Broadly, the compact achieved a long period of political stability and economic security for many Australians, which lasted from Federation to the 1970s. The period was marred by three convulsions—the Great Depression of the 1930s, which brought unprecedented hardship to Australian cities, and the two world wars. In general, however, largely favourable external conditions helped to ensure the strategy’s success. Amongst the Settlement’s most important achievements was the maintenance of a relatively dispersed distribution of national wealth, which compared favourably with that of most western nations, especially the English-speaking ones. The richest period, termed the Long Boom, lasted from the end of the Second World War until the early 1970s. During this time, Australia shared in the sustained growth that blessed western economies. The Settlement was a stabilising order with deep foundations in the cities and their suburbs. It contributed immensely to the strength of the nation’s system of urban settlements, and to the healthy growth of its offspring, the suburbs. The suburbs themselves always harboured various forms of social and cultural inequality but these broad, rambling landscapes did play a critical role in supporting the unique political and economic structures that were to make Australia a relatively egalitarian nation during the twentieth century.
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The sustained periods of full employment in the Long Boom nourished a mood of security and fairness. At the end of this period in 1971, less than two per cent of the labour force was jobless.11 Manufacturing and agriculture thrived under the tariff regime. Industrialisation was concentrated in the capital cities and reinforced their primacy. Strong labour markets and rising real incomes benefited all, but especially the working class, which was able to gain increasing access to home ownership (with state encouragement) and other key consumption goods (motor cars, household wares). In short, both living standards and the quality of life were raised for the middle and lower orders during the period of the Settlement. Security was won for all, but at the cost of freedoms for many: the social order was based upon the officially sanctioned model for good living, the nuclear family. The operation of restrictive employment and housing markets, in concert with conservative state policies and cultural mores, reinforced the economic dependency of women on men. These same forces also reinforced the exclusion of alternative forms of household, especially those based on ‘unconventional’ identities such as unmarried and gay people.
The Suburban Settlement The long running improvement in economic fortunes during the twentieth century was reflected in the increasingly rapid suburbanisation of working and middle class families.12 Suburbanisation, driven by expanding home ownership, reflected the Australian Settlement’s broad political foundations. It was promoted by both the political Left and the Right. In 1942, R.G. Menzies flagged conservative political support for increased home ownership—a policy aim rigorously pursued during the long tenure of the governments he led after 1949. Conservatives hoped that suburban home ownership would eventually dampen the radical political ambitions of the working classes; the same sturdy impulses that had forced the
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bosses to the negotiating table, and which produced the Australian Settlement. A survey of the post-war political landscape by eminent Australian urban scholar Patrick Troy finds no evidence that conservatives succeeded in creating ‘suburbs of acquiescence’.13 He concludes that growing home ownership failed to depress rates of social ‘protest’, including industrial disputes which peaked during the 1970s and 1980s, the same period when home ownership rates were at their highest historical levels in Australia (around 70 per cent). Troy also chronicles the support of powerful segments of the Left during the post-war era for home ownership, notably amongst the Communist led unions. Home ownership for them—meaning secure tenure and decent housing—was a matter of basic economic justice not political acquiescence. Suburbanisation produced satisfaction but not docility. The suburban spread was also aided after the Great War by government policies, including the War Service Homes Scheme which financed the building of separate houses on individually owned blocks. The historian Humphrey McQueen observes that the scheme ‘speeded up the move to the suburbs’.14 As did the motorisation of households with the number of registered motor vehicles increasing tenfold during the 1920s to more than 650 000.15 And while motorisation advanced suburban growth, trains and other forms of public transport remained the backbone of the urban transport system until after the Second World War. Suburban emigration was also closely tied to class improvement. By the Second World War, Australia’s older generations of urban rich, whose fortunes had been made in colonial times, had largely abandoned the inner city cores for the new suburbs such as Ascot and Hamilton in Brisbane.16 Later, as their economic fortunes rose, working and middle class families moved progressively from the crowded, inner localities to new middle and outer ring suburbs comprised mainly of detached dwellings in low-density patterns. In turn, new immigrants, predominantly from non Anglo-Celtic
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European countries, took the inner localities vacated by suburbanising households. Immigrants from Britain and Ireland tended to follow Australian households into suburban locations. Eventually a distinct pattern of ethnic residential segregation emerged in the major cities, with the Australian-born and those from northern and eastern Europe settling in the expanding suburbs, whilst marked enclaves of Greek, Italian, Yugoslav and Maltese settlers emerged in the inner city areas. Later, these tightly banded ethnic communities would open up and many of their members would shift to the suburbs. New immigrant groups from Southeast Asia and South America, and later gentrifiers, took up the inner city housing they vacated (and which migrants had saved from neglect and demolition). The decade after the Second World War saw grit and determination at the heart of suburban expansion as home builders struggled with shortages in materials and labour. Much ‘sweat equity’ was poured into the foundations of the advancing ‘fibro frontier’ as many families took on the task of home building themselves. The winning of a new suburban home frequently required a long, hard struggle involving do-it-yourself building and the contributions of families and friends over many weekends.17 Even after that, the wait for basic amenities, including sewerage, was often long. As economic conditions improved, and the immediate post-war rehousing pressures eased, the quality of residential development rose rapidly. During the 1950s and 1960s, high birth rates and immigration, combined with the mass purchase of motor cars, brought major economic, demographic and physical changes to Australian cities.18 In the 1950s, Australia was already the world’s fourth leading car-owning nation.19 Between 1945 and 1970, the numbers of cars owned per 1000 persons increased from 100 to 500.20 Motorisation drove suburbanisation—extensive, low-density suburbs proliferated, attracting increasing levels of industrial and retailing activity. Clive Forster writes:
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The physical expansion of Adelaide between 1939 and 1965 . . . dwarfed the development of the previous 100 years. Sydney and Melbourne each grew to cover a larger area than London, a city with four times their population.21
Jobs also moved to the suburbs. Manufacturing industries increasingly shifted to suburban locations, spurred by expansion in production and encouraged by new manufacturing and transport technologies which freed firms from dependence upon inner city and port locations.22 Notable changes included the development of small electric motors, which overcame the need for factories to be located near urban waterways where coal was easily delivered, and the introduction of motor lorries and road transport which decoupled industry from the rail networks that clustered in inner areas.23 However, the decentralisation of employment was not always well planned for and resulted in a greater geographical spread of employee work trips than would have been necessary if firms had been encouraged or made to relocate to a limited number of suburban industrial zones. The new suburban landscapes were characterised by outward social homogeneity and a rough uniformity in the style of houses. They frequently lacked basic urban services for several, even many, years following their establishment. And they were fair game for a cultural avant-garde who regarded them as embarrassing evidence of New World provincialism. Suburban life was relentlessly pilloried by legions of comedians who picked at various wounds in the national psyche, including general insecurities about cultural difference. Comics costumed with the assumed dress and outlook of the suburban persona derided the suspicious denizens of ‘those other’ parts of the city: the wogs’ retrograde love for crumbling inner city terraces, the poofters who preferred flats to houses and, worst, the metho drinkers, foreigners and communists who lurked in boarding houses and red light areas.24
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Suburbanisation was criticised, even maligned, by intellectuals and humorists for promoting ‘mindless conformism’. Donald Horne in 1964 believed that it had become ‘the target of practically all intellectuals’, adding that ‘since most Australians live in suburbs . . . this means that intellectuals hate almost the whole community’.25 The Melbourne architect Robyn Boyd feared that droll suburban living was changing the Australian character for the worse. ‘The Wild Colonial Boy is selling used cars’ he bemoaned.26 Mrs (later Dame) Edna Everage, Barry Humphries’ clown suburban duchess, fixed upon and parodied those same fears. The suburban defence team, led by the historian and economist Hugh Stretton, laughed off the rebukes and pointed to the progressive not reactionary qualities of suburbia. In his landmark 1970 study, Ideas for Australian Cities, Stretton cast ‘Australia as a suburb’. He wrote: . . . you don’t have to be a mindless conformist to choose suburban life. Most of the best poets and painters and inventors and protestors choose it too. It reconciles access to work and city with private, adaptable, self-expressive living space at home. Plenty of adults love that living space, and subdivide it ingeniously. For children it really has no rivals.27
Stretton was resolutely aware of how dramatically the suburban shift had improved the well-being and the life chances of the less well off, who had streamed into suburbia from inner cities and from the venerated bush. In the face of overwhelming evidence of mass human improvement, he didn’t care a fig for the critics’ portrayal of suburban tedium: ‘Plenty of dreary lives are indeed lived in the suburbs. But most of them might well be worse in other surroundings: duller in country towns, more desperate in high-rise apartments’.28 And in a prescient remark, Stretton pointed carefully to the difference between ‘aspirational’ behaviour and suburban preference: ‘Intelligent critics don’t blame the suburbs for the empty aspirations: the aspirations are what corrupt the suburbs’.29
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Most suburbanites were unaware of the mockery issuing from wine bars and university comedy revues. They were, it seems, absorbed by the great project of suburban improvement and were also, perhaps, transfixed by the quiet splendour of life in the new suburbs, which were a vast improvement on areas traditionally occupied by the working class.30 The shift to the suburbs realised important material gains for working and middle class families. Throughout the Australian Settlement there was a continuous, rarely disrupted, resettlement of the nation in progressively improved suburban environments. The Australian city by the 1960s was characterised by a broad social and geographic similarity, but not by outright homogeneity. In the suburbs, a class geography was evident: the workers and the bosses tended to live in distinct subregions. An emergent commentary, including Stretton’s Ideas for Australian Cities, began to point to the inequities in service access and environmental amenity that marked the suburban landscape. Attention was focused on the confinement of the working classes in poorer residential subregions and on the service deprivation endured in new outer fringe estates. Feminist critique in the 1970s, in Australia and in other western nations, underlined the isolation and exclusion of many women in low-density suburbia.31 As Humphrey McQueen points out, ‘Suburbia did not exist as a single way of life’.32 But there were places such as Sydney’s northern beaches where the classes were mixed, and social cleavages were modest. And by international standards, Australia’s suburbanites generally enjoyed good quality environments. Even the poorest usually had adequate, if rudimentary, housing, whilst a majority of households enjoyed the benefits of home ownership, good and improving urban services and high residential amenity. The Australian city of the Long Boom was quite different to its North American equivalent, where class and racial divides were far more severe, and where residential segregation was marked. Critically, racial diversity and tension were all but absent in Australia.
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Aboriginal Australians had either been obliterated or were ignored, though new Indigenous urban communities were beginning to assert a presence during the 1970s, and while there was some open ethnic diversity, it was contained in the inner city clusters inhabited by post-war European migrants. (The White Australia policy had prevented the settlement of non-European migrants in any numbers during the Long Boom.) And yet, as noted, these communities began themselves to suburbanise, adding progressively to suburban diversity. Australian inner city areas never declined economically or socially to the extent that their equivalents in the United States did, and Australian CBDs maintained their economic pre-eminence long after the decline of North American ‘downtowns’.
Governing the Cities Australian urban development has been more regulated than has been the case in the United States, but there have been only sporadic attempts to develop strong policy guidance or clear governance for the nation’s cities. This explains some of the failings of suburbanisation, including speculative, sometimes corrupt, development practices; unmanaged spread of employment generating activities, requiring workers to travel long distances, often by car; and lags in the arrival and delivery of key suburban services and amenities, such as sewerage, sealed roads, shops and community facilities. These failings were decried both by urban scholars and many of the new communities that were forced to endure the drawn out consequences of poor planning. In the 1950s and 1960s, there was constant agitation from new suburbanites for the services and amenities they felt entitled to receive.33 Explicit urban policy and regulation was slow to develop. Since Federation the Commonwealth and state governments have tended to shape the growth and character of cities through indirect means or ‘shadow’ planning, such as housing, taxation and financial
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policies, immigration schemes, and through the provision of social services and infrastructure. And whilst state governments have directly provided most public services and infrastructure in cities, their grip on this role was significantly weakened by privatisation and corporatisation from the 1980s. This has not been helped by a weak municipal sector, which remains dependent on state government support, and has concerned itself with the regulation of land and the delivery of basic urban services. This is not to imply that the course of urbanisation has been left completely to market forces and economic growth cycles. The ‘shadow’ urban policies have provided a guiding hand in the development of cities and suburbs. For example, one important public influence on cities was the planning and provision of transport, sewerage, electricity and water infrastructure by colonial, and later state, administrations to new areas, significantly affecting the course of urban development. In addition, the states provided education, health and welfare facilities on the basis of explicit physical planning principles that increasingly favoured residential suburbanisation.34 Eventually, all the mainland state governments, apart from Queensland, produced masterplans for their capital cities, and in time municipalities came to regulate health and housing standards and adopted zoning regulation to ensure orderly urban development and to protect basic residential amenity. State and municipal planning, though faulted and episodic in strength, was broadly successful in preventing the advent of North American ‘sprawl’.35 As noted earlier, after the Second World War the Commonwealth deliberately set out to increase levels of home ownership and it did this through a range of financial and institutional policies. These policies tended to favour the purchase of detached dwellings and were a powerful motive force that drove low-density suburbanisation. In 1945, the Commonwealth initiated a housing compact with the states—the Commonwealth State Housing Agreement—which established a small but significant public
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housing sector that was administered largely by the states, whilst the Commonwealth provided the funding. In some states, the growth of public housing was a major stimulant for suburbanisation—Clive Forster reports that the South Australian Housing Trust provided over 30 per cent of the housing built in Adelaide during the 1950s and 1960s.36 The social goals of planning were uncomplicated, centring largely on support for suburbanisation. It was assumed both by the state and by the corporate sector that public and private interests converged neatly in the project of suburbanisation. Suburbanisation improved the living circumstances of the less well off by allowing them to join the exodus from the inner city begun by the elites in the late nineteenth century. It was also an enormous and profitable economic enterprise. The election of a new Labor federal government in 1972 at the end of the Long Boom saw the first serious attempts by the Commonwealth to develop explicit urban policies. These initiatives were as short-lived as the Whitlam government (1972–75) itself, but their practical legacy remains evident today in the form of many urban improvements (sewerage, parks, public housing, etc.) in the major cities. From Federation until the end of the Long Boom, Australian governments used a range of powers and initiatives to ensure the creation of cities that embodied the ideals of the Australian Settlement. The goals were simple: the expansion of collective welfare through orderly and inclusive suburbanisation and the protection of the most vulnerable through a modest public housing sector. They were seriously pursued and contributed to the great resettlement of Australia, including by the millions of immigrants welcomed during the last century in suburban landscapes that were the envy of the world. Clive Forster’s recent portrait of suburbia testifies to the remarkable success of the Australian Suburban Settlement: Compared with city-dwellers almost anywhere else in the world, most urban Australians live in spacious housing, in healthy
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surroundings, and have good access to jobs, services and facilities. Differences certainly exist between rich and poor suburbs, but the contrasts are less than in most countries.37
And yet, as Forster himself acknowledges, these same hard won qualities have been partly dissipated during the era of neo-liberal reform that followed the demise of the Australian Settlement in the 1970s. The aims of this now defunct compact were indissolubly linked to, and realised by, the project of suburban resettlement. It is not surprising, therefore, that the compact’s demise marked the beginning of a great unsettling of Australia’s cities and suburbs.
The Return of Insecurity The seismic strength of the unsettlement continues to grow, shaking ever harder the nation’s social and institutional foundations. The intensifying tremors have dislodged the very meaning from older social and political structures, which no longer appear recognisable. Governments withdrew suddenly from providing the basic urban necessities (telephone, transport, electricity, water, etc.) and called a halt to suburban expansion in pursuit of urban consolidation. Labour was cut free from centralised structures and legions of independent contractors swarmed through the cities and suburbs. Old forms of poverty thought banished during the Settlement era, notably homelessness and slum-like living conditions, seemed to reappear suddenly. Liberalised migration brought new faces and cultures to the suburbs. Repressed identities came out of the woodwork and openly celebrated their liberation on the streets. All the while, the gales of reform swept through the cities, leaving many with the unsettled feeling of a windy day that won’t end. Things are changing, nothing seems certain any more, and a new ungoverned resettlement appears to be recasting the cities and
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suburbs. The self-conscious solidity of the Australian Settlement is giving way to a social formation that the celebrated British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman describes as ‘liquid’—a society pushed and defined by remorseless reform-driven change.38 The Australian Settlement was nothing less than a national war on insecurity that aimed to guarantee for all the minimum conditions of a decent life. It tried to march its peoples to lands free from strife and risk. By contrast, the new order seems more of a survivalist carnival, presided over by prophets persistently beating the drum of fear. It is transfixed by insecurity and determined to achieve it. The cult of fear’s handiwork is already evident in our cities and suburbs.
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CHAPTER
3
The Great Australian Unsettlement ities are the centre stage of Australian life, and have long been so. The previous chapter pointed to the nation’s extended love affair with cities and to the ways in which their suburbs have guaranteed a high minimum level of welfare for ordinary Australians. (It was also pointed out that our love of cities was often unacknowledged, allowing the myth of a nation of bush-folk to persist long into the twentieth century.) In recent decades a combination of political, economic, environmental and social forces, working at a range of scales from local to global, have profoundly changed this theatre of national identity. Paul Kelly has described the 1980s as ‘The End of Certainty’ for Australia.1 The social observer Hugh Mackay believes that Australia, like other western nations, entered an ‘Age of Redefinition’ in the 1980s, a time when for many Australians established institutions became ambiguous, contested and, in some instances, even meaningless.2 The hopes set out in the beginning of the twentieth century, and the means laid out in law and policy to achieve these, seemed to all but vanish in a decade (was it a moment?) of astonishing change. The ending of the Long Boom seemed to unleash pent up furies of political and cultural transformation:
C
. . . the 1980s was Australia’s decade of creative destruction. It witnessed business shake-out, financial excess, economic restructuring, individual greed, the making and breaking of fortunes and, for many, a struggle to maintain financial and family security. Despite the hopes it engendered, the decade 25
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closed in pessimism. But the significance of the 1980s transcends this pessimism; the decade saw the collapse of the Australian Settlement, the old protected Fortress Australia.3
Kelly’s extensive chronicle of this period charts the transition, beginning in the 1960s, from a relatively stable, homogenous society towards a far more volatile and diverse social formation. He tends to stress the political and economic axes of change. And yet, just as profound were the deep transformations to Australia’s cultural make-up and outlook. In particular, the shift in the 1970s from assimilation to multiculturalism as official policy ideals marked a cultural change that many Australians struggled to comprehend, and which eventually produced a series of political backlashes. By the middle of the twentieth century, much of the bright confidence that had characterised colonial Australia had been subdued under a greyish mantle of insecurity and timidity. The nation seemed a little battered and uncertain, and inclined to close its mind to the more inspiring, if riskier, suggestions of modernity—the lure of cosmopolitanism, of personal freedom, of cultural liberation and experimentation. The author David Malouf attributes this battered and tentative national outlook to a series of shattering blows that rocked the economic and demographic foundations of the country, beginning with the depression and grinding droughts of the 1890s that abruptly ended colonial confidence.4 The world wars of the century that followed generated deep social divisions (conscription), caused catastrophic loss of life and—in the Second World War—saw attacks on Australian soil. The great influx of European migrants after the Second World War was carefully stage managed, blanketed under a White Australia Policy that betrayed a nation with very little energy for experimentation and little enthusiasm for risks and surprises. And yet, this is not simply a tale of moral timidity and narrow mindedness—far from it. The Australian Settlement described by Kelly was grounded in another sort of conformism—a hearty egalitarianism that
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reflected the richly humane potential of the Australian collective psyche. The intolerance of want and the deeply implanted enthusiasm for ‘a fair go’ strongly counterbalanced the fear of strangeness and uncertainty that seemed to strengthen during the first half of the twentieth century. By the fifth decade of the century, some confidence seemed to be returning, as rapid population and economic growth was experienced and carefully managed within the reassuring confines of the Australian Settlement. The main political, economic and cultural structures were fixed, or at least appeared that way, and provided a safe frame for the expansion of national content—of people, wealth, consumer goods and cities. What was profound about the political, economic and cultural transformations that broke across the nation from the 1970s was not change itself, but disruption to the structures that had heretofore been managing, and to some extent pacifying, change. For example, government ownership of major utilities, such as telecommunications, had provided a steadying hand in a sector experiencing technological change. It was the recasting of these deeper structures—the political, social and institutional footings of the Australian Settlement—that really began to unsettle Australia. The intersection of these structural shifts with a new surge of civic, ethnic and demographic transformations sourced in immigration and cultural awakening made for a heady, and for many people still bewildering, period of national transformation. As Hugh Mackay notes, the 1970s marks the start of a period of national redefinition that shows no sign of ending soon. The tempo of change increased: life became faster, civil society became more fluid and public institutions subject to continuous, not to say chronic, reform. Western nations simultaneously shifted towards a ‘liquid modernity’, defined by Zygmunt Bauman as a seemingly endless fluidity in socio-economic structures and by the demise of fixed and durable cultural bonds between individuals. These structural changes produced two broad groups, ‘winners’ and ‘losers’, separated perhaps by a fluid band of ‘battlers’ and
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‘aspirationals’ who have sacrificed, and sometimes gambled, their time and resources in the struggle to hold economic ground. And yet, for all, even the rich, the unsettling of the Australian social and economic compact has greatly increased material and financial insecurity. Jobs, savings, mortgages and homes—nothing seems safe any more. If we accept Paul Kelly’s thesis that the 1980s witnessed the demise of the Australian Settlement, what were the effects of this cataclysm for Australian settlements, in particular, the main cities and their suburbs? The complex set of far-reaching, and sometimes contradictory, changes that Kelly and MacKay refer to have engendered a profound transformation of the Australian urban system. Amongst the many urban shifts of the past decades, two key changes—polarisation and insecurity—bear closer analysis because they portray most starkly a nation unsettled. But were these changes merely painful stepping stones to a field of good economic fortune for all?
The Rise of the Neo-liberal Growth Machine: Gain after Pain? The ending of the Long Boom affected Australia more profoundly than most other western economies. In the post-war period, Australia was a peripheral player in the western economic system, and was heavily reliant upon trade with a few key nations, notably Britain and the United States. The emergence of a perceived global economic crisis in the 1970s, combined with the refocusing of British trade on Europe, greatly stressed the fragile ‘developed dependency’ that Australia had cultivated, and benefited from, during the Long Boom. The Long Boom had brought sustained development, but Australia’s political and economic dependency on patron nations had not slackened, leaving the country vulnerable to the inevitable downturn. As trade problems mounted, unemployment and inflation soared
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and pressure increased dramatically on public sector finances. In a climate of ‘stagflationary’ recession, neo-liberal politics gained ascendancy, offering bold, and readily packaged, solutions—such as public spending cutbacks and privatisation—to the problems that had beset the state sector and the economy. From the late 1970s, the protectionist–interventionist pillar of the Australian Settlement was replaced by neo-liberalism as the new national economic orthodoxy.5 The Australian Settlement collapsed, partly under the weight of its own contradictions and partly because external forces undermined its foundations, notably the most recent phase of globalisation that transformed the capitalist economy in the late twentieth century. The demise of the compact, and its institutions, was wrought both through the liberation of certain repressed cultural and political aspirations, and through the imposition of a new global economic order. In essence, the object of neo-liberal restructuring was the creation of a ‘growth machine economy’. At its simplest, this was an economy freed from the many social and ecological restrictions that governments responding to political pressures had placed upon markets during the twentieth century. Wage guarantees and employment protections, in concert with redistributive taxation and social policy regimes, had acted to secure for working Australians a fair share of national wealth and also to protect their private (family/personal) time from invasion by employers. And by the late twentieth century new regimes of environmental regulation had begun to define ecological limits for markets. There was no radical green agenda behind the growth of environmental regulation. It was driven by the political mainstream’s pragmatic recognition of the need to protect the market system itself from an endemic and historically evident tendency to ruin its own natural base through resource exhaustion and pollution. Both sets of protections—natural and social—were introduced by successive state and federal regimes. Again, the aim was not to achieve radical social transformation but
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to secure the long-term future of the market economy from the potentially ruinous consequences of its chronic short-termism. But the proponents of short-termism were never defeated on the field and began to rally again under the neo-liberal standard. The neo-liberal reform program that raised its banner in the 1970s was about rolling back these social and environmental insurance mechanisms, conceived as halters on a market machine that, if freed from restriction, would spring into life and produce material abundance for all, for ever. It also rejected or sidelined other social values that stressed non-material considerations (spiritual, ecological, social) in favour of a direct and undistracted pursuit of material gratification. Through successive waves of structural reform, the growth machine economy was born. Along the way, there was a major shift of wealth from wage and salary earners to corporations, and new inroads were made into the private time of households and social time of communities by deregulated labour markets.6 The growth machine drove a rapid increase in the scale of natural consumption. The early warning signals of the 1970s oil shocks were ignored, and the fossil fuelled machine was accelerated as if energy resources were boundless. Three decades of economic and political restructuring seem to have delivered the neo-liberal promise: Pain (phase one : 1970s to early 1990s) producing the good times of Gain (phase two: mid1990s–present). Australia entered the new millennium seemingly bloated by newfound private wealth, reflected in soaring house prices, a building and renovations boom, low inflation and unemployment levels and an unprecedented domestic consumption frenzy that left the nation’s households awash with bright new houses, cars, glamorous holidays and wondrous household toys. Even the price of money was cheap, for now. The churches may have emptied but new cathedrals—the suburban retail palaces that flourished in the 1990s—had emerged to take their place, and few seemed to lament the change as the nation’s spiritual energies were redirected into the pursuit of
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material ecstasy. The Catholic icons and Protestant invocations that had studded the walls of many post-war suburban homes gave way to the new motif of the miracle economy: the plasma TV whose awe-inspiring naturalism celebrated the pantheonism of the new ‘Growth Fetish’ economy.7 Some commentators detected a growing social unease that there was no opportunity to enjoy, let alone even really admire, the spoils of the growth machine once the debt collector of working time was paid. But this anxiety never seemed to break from beneath the surface of public emotion; perhaps, perversely, it fuelled further consumption—an idea that would not surprise advertisers. Years of brittle phase one growth, marked by sharp episodic downturns, had given way to a new plenty. Even the respectable suburban working class—rebirthed as the ‘aspirationals’—seemed to be sharing the fun. Indeed, for neo-liberal high prophets across the political mainstream, the eagerness of the aspirationals to rush to the altar of consumption seemed to confirm the innate morality of their project. The reform revolution may have cast down all traditional gods, but after two decades of laying waste to old idols it seemed to develop its own metaphysical aspirations. In political commentary, the banalities of consumer behaviour were transformed into votive acts of observance, which pleased the new material gods and their prophets. ‘Consumer confidence’ was now a register of national spiritual well-being.8 With some ironic (mis)reading, this is essentially the story now promulgated by neo-liberals of the post-1970s structural reform project that overtook and dismantled the Australian Settlement: ‘Yes, a little pain (not for us though!) was necessary but look at what riches and brave new outlooks it has conferred on you, Australia. We are astonished at the ingratitude of some!’ This simple construction masks many uncomfortable realities. Consider four injuries from reform. First, the deep tears and holes that remain in the social and cultural fabric after the storm of restructuring and which are merely temporarily cloaked beneath the
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present consumption boom. These social injuries are matched by the damage done by the growth machine economy to the national resource base and the Australian environment generally. Add to this Australia’s vulnerable national economy marked by catastrophic debt levels, ecological dysfunction and investment deficits. A fourth reform injury has been the weakening of the public sphere and of democratic institutions in general. The collective legacy of these changes is an Australia faltering in the face of mounting economic, social and ecological challenges.
Mapping the Fault Lines Below Has the pain of phase one really been worthwhile? Was it fair? Already political debate, though not the popular mind, has begun to erase these questions. And yet it is important to record and discuss this phase of structural adjustment, including the deep fault lines it produced in our social fabric, if we are to understand the challenges confronting us in the wake of neo-liberalism. These fault lines are beginning to manifest again in our cities, and after decades of neglect and worse are now deeper than many people will have imagined, reaching down to the substrate of Australian liberal democracy. It is worthwhile, therefore, to take a moment to review—if only in sketch detail—the consequences of reform phase one, which many people, of course, never escaped from. Not all made it to the times of plenty; many lives were trampled underfoot in the march to the miracle economy. The first phase (1970s–90s) was marked by painful social readjustments, worsening economic divisions, the reappearance of poverty, and by moments where it seemed that the middle class itself would be engulfed by ruin. During this time, unemployment levels remained high, work conditions deteriorated generally, income polarisation grew, and access to valued consumption goods and services, including decent housing, declined for many. A
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combination of rapid tariff reductions and monetarist public financing by successive Commonwealth governments from the mid-1970s devastated Australian industry. The consequent shift in employment from manufacturing to services was dramatic: between 1981 and 1991, manufacturing employment contracted by 16 per cent, whilst jobs in finance, property and business services increased by 48 per cent.9 Employment in the service sector was characterised by polarised growth which largely produced new high-paid and low-paid jobs, with not much in between. Overall, the service industry was transformed by a rising proportion of insecure, non full-time jobs. By phase two, traditional manufacturing—industries that produced ‘tangible goods’—had been relegated to the fossilised ‘old economy’ sector, overtaken by the shining ‘new economy’ whose pivots were high technology and information-based goods and services, and the specialist ‘knowledge-based’ systems that supported them. The infrastructure of the new economy was the network of globally integrated information technologies that emerged and strengthened during the 1990s. This infrastructure developed only selected footings in Australia’s major cities—largely in Sydney and to a lesser extent Melbourne. In these cities emerged new areas of affluence and influence, which included the vibrant clusters of producer services and knowledge industries in traditional CBDs and in new suburban business parks. There also emerged new affluent communities of people who worked in such industries. The principal example was Sydney’s so-called ‘global arc’, a large swathe of wealth and thriving industry and commerce stretching from new economy hubs in the traditionally privileged north (Macquarie Park, North Ryde), southwards through the CBD, and from there via the eastern suburbs to Kingsford-Smith Airport and Port Botany. Amongst the employed, there was an increase in income polarisation during the 1980s and early 1990s.10 Although Australia’s dispersion in earnings was relatively mild compared to other
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English-speaking countries, the trend was set for further inequality. Between 1980 and 1991, for example, this disparity left men in the lowest earnings decile seven per cent worse off, and men in the highest decile 5 per cent better off.11 Average earnings were also under pressure, falling in real terms during the 1980s. The need for households to offset declining income was one reason for rising workforce participation by women during this period. Many women were drawn into the highly casualised service sectors, where wage levels and work conditions have progressively declined in recent years. The middle class, a social bulwark that strongly benefited from and supported the Australian Settlement, was undermined by structural adjustment as incomes came under pressure, savings and assets eroded, jobs became increasingly insecure and degraded, and many struggled to access declining state services. Indeed, the very survival of the middle class seemed at stake. Hugh Mackay estimated that between 1976 and 1992 the middle class shrank from 65 per cent of households to just 40 per cent.12 Below this, things were very much harder. Blue-collar employment was devastated, and the number of households without a breadwinner increased dramatically. By 1992 it was estimated, for example, that 600 000 children lived in families with no employed parent.13 These economic adjustments combined with demographic and social changes to produce new, and intensifying, forms of disadvantage. Reflecting the liberalisation of divorce laws in 1974, single parent households grew rapidly, increasing by 43 per cent between 1976 and 1981. The rate of growth in this household type slowed to 12 per cent between 1981 and 1986.14 Social deprivation became concentrated amongst single parent households, most of which were headed by women. In the cities, the growth of income polarisation was mirrored geographically through increasing segregation of wealthy suburbs and those places of relative deprivation.15 Amongst the latter, public housing estates fared the worst, most pitched into a spiral of
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rapid decline. Structural unemployment remained highest and most concentrated in suburban areas that hosted significant manufacturing activity, especially the working class regions developed in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Elizabeth in Adelaide and Broadmeadows in Melbourne. Manufacturing had been concentrated in the larger centres, Sydney and Melbourne, and to a lesser extent Adelaide and regional cities such as Newcastle, Geelong and Wollongong. All experienced the devastating consequences of industrial restructuring in the form of high levels of unemployment, deep social dislocations and a slowing in population growth. The centre of gravity of urban growth shifted to the ‘sunbelt’ states, Queensland and Western Australia: ‘. . . whilst Sydney and Melbourne grew by about 10 per cent between 1981 and 1991, the corresponding growth rates for Brisbane and Perth were 30 per cent and 27 per cent respectively’.16 Rising housing costs during phase one imposed additional hardships for middle income and working class households in middle and outer suburban communities. Many families in the later 1980s and early 1990s experienced the loss of their homes through mortgage foreclosure, whilst people living in public housing were adversely affected by changes in government policies. Funding for public housing began a long and sustained decline from the 1970s. Meanwhile well intended, but ultimately disastrous, changes to eligibility and rental policies that reserved public housing for poor Australians saw the sector increasingly residualised, accommodating rising numbers of households with high support needs.17 Broadacre public housing estates, which previously contained a mixture of household types, including working families, entered a spiral of change that saw them transformed into increasingly homogenous welfare dependent communities. The concentration of public housing in inner-city high-rise and suburban low-rise estates meant that such areas emerged as new poles of deprivation. New forms of absolute disadvantage also surfaced, notably poverty in the private rental sector, and outright homelessness.
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At the opposite end of the income spectrum, households in relatively wealthy suburbs tended to weather the economic storm comfortably. In addition, the growth of the new economy, including producer services (e.g., finance) and knowledge-based production (e.g., computer software), helped sustain the employment bases of CBDs, whilst the surge in high paying jobs in such sectors increased the demand for housing in inner city areas. This development intensified the process of gentrification, which had emerged in the major cities in the 1960s. Gentrification of inner suburbs such as Balmain and Paddington in Sydney and the West End and New Farm in Brisbane, in concert with major public investments in infrastructure and facilities, caused steep rises in property values. The result was the displacement of significant numbers of lower income households, many of whom had to relocate to private rental accommodation in poorer-serviced, middle and fringe suburbs. A combination of economic shifts, public sector cutbacks and changes to household composition produced a new geography of segregation in Australian cities during phase one of the neo-liberal reform project. With many poorer private tenants being squeezed out, the inner suburbs became more polarised between gentrifiers and public housing tenants.18 One commentator reported that by 1995, in the middle suburbs ‘the patterns of large-scale segregation inherited from the long boom remain, and the differences between rich and poor areas appear to be growing’.19 The fringe suburban regions, traditionally a domain for younger, modest income households buying their first home, became hosts for elite residential developments. This reflected the rising costs and scarcity of greenfield land, which became increasingly locked up in high-cost and exclusive masterplanned estates, few of which were accessible to first home buyers. The loss of greenfield opportunities forced many young moderate income households to delay or even abandon the idea of buying a home. By the early 1990s, Australian cities were marked by stronger socio-economic divisions than previously: new fault lines had been
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laid, largely on economic grounds. And yet there was little evidence of the forms of extreme segregation common to United States cities. There were very few gated communities of the rich or impoverished ghettoes of the poor: although the smouldering inner city communities of Indigenous Australians in some of the larger cities were exhibiting worsening signs of exclusion and anger.
The Landscape Lifts, the Faults Deepen Phase two from the mid-1990s saw the national economy achieve relatively strong and stable growth levels. Many of the maladies evident in phase one were blunted or submerged as household incomes and wealth surged on the back of rising consumption and soaring urban property prices. However, most of the pressures and social fractures that emerged during phase one continued, lurking beneath the surface of the new ‘miracle economy’. Much of the observed increase in household wealth amongst the middle class and the aspirational working class occurred on shaky foundations, and generally reflected a growth in debt rather than secured assets. The broad evidence is that the social protections—notably welfare payments—brought in as ‘compensatory’ measures during the first phase of structural adjustment by the Hawke-Keating administrations, and largely maintained by the Howard government, have prevented much worsening of income polarisation during phase two.20 Wealth inequality grew markedly during phase one: the richest 20 per cent of households held 54 per cent of national wealth in 1967 and by 1998 had increased this to 63 per cent.21 During phase two, wealth polarisation seemed to slow, reflecting the broad surge in metropolitan house values (and prices) and the steady growth in the superannuation assets of working households.22 But the beast of inequality is reawakening. Recent economic simulations see wealth polarisation worsening again in the next few decades with a new inter-generational gap opening up
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between young and older households.23 Phase two and beyond will prove a difficult time for new households. The gap between the rich and the poor may well need to be redefined in terms of the old and the young. If current trends continue, young families look like they will not be entering home ownership in the way previous generations have and this could result in lower savings for these families. By 2030 . . . wealth inequality will be greater than it is now and the old will be at the rich end of the spectrum and the young will be down the poor end—even more than they are now.24
The remarkable political survival of Australia’s relatively progressive direct taxation regime during phase two helped to underscore the continuing redistribution of income from rich to poor. This further restrained the underlying drift to segregation produced by an increasingly liberalised economy and labour market. The proposals from conservative political interests in 2005 for further structural reforms that would lessen the progressive nature of the tax system and for new tightening of welfare eligibility (especially the Disability Support Pension) highlight the fragility of the current income fault lines. We may be poised for a further surge in polarisation. However, beyond the rather narrow confines of household income patterns, there is an entire landscape of social change that is marked by worsening and new fault lines. One important terrain is work, where new forms of polarisation emerged during phase two and where older cleavages strengthened. A deep fault line grew in workworlds, separating the greatly reduced and declining number of people who have access to secure employment and the large majority who must now cope with chronic insecurity and shorttermism as facts of working life. In many ways, insecurity—largely sourced in changes to employment—became the leitmotiv of the 1990s and the new millennium. Related to this, the critical employment pole that anchored the Australian Settlement—full-time, permanent work—lost its central significance during the 1990s.
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Employment growth in phase two has been largely in ‘non-standard’ work, meaning casual and part-time employment. Also, and significantly, the nature of the employment relationship changed for many formerly salaried workers, who through outsourcing and other ‘innovations’ such as labour hire arrangements moved from being employees to ‘dependent contractors’.25 For many—especially the suburban ‘aspirationals’ who occupied the centre stage of national politics in the early millennium—the shift to ‘independent’ work involved give and take: frequently a rise in gross income and a decrease in employment security. It is surely no accident that during phase two outer suburban electorates in the major cities exhibited a mood of nervous and restive conservatism. Voting patterns and popular debates—egged on by the conservative mass media—conveyed a new impatience with change, especially cultural change, which was reminiscent of the grey insularity of the inter-war years. At the same time, much of the workforce was pushed to work longer hours and/or more intensively. By 2005, only around one in ten employed Australians worked ‘normal’ hours (36–39 hours per week).26 The strain began to show. One study, for example, noted that ‘Stress claims . . . in New South Wales grew so strongly during the 1990s that they became the single largest cause of occupational disease during that decade’.27 The early years of the new millennium saw official unemployment falling to historically low levels. The triumphant joy in mainstream politics that greeted the news cheerfully neglected a much more sobering employment reality: notably worsening underemployment, which seemed to mirror—perversely—the distortion of over-employment reflected in extended hours and work intensification for many. It’s not easy to be classified jobless in Australia—the ‘unemployed’ are those who work less than one hour per week. By 2005, there were just over 500 000 people unemployed, whilst a further 613 000 people reported that they were under-employed.28 The ‘low’ unemployment figures of phase two
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masked chronic under-employment, as well as shielding a much higher real rate of social dependency reflecting the ‘hidden injuries’ of reform. In phase two, growth in the numbers of people on the Commonwealth’s Disability Support Pension (DSP) shadowed the decline in official unemployment. The DSP seems to have caught the fallout from structural reform: over phases one and two— between 1980 and 2004—the numbers receiving the DSP grew from about 230 000 to nearly 700 000, an increase of over 200 per cent.29 Did the neo-liberal program really solve the unemployment problems that beset Australia at the end of the Long Boom, or did it merely submerge them in new statistical registers? The economists Bob Gregory and Lixin Cai concluded: ‘Economic reforms have been ineffective in creating full-time jobs and reducing the numbers on income support’.30 Des Moore, neo-liberal prophet and director of the ‘Institute of Private Enterprise’, remains vexed by the inability of prolonged reform to deal with all the ‘laggards’. It is absurd to have 2.7 million, or 20 per cent of the workingage population, receiving income support compared with only 15 per cent at the end of the 1980s, and 4 per cent in 1969. Social assistance benefits now contribute 14.3 per cent of gross household disposable income. This compares with just 8 per cent under Whitlam.31
More social dependency than under their homo diabolus, Whitlam! Reform is a dunce it seems. Other fault lines to emerge during phase one continue to strengthen. One study reports that ‘work has become increasingly polarised into either all-work or no-work households’.32 Worryingly, the same analysis shows that growth in recent decades in joblessness has been concentrated in households with children. Also, households renting privately ‘are also more prone to the growing polarisation of work . . .’.33 These findings add to the grim portrait of contemporary life for poor households in private rental housing in the major Australian cities.34
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Finally, some forms of absolute poverty continued to worsen during phase two. Homelessness increased markedly in the early years of the new millennium. Between 2000–01 and 2003–04, the number of people using the Commonwealth’s Supported Accommodation and Assistance Program (SAAP) increased from around 91 000 to nearly 153 000.35 The proportion of children and young people using the SAAP scheme was shocking: nearly 53 000 children—one third of the 2003–04 SAAP recipients—accompanied adult service users. In addition, a large number of the remaining users were ‘unaccompanied children’, reflecting the nation’s dramatically escalating youth homelessness problem.
New Tide Lines of Urban Change The miracle economy of phase two produced a wealth and consumption surge—albeit much of it debt driven—that washed across the increasingly restless class landscapes of Australian cities. Household mobility and activity surged as the newly ‘enriched’ middle and upper working classes caught the wave and either improved their homes or moved residence, or both. New spaces of privilege—notably masterplanned estates—opened up to capture the throng, if not the masses, surfing the wealth wave. This saw many households shifting within and between the major metropolitan regions, and a small—if significant in impact—leakage to ‘seachange’ (coastal) and later ‘treechange’ (urban fringe and rural) areas. Importantly, the wave broke across the traditional class sea walls into working class subregions where developers of exclusive estates could access the last reservoirs of affordable and serviceable land. The new enclaves of privilege were not merely drop zones for elites either fleeing soaring house prices in leafy suburbia or rejecting the expensive monotony of inner city apartments. They were joined in the new outposts of affluence by aspirational households keen to stay within their home regions but hoping to distance
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themselves from those not blessed by the miracle economy, the poor and the excluded.36 The warmer metropolitan regions—southeast Queensland and Perth—continued to dominate national urban growth rates. Brisbane grew at a staggering rate—by 22 per cent in the decade to 2001—catching a large share of the mobility wave. Brisbane and the Gold and Sunshine coasts attracted many middle income households from the other major east coast cities in search of lifestyle improvement. Perth also gained significantly from interstate lifestyle migrants. Sydney and Melbourne recorded strong growth rates, proving especially attractive to overseas migrants. Meanwhile Adelaide, still reeling from the effects of structural adjustment in phase one, continued to languish, growing more slowly than any Australian capital, apart from Hobart, between 1996 and 2001.37 Regional industrial cities, such as Newcastle, Wollongong and Geelong, remained trapped in the population doldrums, though in each there were public renewal initiatives that produced some economic revitalisation. The divergent population patterns that emerged and strengthened during phases one and two of structural reform were partly mirrored by changes during the same period in the variation of metropolitan incomes (Table 3.1). The latter changes are telling; showing much more starkly than do population figures how the reform project has created a more polarised urban system. Sydney, of course, is the big winner, whilst Melbourne’s position—particularly given catch-up growth since 2001—probably hasn’t changed much. Amongst the other major cities, Brisbane and Perth lost some ground against the national income average, whilst Adelaide went into free fall, from a position of relative strength to a position of economic marginality. Hobart suffered even more serious decline. Current differences in the economic fortunes of Australian cities are largely explained by the limited opportunities for engagement in the ‘new economy’.38 Sydney, and to a lesser extent Melbourne,
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Table 3.1 Income Variations from the Australian Average (%) City 1976 2001 Change Sydney Melbourne Brisbane Perth Adelaide Canberra Darwin Hobart
8.6 5.9 –1.8 0.5 2.7 29.8 21.1 1.8
14.8 5.1 –2.8 –1.5 –6.9 28.0 12.2 –11.0
+6.2 –0.8 –1.0 –2.0 –9.6 –1.8 –8.9 –12.8
Source: Modified from Business Council of Australia39
have managed to register an almost exclusive claim on Australia’s role in the new global economy. The other major cities have lost out, producing new imbalances in the nation’s urban economic system, whose legacy is unmanageable growth pressures in Sydney, and wholesale socio-economic redundancy and waste in laggard cities and regions. This is hardly an efficient and equitable longterm outcome for the national economy and one that underlines the lack of federal leadership on urban policy in Australia during both phases one and two of the reform project.
The Shifting Sands of Urban Change Cities, by their nature, are always in flux: they are the crucibles of social change. So what has been happening within the major cities during phase two of the reforms? It has become increasingly apparent that a shift is underway in the nature of urban change itself. The geographical level of urban transformation has shifted downward, moving from the regional level to the local level. Change is no longer a hazy suburban phenomenon—the ‘west’ being different to the ‘east’
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or ‘north’, for example. Change now occurs at the neighbourhood level. Socio-economic differences are more apparent at the everyday scale. The geographer Bill Randolph writes: ‘Cities are more than ever before . . . collections of distinct communities and neighbourhoods, all the more differentiated as cities grow in size and complexity’.40 Australia’s once famously ‘bland’—that is, economically uniform—suburban regions decomposed into much more diverse and complex social landscapes. Poorer inner city areas have been transformed by decades of gentrification and by generous public investments in cultural and physical infrastructure that have greatly enhanced their ability to capture and hold social wealth. In the traditional working class subregions, rising—if unevenly distributed—affluence is reflected in the growth of new privileged masterplanned housing estates and classy consumption zones such as super shopping malls and snappy gyms. The established subregional markers of social class have progressively given way to a much more fine-grained and diffuse social geography. For example, regional class differences in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane for much of the post-war period were broadly compassed as ‘the West versus the Rest’. In Adelaide, the poorer western and northern corridors contrasted with the wealthier east and southeast. Perth’s class geography hinged on the division between the affluent west and the proletarian southwest and southeast. The increasingly polyglot class geographies emerging in Australia’s principal urban regions are rendering these traditional regional markers of social distinction increasingly redundant. At the same time, the ageing middle ring suburbs within traditionally poorer subregions have begun to host increasing concentrations of an expanding pauper class. After years of patient empirical observation, Bill Randolph has produced powerful and disturbing analyses of the suburbanisation of disadvantage in the declining and neglected middle suburbs, such as the subregions of Liverpool and Bankstown in Sydney and Maribyrnong and Darebin
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in Melbourne, that were largely built between the 1930s and 1960s. He writes, with some poignancy: Squeezed between the gentrified inner and expanded up-market suburbs in more established areas, and Mark Latham’s new ‘aspirational’ fringe developments, the ageing middle suburbs have become the dominant location of disadvantage and this pattern appears to be intensifying. These are areas of both despair and hope. Much of the population in these areas are just as aspirational as those on the new fringes and see themselves or their children making the same locational shift after making good. Others seem set to remain in these areas, often trapped by lack of lifetime assets and poor job prospects, or simply because they are growing older and do not have the inclination or resources to move elsewhere.41
Australia now has enormous and growing public housing waiting lists that reflect broad pressures in our urban housing markets and the inability and/or unwillingness of governments to invest adequately in the supply and maintenance of social housing. There are presently about 220 000 people on public housing waiting lists in Australia; an increase of 10 per cent in the past decade.42 But the figure masks a much larger level of urgent and growing housing need—many poor households simply don’t bother to join the queues for public housing, knowing they face years of waiting and official indifference. The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates that at least 400 000 households renting privately are in housing stress, meaning that they pay more of their income on accommodation costs than they can afford to.43 Another estimate is that more than a third of the 940 000 recipients receiving federal rent assistance pay over 30 per cent of their income on rent.44 Most of these people are struggling in the major cities. But how and where? Many, presumably, are living inadequately (e.g., with friends or family) and remain unseen to the official eye. Others are simply homeless. And a great many are languishing in unaffordable
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and often shabby private rental accommodation in the crumbling parts of middle suburbia waiting for the public housing that will probably never come their way. Bill Randolph, with colleague Darren Holloway, undertook an extensive study of polarisation in Sydney and Melbourne that revealed how disadvantage is steadily concentrating within the increasingly stressed parts of middle suburban areas.45 These are the netherworlds of the private rental market, studded with decrepit housing stock and generally wearing the mantle of public neglect. As noted, Australia’s cities have been socially and geographically restructured during the past three decades by the progressive localisation of difference. In this respect we have drifted closer towards the situation of cities in the United States where socio-economic differences are often highly localised, even street by street. The new suburban geography comprises a diverse set of historical overlays formed in response to successive political economic shifts and shocks registered at the local level during phases one and two of the reform project. Cities, always in transformation, are inevitably museums of human social history, comprised of artefact buildings, places and landscapes that record the past course of change. The newest artefacts in the urban landscape—the gilded masterplanned estates and the new poverty sinkholes—were produced through a ‘fury of change’, the storm of structural adjustment that has raged relentlessly across Australia’s cities and regions since the late 1970s. The tide lines of change in the older working class subregions are closely studded with the flotsam and jetsam of this furious structural transformation. Previously homogenous urban subregions are pockmarked by poverty and studded with wealth. The social and geographic splintering of cities has been noted in all countries where neo-liberalism has reigned in recent decades. The Dutch analysts Maarten Hajer and Arnold Reijndorp, for example, chart the drift of the contemporary neo-liberal city towards an ‘archipelago of enclaves’.46
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Consider three such subregions whose mosaic residential landscapes are littered with evidence of the structural storm. Adelaide’s north retains established working class neighbourhoods, together with ‘post-public’ housing estates (former public housing estates where ‘tenure mix’ and ‘social diversity’ have been created through the disposal of some public housing stock and the arrival of private landlords), new pockets of dereliction and disadvantage and award winning masterplanned enclaves. Western Sydney possesses robust but ageing working class subregions, residualised (post-1970s) public housing estates, the ‘non places’ where roam endlessly the junkies and the homeless, netherworld caravan parks of the poor, backblock encampments of migrant farmers, stockbrokers and misfits, together with the gleaming (sometimes walled) suburban estates and the middle ring dystopias that emerged simultaneously during the 1990s. Finally, the Gold Coast hosts a rapidly enlarging swarm of elite and gated communities set alongside, sometimes literally abutting, scruffy dormitory communities of service workers and jaded, if resilient, public housing clusters. Our suburbs increasingly reflect our social structure, now broadly divided into two groups of Australians, the winners and losers from structural change. Neo-liberalism’s growth machine produced great material riches (neglecting for now its relentless impoverishment of nature). And yet infuriatingly, indeed biblically, the poor remain with us; not the starving masses of Victorian industrialism, but the excluded, illhumoured ‘spectres at the feast’, who must watch from the sidelines the consumption orgy that characterises popular imagery of contemporary suburban life. The sidelines are the intensifying pockets of exclusion and disadvantage that have been forming in the past decade in areas outside public housing estates. Many of the factors behind contemporary urban segregation are well known and have been surveyed in the social scientific literature. What is much less understood and debated is the way in which government actions—particularly via deliberate dismantling of the
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public realm—have contributed to this change. The problem is not simply one of policy neglect; though this is certainly a factor shaping social and economic outcomes in many of Australia’s ageing suburbs. Many policy interventions and funding shifts in recent years have exacerbated the inequalities that ordinarily arise from market interactions. This is hardly malign neglect. An invisible but purposeful hand has been pushing our cities along the path of segregation. The handiwork of this agent of division is evident in the Commonwealth’s reduced support for key dimensions of the public realm, including education, health services, childcare and labour market support. The affluent are being pushed towards use of a subsidised and private sphere of service consumption and lured into areas of the cities where these services are richly supplied. The poor are left to fend for themselves in an increasingly stressed and dysfunctional realm of publicly provided services.
A Spectre Arises As the Australian Settlement was dismantled in the early 1980s, an anxious public watched whilst a new billboard promising ‘Gain after Pain’ was erected in its debris strewn foundations. Two decades later, the national landscape is festooned with cheerful bunting celebrating the tenth birthday of the miracle economy.47 And yet, there is a palpable undertone of nervousness amidst the prescribed merrymaking and political backslapping. The prophets have proclaimed from the media towers and political pulpits that a new and thoroughgoing round of reform is necessary . . . again. We seem less sure—reform, recently remembered, too often means painful dislocation and more uncertainty, a far and agonised cry from the happier image of ‘flexible adjustment’ conjured by the prophets. Other warning signs resonate in the social atmosphere. Where once Australians were attracted to new suburbia by the allure of space, amenity and peace—propelled only by the need to find
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somewhere new to make a life—now something else seems to impel them through the gates of new suburban estates: the hooded figure of fear. What then is the source of the gloom that seems to be darkening during neo-liberalism’s golden moment of triumph? If these are grand times for all, why are some escaping as fast as they can to the security and isolation of exclusive residential communities? One of the nation’s most insightful urban observers, Clive Forster, captures well the popular mood of unease that seems to be strengthening, just as the din from official celebrations gets louder: . . . it seems increasingly hard for young families in our cities to achieve the ‘Great Australian Dream’ of owning their own house and block of land. Homelessness has increased. Newspapers and TV programs report high levels of anxiety about crime and personal safety in the big cities. Despite recent improvements in unemployment rates, permanent full-time jobs are hard to find. Parents in particular worry about their children’s safety, and about their career and housing prospects.48
Phase one of the reform program rent the societal fabric deeply, establishing both new socio-economic divisions and instilling deeply in the national psyche a mood—an expectation—of chronic uncertainty. This was also a time of profound demographic and cultural change, only some of which was sourced in the political and economic reforms. The fallout from structural change created an unsettled Australia that observed, and experienced, the rapid drift to cultural diversity with increasing ill-humour and eventual alarm. The situation was made worse by self-serving governments— national and state—that mobilised and played upon the social anxieties generated by their own reform policies. The result was a progressive opting out of suburban mainstreams by elites and aspirational elites during phase two of the reforms, which in turn generated a new round of residential segregation in the cities. In an era of chronic socio-economic uncertainty and rapid cultural
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change, one way to re-establish a sense of control was to reject the ‘disorder’ of ordinary suburbia by retreating to new islands of privilege and conformity. Strangely, the new millennium’s ‘good times’ produced not boundless joy in the hearts of suburban publics but a new dysrhythmia that reflected an underlying pessimism about prospects for social solidarity and, ultimately, political democracy. Hope copped a thrashing.
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CHAPTER
4
The Sea of Uncertainty he demise of the Australian Settlement unleashed the furies of cultural transformation, producing liberation for some and disorientation for others. A far-reaching cultural pluralisation uprooted many of the social foundations of the old order and liberated many of the values and identities it had suppressed. Heretofore, Australian social conventions and culture had been moulded by a rigidly Anglo-Celtic outlook. But now, pluralisation was driven by three forces for change. The first was the relentless underlying drift to greater social diversity (especially in the cities) sourced in migration and demographic evolution. The second force was the prolonged struggles of social movements to win support for new values (notably, environmental and Indigenous) and to liberate ‘non-orthodox’ cultural identities and expressions. A third force for pluralisation has been technological change, especially the rise of global media and an associated mass culture that has increased tolerance for new identities and values. Cultural shifts deeply affected gender roles, sexual expression, and the public articulation of personal (especially spiritual and ecological) values. Social researcher Hugh Mackay believes these changes combined to engender a deep sense of ambiguity, and increasing unease, about the notions of national identity that had crystallised during the Australian Settlement period. ‘Since the early 1970s’, he wrote over a decade ago, ‘there is hardly an institution or convention of Australian life that has not been subject to serious challenge or radical change’.1 These words remain bitingly
T
51
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relevant today, if only because in the intervening period it seems that every remaining ‘untouched’ institution has been subject to change. From the contemporary vantage point, after three decades of cultural change, the social landscape of the 1950s seems a very distant country. The white, Christian nuclear family was the cellular form of the society imagined by, and to some extent realised by, the Australian Settlement. The family framed a set of restrictive and culturally enshrined identities—the breadwinner father, the housewife mother, and dependent children. Deviations from this social form were variously discouraged, and even forbidden, in law, social convention and cultural expression. The ideal was always threatened by the fact of continuing (if sporadic) immigration, and this source of social change was therefore regulated through the interdependent policies of White Australia and cultural assimilation. By the 1950s, even after significant post-war intakes of European refugees, outside observers were struck by the outward homogeneity of Australian society, expressed in the relatively uniform social geography of its cities. By the 1960s, things had begun to change noticeably. As with other western countries—especially the United States—this decade unleashed the immanent political energies of alternative cultural forms, often through urban social movements linked ideologically, and even organisationally, to international shifts and struggles. Generally, the claim was not for the radical overthrow of all social conventions, though this ideal was advanced by some progressive currents, but rather for official toleration of, and cultural respect for, non-orthodox identities and lifestyles. Politically and institutionally, the feminist movement had the greatest early successes, evidenced in new legal guarantees of sexual equality in most areas of social life and the increasing participation of women in the mainstreams of Australian society. Other identity causes were pursued, including those of gays, Aborigines and disabled people, as well as non-Anglo peoples and cultures.
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The emancipation of suppressed identities both coincided with, and encouraged, profound changes to the composition of Australian households. One important change was the passage of the Family Law Act in 1974, which made divorce easier and long-term marriage less likely. Combined with rapid demographic changes, notably falling fertility rates and population ageing, these changes undermined the concrete and ideological significance of the nuclear family. Another major source of cultural pluralisation was the demise in the 1960s of the White Australia ideal in Commonwealth law and policy. Although initiated without much official enthusiasm, this change created the way for a deeper commitment to more inclusive immigration and cultural policies by later national governments. By the 1980s, multiculturalism was an important (but not codified) ideal guiding the immigration policies of the Commonwealth, and the cultural policies of the states. And after decades of agitation and slow reform, the 1990s saw landmark improvements in Indigenous recognition, including the Mabo (1992) and Wik (1996) High Court judgements that finally granted a history, if not a future, to Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Two refugee intakes did much to increase cultural diversity, beginning with an influx of Eastern Europeans and Holocaust survivors in 1945 and continuing from the late 1970s with arrivals from Southeast Asia, Latin America and, later, Africa. Just as importantly, the size of the migration intake ensured that this was a major source of cultural and social change. During this time Australia recorded some of the highest immigration levels in the developed world. The tendency of most migrants to settle in the state capitals, particularly Sydney and Melbourne, meant that from the 1970s Australian cities became far more ethnically diverse than could ever have been imagined during the reign of the Australian Settlement.
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Liquid Cities How has cultural pluralisation manifested itself in the cities? First, the demise, but not the disappearance, of the nuclear family, has been accompanied by a rapid increase in the number of ‘nontraditional’ households. The ‘family’ has certainly not disappeared, increasing in number from 4.3 million in 1991 to 4.9 million in 2001. But it is a much more diverse phenomenon than formerly. The couple family with children remains the most numerous family form; but the number of couples without children has increased by 30 per cent during the past decade, whilst one parent families increased by nearly 40 per cent during the same period.2 Single person households have grown significantly, driven largely by population ageing. Demographic pluralisation has been strongly registered in the cities. Bill Randolph observes: The decline of the [nuclear] family and the rise of a more atomised population structure, most notably an ageing one, is an ongoing feature of urban social change. The population of the eight Australian capital cities grew by 12.7% between 1981 and 2001, but the numbers of households grew by 20.6%.3
Between 1996 and 2001, growth in couples with children remained sluggish in the capitals, even reversing in Adelaide, which saw a 2.2 per cent decline in this household type. Other household types, by contrast, registered strong growth for all cities in the same period, though rates varied considerably. Growth in couple only households was lowest in Adelaide (5.2 per cent) and highest in Brisbane (14.9 per cent). Single parent household growth ranged from 7.9 per cent in Sydney to a soaring 19.4 per cent in Brisbane. Brisbane also topped the growth for lone person households, whilst Sydney recorded the lowest growth at 7.1 per cent.4 Another significant cultural change has been the emergence of new ethnic landscapes in the cities. These have been overlain in
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recent decades on earlier patterns of post-war cultural change which began the transformation of a largely Anglo-Celtic urban culture. As Clive Forster points out, ‘Australia’s major cities were already ethnically diverse by 1971 . . . In Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide especially there were marked concentrations of Italians, Greeks and other nationalities in particular suburbs’.5 Since then, newer, non-European immigrant groups—and especially refugees— have made their presence felt in inner city public high-rise estates. But more significantly, the new waves of settlers have established distinct communities outside the inner suburbs, which no longer possess the affordable housing and blue collar jobs that are sought by many immigrant groups. The Vietnamese and Lebanese, in particular, have tended to be more residentially segregated than other immigrant groups, concentrating their communities in working and lower middle class suburbs such as Auburn and Cabramatta in Sydney and Coburg and Springvale in Melbourne. Working and middle-income suburbs in the major cities have also been transformed. In the northern suburbs of Melbourne, for example, Turkish and Lebanese immigrants have mixed with earlier settlers from southern Europe to create an area that has an increasingly Mediterranean ambience, contrasting with its earlier Anglo-Celtic character. Typically for most areas with large immigrant populations, Melbourne’s northern and western suburbs had tracts of cheap and public housing, and were also situated close to migrant hostels such as Midway in Maribyrnong, the entry points for most refugee groups. The location of hostels established growth poles for Vietnamese communities, in particular in Springvale and Footscray (Melbourne), Darra (Brisbane) and Woodville (Adelaide).6 Sydney’s Cabramatta has been completely transformed by Vietnamese migrants with its dense concentration of Vietnamese restaurants, shops, religious institutions and community facilities. Many of Cabramatta’s residents started their lives in Australia at the nearby Villawood Migrant Centre. In 2001, 25 000 Vietnamese-born people resided in the
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Fairfield local government area in which Cabramatta is situated. But Cabramatta is also an island in a sea of ethnic diversity. By 2001, more than half the total population in Fairfield and the adjoining municipality of Auburn were born overseas, with residents coming from Vietnam, China, Turkey and the Philippines together with large groups from Italy, Malta, Lebanon, Chile and Croatia.7 Cabramatta is not alone in its diversity. Many other working and middle-income suburbs in the major cities have developed highly complex ethnic compositions. By 2001 in the greater Brisbane region, one-quarter of Logan City’s population was overseas born; after English, the top five languages spoken at home were Samoan, Chinese, Spanish, Khmer and Tagalog (Filipino). And recent influxes of wealthier migrants from Asia, notably Malaysia, Hong Kong and Singapore, have clustered in higher-income suburbs and exclusive inner city residential developments in most major cities. But the suburbs have not always been happy theatres of multicultural diversity. Tensions have risen as non-European cultural facilities such as mosques have appeared in suburban landscapes, attracting opposition from local residents and councils. For some, the mosque and the Hindu temple represent disturbing motifs of the cultural pluralisation that threatens Australia’s European social order. Perth—a stronghold of the anti-immigrant Australian Nationalists Movement (ANM)—has been particularly beset by sporadic racist violence in recent decades. The ANM’s leader Jack van Tongeren served twelve years in gaol on more than fifty charges, including arson, stealing, conspiracy and assault. In a public statement on his 2002 release, van Tongeren warned the Western Australian premier Geoff Gallop, ‘You ought to be more concerned about the rights and welfare of Australian people, than pandering to the Asian minority’.8 Graffiti and sticker campaigns have regularly stigmatised migrant and minority groups in Perth, whilst ethnic businesses and cultural facilities have been episodically vandalised. It is important, however, not to exaggerate the extent of ethnic tension that manifested in Australia during the first decades of
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pluralisation. By international standards, Australia made the transition to multiculturalism in a remarkably peaceful and tolerant manner. Recent politics have, however, stretched the fabric of tolerance. Some media and even scholarly analysis has cast the new urban ethnic concentrations negatively, as ‘enclaves’ or even ‘ghettoes’ of marginality and disadvantage. The characterisation is thoughtlessly derivative of North American urban experiences (a common failing in Australian urban commentary) and neglects the dynamism and fluidity of Australia’s urban ethnic communities. One of Australia’s most experienced and insightful population geographers, Ian Burnley, flatly rejects the use of either term, emphasising that urban ethnicity in Australia does not reflect the patterns of geographical and economic entrapment evident in many United States cities.9 Mike Poulsen, Ron Johnston and James Forrest have further debunked the ghetto myth through analysis of cultural change in Sydney, which demonstrates the limited and highly fluid nature of ethnic segregation.10 The study showed that new migrant groups clustered initially in areas with cheap housing but moved on to other suburbs as their economic circumstances improved. The idea of hardened ethnic enclaves was a myth. The Sydney Morning Herald’s sympathetic coverage of the Poulsen study in late 2004 was a rare departure from the stream of ‘ghetto journalism’ that has distorted popular perceptions of cultural change in Australian cities, especially since the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York. The social researcher Gary Yia Lee points to the frequent media demonisation of migrant and refugee communities by the metropolitan media in Sydney and Melbourne during the 1990s.11 Alarmist headlines raised the spectre of Asian gangs (‘ASIAN DRUG CARTEL BACK ON STREETS’, Sydney Daily Telegraph), quartered in murky urban ghettoes (‘MIGRANT GHETTO CONCERN’, Melbourne Herald Sun).12 As Lee points out, these ludicrously distorted depictions of urban criminality (crime by Anglo-Celts not being ethnically identified) had a sinister and
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destructive edge, criminalising migrant and refugee groups and driving second-generation youth into the despair of stigmatism and police suspicion. Apart from ethnic diversification, other new forms of cultural plurality have cut across Australian cities, including the emergence of places inhabited and frequented by openly gay people in the major cities. Many gays, especially male couples, have participated in the gentrification of inner city terrains such as Sydney’s Oxford Street and adjoining residential areas, Darlinghurst and Paddington. Perth’s Northbridge and Melbourne’s inner suburbs—notably Collingwood, Fitzroy, Northcote and St Kilda—also have open and active gay communities. However, the increasing cultural visibility and official acceptance of gays and lesbians must be considered against a backdrop of continuing, if often muted, animosity and violence towards homosexual people. Tolerance for the open expression of homosexual identity seems lowest in the suburbs, though this is undoubtedly where the bulk of gay and lesbian Australians live.
The Politics of Cultural Enclosure Diversity and insecurity were two distinct and yet related consequences of the complex set of cultural, political and economic shifts that dethroned the Australian Settlement. Both outcomes affected different social groups in quite distinct ways. The insecurity pandemic, deriving from political and economic changes, especially within labour markets, was offset for some by rising incomes and increased flexibility in working arrangements. For many others, it signalled a descent into a more miserable lifeworld overshadowed by increased work performance pressure and decreased control of life in general. Cultural diversification also affected social groups in distinct ways. For some sections of Australian society, the increasing
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cultural plurality of the nation from the 1960s brought a greater sense of unfamiliarity and uneasiness. A broad ‘middle’ had mixed reactions, accepting and enjoying over time the benefits of an increasingly cosmopolitan society, whilst nonetheless remaining vulnerable to fear campaigns generated episodically by media and political interests that fixed on ‘dangerous’ cultural groups. For other social groups, such as gays and lesbians, the shift to a more plural culture, and its official recognition, brought greater social and psychic security. Employing the time schema introduced in the previous chapter, it can be argued that phase two of the structural reforms saw a cultural counter-reaction which sought to roll back the tide of pluralisation that had gained momentum, especially in public policy, during phase one. The 1996 election of the Howard government coupled a reactionary cultural agenda to a new attack on the Australian Settlement’s surviving elements, such as industrial conciliation and centralised wage fixing. Much of the force behind the cultural fightback came from conservative commentators and scholars—led from behind by the Howard government—who seemed to desire the reinstatement of the social and moral order that supported the Australian Settlement. The agenda both cultivated and profited from the social unease many Australians felt about the changes that had transformed their society and cities during reform phase one. This produced tensions within conservative politics, which included a strong libertarian contingent who saw cultural pluralisation as integral to a more deregulated economic order. (In 2002, one key neo-liberal prophet, The Australian’s Greg Sheridan, cast the Howard government’s approach to border protection as ‘A POLICY OF INSANE CRUELTY’.)13 However, the reactionaries, aided by the conservative mass media, grabbed the political megaphone, and were able to pursue what the political economist Boris Frankel calls a project of ‘cultural enclosure’, marked by a renewed official emphasis on established Anglo-Saxon mores and other forms of
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cultural orthodoxy. The ‘right-wing jihad’ (as Frankel puts it) against the pluralists was largely an urban campaign prosecuted within the arts and academia (the so-called ‘culture wars’) and in the mainstreams of suburban interaction.14 The spear-carriers for the conservatives in the suburban skirmishes were talkback radio and the tabloid dailies. After 1996, ‘political correctness’, though never an explicit policy of the previous government, was demonised as a failing of the recent past, and the notion of free speech was redefined in ways that encouraged the airing of extremist cultural views. Indigenous and environmental programs were targeted for attack, and the Commonwealth’s commitments to multiculturalism and human rights were diluted. The native title rights implied by the Mabo and Wik judgements were circumscribed by new legislation in 1998. Reactionary cultural politics were inflamed by the emergence of a new independent politician, Pauline Hanson, whose declamations against pluralisation, especially multiculturalism, received wide media coverage. Significantly, many of the supporters of Hanson and the One Nation Party that formed around her standard, mainly Anglo-Celtic Australians, were equally critical of the economic restructuring of the previous decade. One Nation became a significant potential threat to neo-liberalism itself: by 1998 it had a loose membership of 25 000 organised in 275 branches nationwide. The populist front of the culture wars drew deeply from the well springs of social resentment that had been charged by rising levels of material insecurity and economic hardship. The sociologist Michael Pusey remarked at the time of One Nation’s rise that ‘Insecurity is biting hard into Middle Australia and generating the kinds of social resentments epitomised by Pauline Hanson’s supporters . . .’.15 Hanson’s army had provided useful footsoldiers for the culture wars but clearly needed to be demobilised before it marched back to ransack the citadels of neo-liberalism. (The libertarian Right was well aware that Hansonism was a potentially dangerous foe of neo-
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liberalism.) This was deftly achieved in the early years of the new millennium, with the conservative mainstream parties effectively co-opting much of the ‘acceptable’ Hansonist policy agenda, especially on refugees and welfare recipients. Other cultural counter-attacks were made. These included the Howard government’s ‘wedge politics’ on welfare, which aimed to garner electoral support from their opponents’ traditional constituency, the ‘respectable working class’, by demonising recipients of social support, especially the unemployed.16 The blending of cultural counterreaction with bald electoral opportunism continued in the early years of the new millennium, marked especially by the lethally effective tactic of ‘dog whistling’. The former senior public servant and cultural commentator John Menadue describes the technique as: . . . putting out quite different messages in different registers, so that a message, often of fear, will be heard by a targeted group. It is the antithesis of open and honest public discourse . . . Put out a subliminal story, confident that there are media commentators, particularly on talk-back radio, who will make the necessary connections and push the fear along . . . as the late US journalist H.L. Mencken put it ‘the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed’. We are fed a diet of endless fear and endless insecurity . . . On Asian migration, the Prime Minister said that he was not saying it was too great but ‘in the eyes of some in the community, it is too great’. Those who wanted to hear ‘no more Asian migration’ heard the message very clearly. But John Howard could deny he said it . . . On asylum seekers, he hinted that many asylum seekers might be terrorists and that they were so inhuman as to throw their children overboard. He left it to commercial radio to kick the story along. Great damage was done to innocent people.17
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Towns Called Malice The 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York provided the dog whistlers with new opportunities and legions of anxious new ears which, according to one chronicle, led to: . . . a number of cycles of attacks on Muslim and Middle-Eastern background people in Australia . . . [including] racist media panics which criminalise whole communities, racist vilification for political advantage, physical assaults and property damage such as arson which are arguably provoked by the foregoing, and police and security raids which trample on civil rights . . .18
Populist politics was described as ‘exploiting xenophobia; in symbiosis with manipulated and largely supine media’.19 In 2001–02, a series of media induced moral panics about ‘lawless’ Lebanese–Australian youth followed the trials of gang rapists in Sydney. The tabloid press put in a gold medal performance worthy of the Olympic city. A Daily Telegraph editorial shrilled: ‘There are suburbs in which the streets are not safe and young Caucasian women are at risk of rape’.20 Young Lebanese men seemed to have replaced the earlier Vietnamese crime gangs as the contemporary Australian ‘folk devil’.21 The cultural critic Ghassan Hage writes: Unlike most migrants, the Arab migrant is a subversive will . . . They invade our shores, take over our neighbourhood and rape our women. They are all little bin Ladens and they are everywhere . . . bin Ladens on the beach, bin Ladens in the suburbs . . .22
Like their counterparts in any ethnic group, including Anglo–Australians, some young Lebanese men on occasion behave badly in public. Sydney journalist Salam Zreika writes: I am Lebanese and I know what these young Lebanese boys are capable of and how they behave in public. For years I have travelled on public transport and gone to venues where groups
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such as these have been loud, rude and obnoxious, and it disgusts me to think they are part of my cultural heritage. And I am not the only one who feels this way.23
Zreika decries, however, the tendency of the popular media, especially talkback radio, to stereotype all young Lebanese Australian men as marauders. The inevitable consequences of prolonged stereotyping were revealed on Sunday 11 December 2005 when a mob of ‘true Australians’ gathered at Sydney’s Cronulla beach to hunt and punish the Lebanese folk devils. An unruly horde met to ‘reclaim the beach’ after reported anti-social behaviour by outsiders, assumed largely to be Lebanese–Muslim youth. In the preceding week, a mobile text message had been circulating, urging a mob gathering: ‘Come to Cronulla this weekend to take revenge. This Sunday every Aussie in the Shire get down to North Cronulla to support the Leb and wog bashing day . . .’.24 The call to arms might never have stirred up more than a desultory few if it hadn’t also been telegraphed on talkback radio by shock jock Alan Jones. The gathering began relatively peacefully but became increasingly frenzied and eventually generated a series of savage assaults on innocent people of ‘Lebanese’ appearance. In the following days, antagonised elements in Sydney’s Middle Eastern community responded to the Sunday riot with a series of equally violent retaliatory attacks on individuals and property in Cronulla and surrounding parts of Sydney’s Sutherland Shire. In the wake of the violence, conservative commentators, such as Keith Windschuttle, claimed that the tensions and violence were somehow a legacy of multiculturalism. Sydney writer Steve Sharp made this assessment of Windschuttle’s argument: One moment, it’s the corruption of multiculturalism that’s the problem, the next it’s multiculturalism itself—which he equates with tribalism. All very confused. Whatever the line of attack, he does not make any case to link multicultural policies with
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the clashes at Cronulla. He appears to blame the ‘M’ word for the concentration of Lebanese in the western suburbs, their unemployment, welfare dependency, crime, violence; you name it. Please explain. In this version of reality, craven bureaucrats are also responsible for the failure of Lebanese to marry outside their ethnic group—a measure of their failure to integrate. But Windschuttle doesn’t factor in the most obvious variable: religion. Muslims don’t do inter-marriage. This methodological sleightof-hand gives readers the misleading impression that in the absence of the multicultural social engineers, Lebanese Muslims would be falling over themselves marrying people of other faiths. Crazy stuff.25
What falls from Sharp’s analysis is a different set of failures. The first was a failure of leadership: the inability or unwillingness of political and community leaders to address cultural tensions in their earliest stages, to oppose cultural stereotyping and to ‘identify and isolate opportunists and provocateurs both from the extreme Right, and religious radicals’.26 The second and equally appalling failure of public culture was the outright complicity of the popular media with the agents of racism and resentment. Sharp fears the drift towards cities ruled by ‘a kind of social apartheid’ and marked by ‘lockdowns, no-go zones, segregated beaches’. What is important here is the impact of the cultural counterattacks—including dog whistling and wedge politics—on the climate of public opinion in the cities. The ‘diet of endless fear and endless insecurity’, of which Menadue speaks, further weakened the moral confidence of a body politic already stressed by economic change and cultural fluidity. The project of cultural enclosure—‘the narrowing of genuine cultural and political choice’—steadily gained ground in the cities, where social angst was deepening.27 The Howard Government’s ‘Dark Victory’28 in the 2001 election
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drew inspiration from and further intensified the climate of urban gloom, manifesting during the election campaign as a manipulated suburban pandemic of fear about asylum seekers. The campaign’s axiomatic moment—the ‘Tampa Affair’ and its monstrous propaganda about filicidal refugees—was followed by the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, which put fear into overdrive. These attacks produced in western minds a new tableau of dread: the twin motifs of modernity—the jetliner and the skyscraper—cast down together by the Saracens of Bedlam. The traditional western view of cities as redoubts or permanent fortifications was also cast aside: they were now the targets of terror and the focal points of insecurity. At the same time, the golden skies of the miracle economy were laced with clouds of anxiety arising from workforce fatigue and spiritual exhaustion: from the horizon came storm rumblings, what the poet Christopher Brennan a century earlier called The Chant of Doom, the talk of terrible acts and of convulsive war. As the third millennium opened, a new mood of anxiousness surfaced, this time in the cities and their suburbs. The new social angst contrasted in a number of ways with the Children’s Crusade launched by Hansonism against the apostasy of postmodernism and the treason of neo-liberalism. The crimson banner of resistance that marked One Nationism was replaced with the white flag of capitulation, raised in new suburban outposts where people sought refuge from, not confrontation with, the storm of change. There was nothing obviously good about diversity any more: it was the corrupting absinthe drunk by the inner city chattering classes. Conservative commentary conjured—just as it had done regularly in previous centuries—a mythological cityscape of sedition: this time peopled with dissolute libertarians, perfidious lefties and barmy tree-huggers. After fifty years off the topic, the dailies thundered again with slum condemnation, only this time the slums were filled with intellectuals not metho drinkers. The decadence of the chattering classes was contrasted with the alleged rectitude of the
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suburban aspirationals, including those flooding into new lifestyle and security communities, where the disorder of change could be set aside.
Hillsong and the Sirens of Insecurity As conservative commentary chorused over the apparent ‘revival’ of Christianity in the suburbs, Anne Henderson, of the Sydney Institute, gave thanks for the new religious fervour of the outer suburbs. ‘Not the religion of the 1950s,’ she wrote, ‘with its strictures and overarching piety but a community-based spirituality that attracts followers from the middle class and young families’.29 And the admiration has been mutual. Neo-liberalism has received benediction from influential currents within conservative Catholicism and Protestant revivalism. A new liberation theology has emerged from the encounter between economic conservatism and conservative religion. It invokes freedom as a sacred virtue, promising escape from the drab shackles of material temperance. This has largely occurred in the cities where the veneration of affluence has claimed a mass following. A large revivalist Sydney congregation in northwestern Sydney, Hillsong, has carried the new aspirational religion to the centre stage of public attention. The church ‘. . . operates from a 21 acre site in a modern business park’ and draws thousands to its rapturous meetings, including federal politicians who regularly immerse themselves in the sea of photogenic believers.30 The power of the message to make even the unbelievers dance and clap in time was vividly displayed in 2005 when Bob Carr, the openly agnostic Labor premier of New South Wales, joined the chorusing at Hillsong. Geographer John Connell sees Hillsong and kindred aspirational congregations as providing ‘a more personal sense of community in largely anonymous suburbia’.31 Such congregations use a religiously honed communal sphere to generate and maintain social relation-
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ships. To this end, they have little obvious reliance on the traditional secular civic domain of liberal democracy. As Connell says about Sydney’s Hillsong: The Church has taken over the role once played by local civic associations, developing human relationships (and stimulating social capital) and simultaneously exercising a powerful conservative force, transmitted into the wider political arena.32
It is important, however, not to overstate the reach of the aspirational congregations, which have large but not mass memberships and which tend to be geographically concentrated. Their influence may appear larger than it really is because increasingly they provide health, childcare and education facilities used by a broader net of households whose real interest is the quality of the service itself rather than the religious message attached to it. The new deliverance is a rapture for the rich—the devil seems to have claimed the hindmost, especially the poor and the inner city chatterboxes. ‘And a lot of it is based around new and growing outer suburban and regional schools,’ Henderson remarked, whose success is ‘. . . partly a result of this revival of interest in Christianity’. Henderson conveniently overlooks one major stimulant behind the growth of suburban Christian schools: the dam burst of federal funding for ‘independent’ schools, and the tenuous embrace of the otherwise ungodly aspirationals with evangelical religion, or at least its educational organs. Conservatives such as Henderson fervently hope that aspirational ‘revivalism’ in Australia’s affluent suburbs will mirror the conservative religiosity that characterises many suburban landscapes in the United States. Marion Maddox, an acute observer of the rise of the religious Right in Australia, can see through the delusion, however. She doubts that the new suburban religiosity has mass appeal, and points to the pragmatic and sceptical heart of the Australian proletariat.33 The journalist Andrew West agrees:
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. . . ‘Christian values’ and Christianity are not the same . . . religious conservatives in Australia have . . . to work harder to broaden their appeal to people who rarely, if ever, darken the doorway of a church but who see Christian values as code for a more ordered society.34
Some suburbanites have aligned with elements of the new conservative suburbanism—including outer suburban Christian schools and faith-based service agencies—in a pragmatic not pious search for ethical and social moorings in a world marked by the retreat of the state and the deliberately engineered decline of moral standards in public institutions (witness Tampa and the Children Overboard affairs). But the Hillsong emanating from the new suburban faith citadels hardly signals the revival of social hope.35 Meanwhile, the ‘devil’s hindmost’ has been showing new signs of restlessness. As the social residuum created by structural change progressively hardened, it revealed in the increasingly neglected and blighted public housing estates and places of Indigenous poverty a simmering anger, boiling over regularly in anti-social waves that washed through adjoining residential areas and public spaces. Perhaps appropriately, the discontent arising from poverty and marginalisation was most strongly expressed in Sydney, the citadel of neo-liberal globalisation, and the molten epicentre of the phase two miracle economy. In the early years of the new millennium, the Indigenous urban community in Redfern and the bleak public housing estates in the city’s southwest were plagued by unrest. February 2005 saw open rioting, largely between police and disaffected youths, in one estate, Macquarie Fields. A seasoned commentator observed: When you have marginalised people, low employment rates, a concentration of single, stressed parents and communities with poor access to resources and poor health care, difficult transport and little opportunity for meaningful employment, when you put all these things together, it is a recipe for disaster.36
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This former policeman’s heresy was surely to suggest that the desiderata of neo-liberalism also amounted to a recipe for urban disorder. The New South Wales premier, Bob Carr, initially blamed the outbreaks on failings of individual character but later admitted that there appeared to have been a ‘social trigger’ for the riots.37 A heartless, not to say venomous, media magnified public anxieties about the threat of an ‘underclass’, condemning the ‘outrageous’ and ‘ungrateful’ behaviour of the Sydney ‘mobs’. And while some letter writers and commentators suggested that the rioting underlined the need for collective reflection on the social effects of economic restructuring, the Sydney Morning Herald’s conservative columnist Miranda Devine snorted that the riots merely demonstrated the need for zero tolerance policing.38 In The Australian, Janet Albrechtsen spun marvellous sophistry, arguing that the outbreaks of despair amongst Sydney’s alienated and abandoned was evidence of too much ‘government intervention’ in the lives of the poor.39 In every city, middle-class urbanites glanced nervously aside at the public housing estates and stressed out communities in their own backyards. There was now a profound shift in the popular understanding of cultural change in phase two of the great reform. The centre point of public opinion moved—propelled by the politics of enclosure—away from the slightly bewildered enthusiasm that marked early multiculturalism to a much warier, at times hostile, encounter with change. As the moods of the wealthy and aspirational classes darkened, events, both ordinary (crime) and spectacular (riots), seemed to confirm mainstream fears about the frightening apparitions that had appeared from the mists of change: a thankless, lawless Dickensian poor, and a subversive set of folk devils— machete waving Asian gangs and skulking suburban bin Ladens. The German sociologist Ulrich Beck has termed such apparitions the ‘enemy stereotypes’ of contemporary western globalism.40 These enemy stereotypes took on frightening new hues under the dark skies of the post 11 September War on Terror. They danced most frighteningly in the cities: the increasingly vulnerable dioramas
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of globalisation, now beset by a terrorist world war whose principal theatres of action would be cities. John Menadue speaks of ‘endless fear and endless insecurity’ as new motifs in Australian public life.41 Insecurity perhaps was the banner of reform phase one; phase two witnessed the raising of fear’s standard by its side. Both are powerful organising and motivating forces, and both—not surprisingly—began to influence how elites and the aspirationals felt about their communities, their suburbs and their cities. Australians have always been great urban improvers, moving their place of residence in search of better employment, more agreeable environs, a nicer climate, or—often— simply more personal space. What began to shift now was the register of improvement, which took on a North American tone— improving one’s ‘neighbourhood’ by moving into pockets of privilege and stability and away from the sources of fear: the pauper brother and the ethnic other. In the sea of uncertainty appeared new islands of privileged order. The developers and their advertising agencies sang of idylls free of urban turmoil, and whose denizens looked reassuringly similar, right down to the same smirk on their cherubic faces. The contemporary retreat of elites and aspirationals into exclusive masterplanned estates suggests transition to a new mode of suburbanisation driven by dreams (refuge from insecurity) and nightmares (retreat from the snarling faces of urban disorder). Slowly arises from the sea of uncertainty the ‘archipelago of enclaves’.
To the Islands ‘In the sea of uncertainty, one seeks salvation on little islands of safety’ Zygmunt Bauman42
Mike Moore’s Oscar-winning documentary Bowling for Columbine depicted a country in the thrall of fear, largely of itself. Ostensibly
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about the ravages of America’s gun culture, Columbine exposed far deeper tensions within the United States’ white suburban societies. A sequence of animated maps retold the story of white flight from the cities that began in the 1960s, propelled by deepening racial tensions, economic restructuring and mounting concern about urban disorder. The exodus has continued in the decades since, fuelling the continuous and often haphazard expansion of largely white suburbs. Zygmunt Bauman observes, ‘The recent history of American cities is . . . marked all over with security and safety concerns’.43 Feardriven sprawl has been accompanied by a rapid balkanisation of the local political landscape as each new suburban community wraps itself in municipal armoury, ensuring that local taxes aren’t redistributed back to the ‘undeserving’ (and coloured) poor in the older cities. Mike Moore’s thesis is that fear is good for business. Fearfuelled sprawl has consumed vast amounts of land, materials and energy and has undoubtedly added significantly to the United States’ GDP since its emergence four decades ago. Anxiety fuels consumption, as advertisers well know, and death and disaster are excellent growth stimulants. All such ‘ordinary’ maladies are good for business and hence for the nation. Mike Davis is an urban theorist from the United States whose celebrated explorations of the growth and decline in fin de siècle Los Angeles reflect Moore’s theme of a suburban America literally terrified of itself.44 His lens captures elite masses retreating into walled and economically autonomous enclaves as older cities spiral downwards into the economic and social abyss. ‘Fortress America’ is now comprised of a myriad of largely white suburban fortresses. The political scientist Evan McKenzie calls these private utopias ‘privatopias’.45 They include gated estates, home-owner associations, buildings with doormen—people living in ever-increasing isolation from the dimly grasped sources of their original fear of urban disorder.46 A recent assessment shows that the number of
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American citizens in security communities increased from 4 million in 1996 to approximately 16 million in 2004.47 Australians have long shared with Americans a deep love of suburban living—its space, amenity and order. But with the outbreak of fear in urban America in the 1960s, the dynamics behind suburbanisation in both countries diverged, as Australians continued to pursue peace rather than security in the suburbs, largely free from the shadow of urban dread. Other factors, such as Australia’s relatively vibrant planning system and its recent flirtation with inner-urban living, have shaped its distinct development paths. Recently, however, commentary from academics, the media and development industry advocates has heralded the arrival of the North American privatopia in Australia. The opening of Australia’s first gated community, the Gold Coast’s Sanctuary Cove in 1985, marked the arrival of a new residential development form that has gradually manifested in most of the nation’s major cities and in nearby urban regions.48 One estimate has 100 000 people currently residing in gated estates in Australia.49 The gated community is an example of the broader exclusive residential estate that is now the mainstream suburban product. With the recent decline of the first-home-owner housing market in urban Australia, the exclusive lifestyle estate has emerged as the principal form of greenfield residential development. These new estates are strongly distinguished from the traditional residential subdivisions of post-war Australia by their careful and often expensive design and, importantly, by the manner in which they are marketed to an exclusive and ‘discerning’ clientele. The Australian masterplanned estate is, however, rarely walled; rather, the quality of exclusiveness, and by extension exclusion, is assured by the expense of buying into such estates. Exclusiveness is also maintained by physical attributes that ‘design out’ non-residents, such as landscaped embankments and signs that remind visitors that parks are for the use of ‘residents only’.
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The deepening cultural and economic angst amongst elites and aspirationals has been reinforced in the cities by a decline in the urban public realm. Urban ‘society’ seems to have failed, disappearing in boiling seas of change. Community is the island of certainty. This structural angst is distilled, along with yearnings for community, in the heady mix of dream weaving and dream believing that now frames the sale of housing estates in suburban Australia. For the urban improvers, the principal object of discernment is ‘community’—the compelling image that emblazons the billboards of new estates. The marketing trumpets community, expensively and quickly willed into existence through the creation of urban villages: rapidly constructed residential stage sets that promise a return to the alleged carefree homogeneity of traditional suburban Australia. The dog whistled code is a call to return to the Australia that existed before the Great Unsettlement—carefree, secure and homogenous, but with the wine, cappuccinos and (safe) ethnic food thrown in. Through this reconstitution of suburbanisation the concept of community, of suburban community, has itself become a commodity. Much more than house-and-land packages are now on offer via sales pitches that are suffused with giddily utopian promises of happy, wealthy and secure futures for all who take the chance to share the new suburban dreaming. The contemporary Australian commodity community takes two principal forms: a greenfield exclave separated from the tatty fabric of older urban areas and usually located in the outer metropolitan fringe; or an enclave bravely reinstating community within the existing urban fabric, sometimes with walls, gates and other filters for protection from the corrosive influence of the ‘public’. A continuum of products is available to service a range of budgets, from the gilded resort-style estates—possibly centred on a golf course designed by an ageing champion—to the crowded, ‘entry level’ aspirational suburb, with its closely packed project homes and cheerfully modest community facilities.
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At the high end of the spectrum sits the resort estate committed to lifestyle, from whence comes the faint whiff of indulgence, even notes of decadence. Sanctuary Lakes in Melbourne’s west (on Greg Norman Drive) offers a resort lifestyle pivoted on ‘an 18-hole Greg Norman design golf course and 168 acres of lake’.50 The advertising is wrapped in comforting golden thread: ‘Sanctuary Lakes Resort is a self-contained lifestyle enclave where residents are members of an exclusive club’. At the other end of the masterplanned spectrum a different sort of sanctuary tends to be offered, focusing on rectitude not resorts. Garden Gates, in Sydney’s southwestern aspirational belt, evokes order not indulgence. The neat arrangement of its tightly crammed houses is reinforced by a regular spacing of sober, attractive parklets and consistent street landscaping. This is not the place for silly stuff. The estate’s only immodesty is the heavily manicured entrance which proclaims, without quite shouting, that the residents have ‘made it’. The promise of masterplanned community evokes an impressive confidence in the power of design to create attractive social milieux—betraying strong derivative roots in the New Urbanism cultivated by North American designers, dreamers and developers in the past decade. New Urbanism invites a return to the happy suburban village that apparently was humanity’s haven before it was swept aside by modernisation and its urban depredations. Developers in the United States, sensing a new zeitgeist—postmodern angst—washing across the substrate of middle-class fear, responded by turning the new urbanist niche development into a mass commodity. Just as sea-monkeys could be willed into life by adding water to a strange powdery substance in a mail-order packet, now community is willed into life by pouring money, lots of it, into nostalgic combinations of bricks and mortar. Millions have answered the call and now live in Truman Show stage sets across North America, though even Hollywood detected the underlying unease about the ‘cookie-cutter’ communities created by New Urbanism. Australia’s masterplanned estates have not adopted the Jeffer-
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sonian picket-fence purity of North American new urbanism or the theme-park knavery of its niche spin-offs, such as the Walt Disney Company’s traditional (circa 1996) mid-western township Celebration. This may reflect the sociologist Michael Pusey’s observation that Australians ‘typically have cooler feelings about community’ than Americans and view the ideal in aesthetic rather than moral terms.51 In Australia, the masterplanners sense that lifestyle, not necessarily nostalgia, is the quality of community sought by the local discerning classes. It comes down to provision of high-quality facilities and outdoor amenity from the moment the gates open and the lots are sold off. However, the increasingly frequent use of resident owned land (community titling), in preference to publicly maintained space, to provide for amenity and facilities marks a significant overlap with the North American privatopia. ‘Lifestyle’ is, after all, not a public good like ‘life’, but a quality that must be attained and guarded.
Asylum Seekers The increasing evocation of ‘security’ as a defining quality in many of the new exclusive estates demonstrates that the rush to suburban nirvana is not simply driven by the search for community and a well-appointed lifestyle. Many exclusive estates actively practise exclusion in search of market advantage. The bare subtext of the marketing that sells the gated or security estate is the promise of safety and isolation via social conformity and distance from unsettling cultural and socio-economic differences. As the Sydney Morning Herald put it, ‘the lifestyle estate is expressly not about diversity . . . it’s about living with people similarly inclined and with the funds to buy in’.52 Journalist Deidre Macken, commenting on the strengthening preference of many outer suburban households for exclusive residential communities, observed that ‘. . . many are opting for a life surrounded by people like themselves’.53
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Small to medium sized security developments are proliferating in Australian cities. In southeast Queensland, developer Harry Reed points out that ‘. . . security, lifestyle and location are key attributes for purchasers’.54 Gating is a thriving trade in the Gold and Sunshine coasts where security estates look more like holiday resorts than places where people actually live. On the Gold Coast, ‘Villa Milos is an island of dream homes, secured by manned entry gates and security fencing’.55 By contrast, more modest security estates are now peppering the traditionally poorer urban subregions whose polyglot class geography was surveyed in the previous chapter. Buddy Wakim, developer of a new 16-terrace estate in Roselands in Sydney’s south, explains: We felt security was an issue, with all the crime rates happening in a lot of areas . . . If you are an executive travelling a lot, you can leave your terrace and go away for four months and know your possessions will still be there when you return.56
Former test cricketer Ian Davis is an enthusiastic resident of another Sydney gated community, Macquarie Links: ‘You look at Sydney today and it is a dog fight’.57 Macquarie Links sits beside the Macquarie Fields public housing estate beset by rioting in early 2005: a juxtaposition revealing Sydney’s new archipelago of enclaves. The narcissist face of the security communities is pockmarked by fear. Mike Gore, developer of the Gold Coast’s Sanctuary Cove, knew the disease and knew the cure: complete quarantine for the rich. The streets these days are full of cockroaches and most of them are human. Every man has a right to protect his family, himself and his possessions, to live in peace and safety. Sanctuary Cove is an island of civilisation in a violent world, and we have taken steps to ensure it remains so.58
The question ultimately for history is whether the archipelago of enclaves isn’t also a gulag archipelago: a fractured landscape to which
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people fled in fear, not to transcend and escape their demons but to remain imprisoned with them, incarcerated by phobias of the social and trapped by the futile dream of escape from the vicissitudes of chronic economic uncertainty. Zygmunt Bauman speaks of the ‘mixophobia’—the ‘drive towards islands of similarity and sameness’—rampant amongst the west’s insecure elites and exhausted, ill-humoured proletariats.59 He marks the ‘fading of sociality skills’ driven by relentless structural change.60 It was a strange globalisation that drove not the flowering of human solidarity but the withering of tolerance and the retreat of elites into Fortress America, Fortress United Kingdom, Fortress Australia . . .
Tempus Fugit Old Father Time seems grumpier than ever these days. We Australians live longer than ever but we don’t seem to have time to live any more. Life expectancy increased greatly during the twentieth century: by 22 years for males and 24 years for females. Most of us can expect to live to our late seventies. But what sort of life can anyone expect in the liquid modernity now governed by remorseless change? If time is the conscious, sensuous experience of life moulded by choice and inscribed with personal autonomy, we seem to have remarkably little of it. Most of our waking life—and increasingly our dreams—has been claimed by the market, traded away—too often forcibly—in the Great Social Exchange created by structural reform. For many Australians, reform phases one and two saw time—for self, for family, for community—exchanged for wealth and flexibility. Personal and social alienation were the prices to pay for slippery riches. Others missed out altogether: their lives—their time—pushed to miserable margins, and the new urban twilight worlds of exclusion. What must surely unnerve the prophets—if nerves and feeling they have—is the mounting survey evidence showing that the
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middle class wants not more riches but a restoration of time. What after all is an existence governed by fears of cultural change and economic insecurity, and overlain with the deep psychic stress that arises from a life without time for family and friends? Add to this in the worker ant cities the abyss of commuting time, which new evidence reveals as a major cause of family and community stress.61 The desire to escape alienation courses through the contemporary commodity community. This is a fantasy island where the world is slowed and held at bay, and where time can be won back, if only briefly, from the vicissitudes of the market. Princeton Private Estate, an enclave development in Perth’s south, is an island in the sea of uncertainty. Here one finds ‘Homes in Harmony with Nature’ within one of Australia’s brutally eco-cidal cities. Live the dream, and the dream will help to ward off the cruel dissatisfactions of everyday life: ‘The tranquillity of Princeton will have you believing [emphasis added] you are living well away from the hustle and bustle . . .’. And most wondrously, . . . it is an investment in your family’s wellbeing. Imagine coming home from the city—in minutes—with more time to spend with the people who really matter. Twilight walks around the lakes. Picnics in the park. A cycle ride with the kids before dinner. Time to relax, reflect, interact. Time that is invaluable, precious.62
Homo consumens, the heroic child of the neo-liberal revolution, is ageing and showing signs of conservatism. Homo communitas may have been just as fictitious as the neolithic Homo economicus of textbooks. Consumens—deadpan worker/euphoric shopper—may also prove to be a short-lived apparition. This poor creature wants time and is searching for it. The Tin Man wants his heart back. The aching of timeless souls resonates in the poetry that embroiders the marketing of community. Gatehouse security keeps unwanted visitors and noise out and peace and tranquillity in. Traffic is minimal. Just the occasional
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golf buggy as visiting neighbours catch up. The far away sounds of perfectly hit five irons are about all you can hear above the gentle calls of the birdlife emanating from the surrounding National Park and Lake Weyba. Secluded recreational areas with swimming pools, BBQ facilities and boardwalks complete your private haven. At Noosa Springs, your lifestyle is protected as carefully as your investment.63
For those who can pay, elite estates promise to return some of the life assets—peace, time and security—swindled in the exchange of reform. No Australian swindle is complete, however, without a land grab. The theft of time by the reformist junta was accompanied by the embezzlement and ruin of public space.
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CHAPTER
5
Siege of the Realm: The War on Terra Publica ome will argue that the spectacular rise of the commodity community simply expresses middle Australia’s expanding material hunger and its growing appetite for lifestyle refinements. The sophisticates don’t just want life to happen to them, they want to style their lives in lifestyle estates. A Lilliputian army of preferences is carrying Australian suburbia to new Golden Groves. Closer inspection, however, reveals a much less incidental force leading the course of urbanisation in our cities, directing from above not guiding from below. Even some critical commentary, which casts the new suburban segregation as the product of government withdrawal, tends to overlook the intentional policy changes and the vast budget allocations that have actively crafted the shape of urban change. These have been largely federal interventions, though state and local governments have also played their part in the emergence of Australia’s urban archipelagos. Apart from the cultural counter reformation, the Howard government’s social reengineering project embraced pursuit of an ‘entrepreneurial society’.1 The new social vision is rooted in conservative Victorian values—thrift, independence and temperance— reworked and updated as aspiration, self provision and values (the latter signalling a particular, that is conservative, moral outlook). Pursuit of Australia Inc. involved a range of new policies and spending commitments which aimed variously to bully, implore and bribe people—especially the middle and aspirational classes—away
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from use of public services towards greater reliance on provision by themselves, markets and the voluntary sector. State provision, intoned the prophets, was rank with moral hazards that encouraged government dependency amongst the masses, especially the lazy and the poor. A ‘politics of choice’ would wean the citizenry off the public teat, and replace a mindset of entitlement with a robustly independent outlook. The change would also unlock what neo-liberals knew resided in the breast of every citizen: discernment, the desire for tailor-made, commoditised services and a burning antipathy for common provision. Only the breastplate of socialism, with its stifling public realm, held back the spirit of freedom imprisoned by social democracy. The politics of choice was a brilliantly ambitious scheme that would vastly improve the range and quality of social services, whilst also reforming and improving the moral character of the citizenry. The model’s added extra—quietly outlined in the fine print—was electoral advantage: not a wholesale surge delivered by openly grateful masses, but a very tidy incremental gain, ‘locked in’ by the tendency of the politics of choice to deliver lopsided benefits, largely to marginal electorates in outer metropolitan regions. The massive government subsidisation of private collective consumption in education, health and other human services tended, by its constitution and targeting, to favour the relatively better off, who had the starting resources needed to access the newly enriched private schools, health schemes, clinics and childcare centres. Money to prop up private consumption was like water it seemed (or like water used to be): colourless and limitless. And yet the subsidy surge broke not as a giant wave across the nation, but as a series of showers raining riches into the cantons of exclusion and aspiration that studded the cities. The unmarked perversity lurking in the politics of choice was that it surely produced more not less dependency on government amongst certain social classes. By contrast, unforgiving government neglect became increasingly obvious in parched fields of lost suburbia. Here the state’s retreat
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from commitment to public provision was marked by an increasingly impoverished and blighted public domain. The previous two chapters retold the story of structural change and its impacts on Australian cities. This chapter, and the two that follow, take a more contemporary tone. The contemporary survey begins now by examining the current state of the nation’s urban public realm and exposing the forces that are working to undermine it. The first phase of the neo-liberal reform program witnessed a paring back of public activities and interventions, mainly through privatisation of government-owned entities, such as Qantas and the Commonwealth Bank. Other public frameworks were strengthened (arguably Medicare), sometimes half-heartedly. The politics of choice was part of a broader agenda in phase two— including further privatisations, corporatisations and cutbacks —that amounted to a wholesale attack on the entire terrain of Australian civic life, Terra Publica. The War on Terra Publica was, and remains, an intensely urban conflict, whose principal battlegrounds have been the bright enclaves of privilege and the mouldering fields of middle suburbia. To understand the war and its impacts on the suburbs, and ultimately the nation, it is necessary first to map politically and conceptually the public realm and to contrast it with neo-liberalism’s alternative, the communal realm.
Charting the Realm The public realm is a multidimensional phenomenon that embraces those spaces, places and events that affirm social relations. It gives priority to civic relationships over other forms of interaction (market) and identity (for example, self, family, community). Importantly, the public realm does not reduce to government space, but extends to include those spaces and places and moments where the real or assumed possession of citizenship guarantees entry or presence. Some historical and contemporary state spaces and places
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cannot easily be reconciled with this idea of ‘the public’. For example, in the past state asylums for mentally ill people acted often to deny rather than affirm citizenship. Similarly, the contemporary federally run detention camps for asylum seekers act to restrain not enhance the terms of citizenship. In Australia’s contemporary urban regions the public realm could extend to include spaces that are predominantly in private ownership. An example is a major shopping centre where there is no prospect of exclusion and where there are strongly formed and culturally embedded social expectations of right of entry and presence. However, many of these non-state public spaces and places have been transformed in recent years by desocialising forces, notably privatisation and ‘securitisation’. Urban geographers, especially in the United States, have exposed the increasing trend towards the privatisation of major shopping centres, and the heightened regulation of behaviour within such spaces.2 In this conception, the public realm is distinguished from something we might term the communal realm, the latter being an associative order based on more exclusive notions of membership. For example, communal realms are provided by homeowner associations which now govern a large share of new housing development in the United States. Instances closer to home include the bodies corporate that regulate life in multi-unit developments and the residents associations that manage community title land in some masterplanned estates.3 The communal here is not the same as the private realm, which is a set of relationships based on market interactions and personal ties (e.g., family). A communal realm encloses specific communities of common interest, not defined by economic or family ties. An exclusive communal realm may be either progressive or regressive or reflect both political tendencies in different ways. For example, the suburban scouts and guides movement is a communal realm founded on exclusive membership. Some have lauded the movement’s capacity to aid the healthy development of the young, whilst others have decried its values as militarised and conformist.
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In plural, multicultural nations, the presence of a flourishing public realm is the guarantor of social solidarity and cultural tolerance, both defining ingredients of democracy. The Dutch commentators Maarten Hajer and Arnold Reijndorp describe it as ‘a sphere of exchange and confrontation in society’—a place for the constant interrogation of conventional wisdom, ‘where one’s own casual view of reality gets some competition from other views and lifestyles’.4 For the American sociologist Richard Sennett, constant immersion in the public realm is a necessary activity, even duty, for citizens in democratic societies. By their nature, flourishing public realms offer a safe encounter with disorder, experienced as unscripted meetings with strangers, including unusual or new cultures and social identities. In this sense, the public realm acts as a form of civic schooling, preparing citizens for the ordinary challenges of human social contact. Sennett has counterposed the diversity and disorder of the public realm against the high degree of order and control that characterises many communal realms, including exclusionary suburban estates.5 He warns that sealed immersion in ‘excessively ordered’ communities leaves individuals vulnerable to anti-social development, resulting in narrow, even violence-prone, outlooks. Without the insistently socialising force of the public, the possibilities for safe and mutually enriching forms of encounter between different groups are greatly diminished or even removed. In the void, the conditions for human interaction are determined by exclusive forces, such as markets, cultures and kinship ties, which emphasise membership not citizenship. Without public space we’re left with clubland—a landscape of insiders and outsiders.
Private Aspiration, Public Desperation The American economist J.K. Galbraith long ago noted the increasing divergences between the private and civic spheres in market
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societies in his memorable depiction of ‘private affluence and public squalor’.6 The observation resonates in many of Australia’s suburban regions where degraded or neglected public facilities and infrastructure increasingly contrast with their well resourced private equivalents whose use is confined to those with the ability to pay. There has been a marked decline in Australia’s urban public realm—especially in the quality and capacity of its social infrastructure. Melbourne urban design critic Kim Dovey observes, ‘traditional kinds of urban public spaces are being eroded or transformed’.7 He is especially scornful of the major redevelopment projects in Australia’s inner cities that have produced exclusive, highly policed spaces that control or prohibit entry by ‘unruly elements’, such as the homeless or young people. Dovey cites Melbourne’s Crown Casino, ‘on seven hectares of public waterfront land’, as an example of renewed inner city spaces which purport to be ‘public’ but are effectively governed by corporate bodies.8 In such ‘zones of public access under private ownership . . . the ragged, the homeless and the political [e.g., protesters] can be removed without loss of legitimacy to the state’.9 In many instances these hybrid public–private spaces were the direct or indirect creation of state governments that used legislation and other means to secure showcase inner city renewal projects, such as Sydney’s Darling Harbour. In other cases, state governments have undermined or attacked public domain more directly. For example the redevelopment of public institutional lands—including asylums, hospitals, schools, defence facilities (with the Commonwealth)— have often produced a net loss of public domain. Popular concern about the privatisation of the urban public domain recently manifested with the establishment in Victoria and New South Wales of two community lobbies both bearing the name the Protectors of Public Lands Coalition.10 Local governments have also at times joined the War on Terra Publica. In some states, notably New South Wales and Queensland, local governments have quietly encouraged community or collective
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title developments that incorporate private communal realms. The hope is that such developments will provide municipalities with ‘obligation free’ rate revenue, delivered by communities that pay for and maintain their own communal infrastructure and services. In the long term such hopes will doubtless prove false, as developers withdraw and these communities begin to question the double burden of paying rates and community title levies. Many local authorities have privatised public municipal services and facilities such as waste management systems—sometimes under compulsion from state governments. In a stark example, from 1993 the state administration of Jeff Kennett, whilst privatising and/or downscaling a large share of its own social infrastructure, simultaneously forced local authorities in Victoria to contract out services through its Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT) regime. When CCT was abolished in 1999 it had the hallmarks of a failed experiment that had, according to one observer, brought about a ‘purposeful decline of local government services in Victoria’.11 And yet the localised war on urban public domain continues in other parts of Australia. In 2005, for example, Brisbane City’s Lord Mayor Campbell Newman proposed to use the private sector to build and operate new council facilities such as libraries and pools, mirroring the New South Wales government’s model for new school provision in outer suburban Sydney. Since the election of the Howard government in 1996, the Commonwealth’s progressive withdrawal from support for urban development has contributed to the withering of the urban public realm.12 The national government eschews any meaningful responsibility for the development and maintenance of public urban infrastructure. On top of this, the decline in federal support for collective public services (of which more later), notably health and education, represents a broad scale attack on the public realm. The state of public education is a barometer of health in the public realm. The reading is not encouraging. In 1970, about 77 per cent of Australian children attended government schools,
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Reproduced courtesy of Lethbridge, Courier-Mail
but by 2002 this figure had shrunk to 68 per cent. Proportionately, Australia has one of the largest private school sectors in the developed world—even the United States, the global beacon of free enterprise, educates only 10 per cent of its children outside the state sector. Moreover, our high public subsidisation of private education is not matched by high levels of regulation. By international standards, Australia’s private schools are subject to a very weak level of public control, further underscoring their distance from the public realm where the fundaments of citizenship are maintained.13 The Commonwealth now spends nearly $5 billion per annum on private schooling; more than it spends on public universities.14 Planned federal spending for the 2004–08 period was $7.2 billion on public schools and $20 billion for private schools.15 State government spending props up public schools, but the figures reveal
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the effort the federal government has devoted towards the growth of the ‘independent’ schooling sector. Many of the new ‘low fee’ independent schools nurtured under the policy are in or near the new outer suburban privatopias. The aim is clearly to draw the aspirationals away from the public educational realm. Prime Minister Howard boasted in 2004: [U]nder this government about 300 non-government schools which charge an average less than $2000 in fees have been established . . . you are talking here about schools for the battlers who want a bit of choice . . . I have been to many of them and they are on the outskirts of the cities of this country.16
The growth of private schools acts to limit not enhance choice because it reduces the public educational realm. National debates abound with what must be termed the ‘substitution fallacy’: the assumption that private schools can supplant the role of public education and replace their civic function. Private schools exist expressly to mitigate and/or obviate civic values—the broader ideals that unite all Australians and which underpin the existence of liberal democracy. It may be a democratic right to receive an education with particular value overlays (religious, cultural, pedagogical), but it is a profound error to assert that private education can replace state education within the public realm. John Howard also attacked government schools for being ‘too politically-correct and too values neutral’.17 This was a battle cry in the War on Terra Publica evoking contempt for civic values— ‘political correctness’ is the gruesome mask that culture war conservatives have imposed on the face of civic policies that promote respect, nothing more, for individual and group values. The ‘values’ that Howard and other conservative cadres lament are, by contrast, not the universal markers of goodness that their language suggests but their own highly specific cultural and ideological outlooks.
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Murmurs in a Heartland: the Case of Western Sydney Western Sydney is an urban heartland that is home to nearly one in ten Australians. Its principal political advocate, the Western Sydney Regional Organisation of Councils (WSROC), has noted the deterioration in the region’s public realm with alarm, calling on governments, especially the Commonwealth, to embark upon ‘a rebuilding of the public domain’ in western Sydney. WSROC believes this should involve ‘. . . a major program of upgrading and/or reconstruction of social infrastructure facilities’.18 Money may not ultimately be the problem. The Commonwealth is presently pouring enormous financial resources into the region; only it is doing so in a manner that is undermining not enhancing the public sphere. In new elite and aspirational communities, a constellation of private health, education, human services and recreation facilities is emerging to cater for the needs and desires of the affluent and the anxious. The Australian social commentator Russ Grayson observed: It’s the new Australian suburbia occupied by what the ALP’s Mark Latham calls the ‘aspirational voters’, families with aspirations to wealth, private schools for their children (partfinanced by the Australian taxpayer) and freedom from the crime of the middle-ring suburbs.19
Many of the new users of such facilities are not necessarily rich, but are willing to put themselves under considerable financial pressure to avoid using public services and facilities. The shift has been encouraged by sensationalist media reportage about dysfunctional public hospitals and schools. For some, the mood of anxiety is reinforced by actual experiences of degraded and neglected public services. Together, these new patterns of anxiety help to perpetuate the decline of the public sphere as schools struggle to fill enrolments, health services are left to treat a marginalised population, and public transport services are left to the excluded and the angry.
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The Sydney-based sociologist Gabrielle Gwyther has surveyed social attitudes in several of the region’s newer masterplanned estates.20 A high proportion of her respondents confided that their decision to relocate to the estates was driven by fear about personal security and a desire to put as much social distance as possible between themselves and the welfare dependent poor. Many had previously lived near public housing estates and developed negative views about welfare recipients based upon their own observations. In Sydney, the journalist Matt O’Sullivan argues that if fear of crime is motivating the move to exclusionary communities this tends to ‘defy statistics showing crime rates falling’.21 In New South Wales, 12 of the 16 principal categories of crime showed declines for 2003–05.22 Here at least the aspirationals’ fear of the desperationals may well be driven more by their immersion in the panics conjured by the tabloids and talkback radio than by the experience of crime itself. Gwyther’s findings reveal an increasingly assertive mood of privatism amongst the residents of these new estates. The pleasures of order, homogeneity and amenity are celebrated; the provision of high quality social and urban services acknowledged as the rightful reward for individual effort. One western Sydney commentator, David Burchell, believes that ‘the jealous insularity traditionally associated with the [affluent] North Shore has grown wings and flown westwards’.23 The paradox is that this private retreat is induced, and in some instances explicitly encouraged, by publicly funded endeavour. The role of deliberate government action in the creation of these new ‘aspirational communities’ is neither acknowledged nor understood. A complex and expensive matrix of public initiatives—financing, regulation and service provision—shape and support these new communities. Long-term planning and investment by governments, especially state and local government agencies, has created the amenity and value that are captured in private estate development. The privatised infrastructure and
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services that support new residential communities remain heavily dependent upon direct and indirect government subvention and risk sharing. At face value, the new estates of privilege seem to offer buyers a chance to opt out of a degraded and insecure public realm in favour of new user pays fiefdoms where access to ‘community’ facilities is strictly rationed. In Horningsea Park south of Liverpool, near Camden in Sydney’s southwest, the signs in Peppercorn Place warn outsiders that the park ‘Is a privately owned and maintained facility for the use of Peppercorn Place residents only’. David Burchell writes: . . . viewed from the arterial roads of the region, the new housing developments in the south-west do look eerily like medieval walled towns, albeit without the castle or the cathedral. And community planners, only too well aware of the perception that these are self-willed islands of homogeneity in the suburban ocean are increasingly preoccupied with the tricky task of engineering diversity . . . in housing developments where such tinkering is not always welcome or even well-advised.24
On closer inspection it is clear that many niche security developments benefit enormously from co-location with major public facilities and investments, including regional parks, major roads, railways and sporting facilities. Indeed, some of the new enclaves seem to have been carefully positioned to capture the benefits of major public investments in regional infrastructure. Macquarie Links sits alongside the Hume Highway, now linked directly to the Sydney CBD by the new M5 East motorway extension. The promotional material for Liberty Grove in Concord notes that this secure estate ‘puts you right next door to the best recreational facilities in Australia’. The blurb goes further to note that the ‘New South Wales Government has invested well over $1 billion in facilities for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, which are a short walk or bike ride from Liberty Grove’.
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Far from being simple testimonies to the rewards for individual effort and thrift, these landscapes of self-reliance are in fact heavily dependent upon public subsidies and public endeavour for their creation and maintenance. The fiction of self-provision is a simple story that is readily digested by those already anxious about the state of publicly provided facilities and services. It happily neglects the hidden subsidies.
People Smuggling In the context of strong regional population growth, the internal migration from established areas to new release areas has not resulted in a depopulation of older places. In this sense, Australian patterns of urban decline contrast with those in the United States and some European cities where depopulation is a key dimension of change. Neither is ‘white flight’ of the United States variety involved. The geographic analyses of recent population changes by Bill Randolph have shown a subtler, but nonetheless powerful, shift underway in the middle areas of western Sydney.25 It involves an exodus of mostly wealthier (but not exclusively) Australian-born residents for newer residential estates and their replacement by relatively poorer households, with a high proportion of private tenants, younger people, recent migrants, Centrelink ‘clients’ and people with high support needs. These latter groups join those left behind, increasingly elderly Anglo-Australians, the original ‘Westies’, and the less economically mobile. United States-style racial dread does not appear to be driving the outwards migration of the relatively affluent. A range of push and pull factors are behind the shift, including the attraction of a federally subsidised private communal realm. However, as has been argued in the previous chapter, a spectre of fear is also at work, propelling elites and aspirationals both outwards towards exclave communities and into inner and middle ring enclaves, including the
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rapidly growing number of small security estates. Fear of crime, linked to anxiety about a declining public realm, is now a motivating force for suburban growth. There is no reason to suppose that this is a uniquely Sydney phenomenon. The marketing rhetoric surrounding the growth of security estates in other major cities confirms a general trend in Australian urbanisation. On the Gold Coast, hope is contained and rationed on exclusive islands in the sea of urban uncertainty: As you will see Hope Island Residential Resort has something for everyone. A world standard integrated residential golf resort Hope Island provides a five star living environment in a safe and secure development.26
‘Something for everyone’ . . . with the ability to pay. The resources for human hope—security, solidarity and support—are in this case strictly rationed. The private communal realm of the security community is an island from where may be glimpsed the wreckage of a foundered public realm drifting, disappearing in the seas of change. In attempting to explain the exodus of Australian-born from the middle ring suburbs of western Sydney, the sociologists Bob Birrell and Byung-Soo Seol point to a stressed public realm: We can only speculate about the factors shaping the Australiaborn exodus from Sydney’s south-west. It may be that the concentration of low-income NESB [Non English Speaking Background] families occurring in the south-western suburbs presents problems of accumulated disadvantage, straining the provision of government services in the area [emphasis added].27
Successive national governments have highlighted the contribution of high immigration levels to economic growth and to social and cultural enrichment in Australia. There is incontrovertible social scientific evidence to support these claims. And yet, national governments have not been prepared to invest sufficiently in the
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maintenance, let alone the enhancement, of the urban public realms—especially, the education and training spheres—that provide new migrants with the cultural and material resources needed to attain and practise citizenship. The public domains in the urban areas favoured for settlement by newer migrants that should function to support and nurture both new arrivals and their host communities are, however, under immense pressure and we must doubt their capacity to safeguard one of the nation’s most enduring and valuable assets: an orderly and peaceful migration program that has been the envy of the world for many decades. In the wake of the Cronulla riots in December 2005 and the retaliatory violence that followed, one Arabic community leader, Dr Jamal Rifi, pointed to the neglected state of the public realm in western Sydney as a source of frustration and alienation for young people. Dr Rifi called for more community development and youth support programs and lamented the woeful state of many of the region’s recreational facilities. Of Lakemba, an important western Sydney locality for Arabic Australians, he observed: ‘The majority of parks in the area are not designed as places to go for a barbecue or picnic; that’s why we head for places like Cronulla.’28 The comments were alluding to the failure of the public realm in such areas to nurture a sense of civic inclusion in the young. The Sydney writer Steve Sharp, observing the Cronulla disturbances and the antipathies simmering in Sydney’s Muslim communities, underlined how a vibrant public realm would be an instrument for civic strength in urban regions weakened by communal insularity and anxiety. Sharp writes, ‘. . . the government should recognise institutions of secular socialisation as agents of social cohesion, the most important of which is the well-resourced State school with competent teachers and religious and sex education for all’.29 None of this is to say that public investment in an aggrieved community is in some way a compensation for broader societal intolerance. But the insights of Rifi and Sharp remind us that we have frequently failed, sometimes woefully, to provide the
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basic civic resources that migrant communities need to attain full citizenship. Little wonder that some feel and behave like unwanted outsiders. The Commonwealth—the principal national migration agent—regards these middle ring public domains as the exclusive concern of state and local governments. The effective abandonment of new migrants who must negotiate stressed and degraded public domains as part of their settlement experience is hardly consistent with the idea of a responsible migration program. National governments, and the business lobbies that cheer them on, seem prepared to accept the migrants’ currency—their profound and manifest contribution to the national economy—without returning in exchange the essential resources for citizenship, such as ready access to basic social and educational services. We grab the cash and give little in return, leaving migrants to fend for themselves amidst a wider population that sometimes resents the social ‘stress’ generated by laissez-faire population growth and change. Sounds like people smuggling.
Tollway Tories and the Politics of Choice The War on Terra Publica has been supported by federal policies and programs that have transferred large amounts of public resources into the private sector.30 The massive shift of federal funding to support the subsidised provision of private health and education is claimed to enhance individual choices, but powerfully diminishes the appeal and viability of state and communal services. The policy is rooted in an influential neo-liberal ideology—public choice theory—which assumes that human behaviour is driven, ineluctably, by self-interest. In the United States, much contemporary suburbanisation is driven by an outright aversion for the public sphere, including the principle of universal entitlement to basic social and economic
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resources. Political sentiment on the Right counterposes the decaying city, and its failed welfarism and dysfunctional public realm, with a flourishing suburbia and its robust and responsible communal realms, including the privatised municipal function provided by homeowner associations. The capturing and concentration of investment capital in the suburbs has been marked by the emergence of edge cities, large congregate urban centres located on major outer roadways, existing largely in isolation and antipathy to the older cities and their putrefying downtowns. For Mike Davis, the exclusionary white suburban community is a succubus that lurks on the edge of decaying coloured cities, draining out tax revenues and drawing off political attention and favour towards itself.31 Davis argues that the edge cities produced a new and unique crop of political conservatism during the 1980s, in the form of Newt Gingrich and other Beltway Republicans whose 1994 Contract with America program promised a radical downscaling of government. The Contract distilled to a fine essence the anxieties of suburban America about urban ‘welfarism’ and disorder. The presence of relatively robust planning systems, combined with the continued centralisation of urban governance and investment, has tended to stymie the development of edge cities in Australia. And yet, there are broad ideological similarities between the anti-welfarism championed in the mid-1990s by Beltway Republicans of the United States and the politics of choice trumpeted by the crop of Tollway Tories who have won seats for conservative parties in Australia’s outer suburbs. The absence of edge cities may be masking the emergence of a new form of urban edge conservatism in Australia, reflecting the growth of new residential areas with weak public spheres and a high degree of cultural homogeneity. The antipathy of the new suburban conservatives for the public realm was flamboyantly underlined in early 2004 by Gary Hardgrave, federal Minister for Multicultural Affairs and member for Moreton—a tollway bounded south Brisbane electorate which
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includes a swathe of new masterplanned estates. Hardgrave presided over a citizenship ceremony in a Bunnings hardware store, a chain whose emblematic status for aspirationals was surely not lost on the member for Moreton. The minister had previously staged citizenship ceremonies at car factories, football matches, surf life saving championships and on airliners. Hardgrave laughed off political and community criticism of the Bunnings event (one attendee reportedly walked out, protesting the ‘commercialism’), remarking that the offer of free catering was too good to turn down.32 The combination of ideological extremism and slapstick popularism surely marks this out as a uniquely asinine form of conservative radicalism. In western Sydney, public choice theory has been openly advocated by federal government representatives, including Jackie Kelly, member for Penrith. In 2002, Kelly spoke out against public childcare services using rhetoric that could have been lifted straight from a public choice textbook: ‘[I] wonder why, as a ratepayer, I am paying a portion of my rates to operate council centres and then paying unsubsidised fees to the private provider of my choice.’33 Public choice theory is a freeze-dried by-product of neoclassical economics, and its adherents tend to happily neglect the social and geographic consequences of policies founded on its principles. Private health and education services are strongly geographically patterned: their provision relies on and relates to catchments of households. Commonwealth policies that favour the provision of private ‘collective’ services therefore tend to channel significant public resources to the wealthier areas, the recently developed outer suburban residential communities where new and existing private education establishments and health-fund supported facilities are flourishing. The transfer of resources from public to private schools effects a geographic, not merely a social, shift of wealth and opportunities. Many Australian households receive federal housing assistance, not just the poor. The wealthy however tend to receive asset- and
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therefore wealth-enhancing assistance whilst the poor receive lifesupport aid that does little to improve their economic position. Across urban regions, these forms of assistance are distributed in specific and uneven ways: the former captured by the residents of newer homeowner areas, and the latter supporting growing concentrations of the needy in older localities. The Commonwealth’s First Homeowner Grant Scheme provided a vast public subsidy to the construction of new ‘model’ communities.34 Perversely, such housing support helps recipients qualify for further subsidies. Having been supported into homeownership, many will in time access taxation related wealth subsidies—notably negative gearing—to further enhance their wealth and thereby increase their social distance from the poorer households that will never qualify for major forms of public financial assistance. Apart from new subsidies and policy shifts, Commonwealth funding cuts to human services and labour market programs have driven social differentiation in western Sydney. A study commissioned by WSROC in 2001 found that the rising cost of childcare, driven by Commonwealth funding cuts since 1996, meant women in Fairfield and Liverpool—relatively poor areas with many recent migrants—were less likely to work.35 By contrast, women in the wealthier northern suburbs of Sydney were less likely to succumb to rising cost pressures by leaving work. Whilst Jackie Kelly MP may continue to exercise choice in her use of childcare services, the only choice available to many women forced to keep on working is informal and inferior arrangements for their children. An apparently progressive response to suburban aspirationalism was advanced under Mark Latham’s standard, which set itself against the Tollway Tories, if not against the social constituency they claimed to represent. Latham’s powerful evocation of a ‘nation rebuilt’ from suburban neighbourhoods pivoted around two exemplars: the model aspirational community, peopled with self-reliant improvers, and the reformed poor community, stocked with flocks
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of well-behaved public tenants shepherded by zealous civic entrepreneurs.36 His period of leadership of the Australian Labor Party (December 2003–January 2005) took the fight to the political pinnacles and served the great purpose of underlining the importance of contemporary suburban transformation to national civic life. The campaign failed, appropriately enough, in the suburbs where the pale evocation of socially responsible aspirationalism was no match for the authentic, more exclusive product hawked by the Tollway Tories: the publicly subsidised communal realms for winners and grinners. The Devil took the sinners and the ALP. With Latham’s inglorious demise in early 2005, the federal Labor Party withdrew from debate about suburban change. The lengthening shadows had them spooked.
Shadows Creep, Fears Lurk The sun has been kind to suburban Australia, whose denizens have long basked in the warmth that comes from the quiet, unaffected enjoyment of one’s homeworld. This was no nirvana. It had its own failings, some of them awful. And yet somehow much of their force tended to fade under the relentless and enervating glare of Australian ordinariness. Postmodernists, with some reason, decry the cultural pettifoggery that characterised life in suburban Australia. But we should not forget the remarkable success suburbs had as ‘machines of tolerance’ that embraced and calmed countless fears and antipathies born in other parts of the globe. The public spheres were often scruffy—the unkempt parks and ovals, the strangely undeveloped pockets of bushland. And they were built piecemeal—the shops and the services that we seemed to wait an age for. There were plenty of other instances were the public sphere was developed quickly and to a high standard—Canberra comes to mind. Despite these drawbacks, many of them unnecessary, the public sphere served the Australian suburban populace
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pretty well. For the vast majority, there was no ready alternative and thus almost everyone commingled in the rough and ready civic schools of suburbia. There were no racialised tensions to match those of cities in the United States—our own racialised minority, Indigenous Australians, were largely missing from suburbia, an absence with complex causes but which surely limited both the quality of suburban life and the breadth of suburbanites’ cultural outlooks. When migrants, and later their children, began to move outwards from inner city toeholds into suburbia, there was remarkably little fuss as school classes, sporting clubs and train carriages began to look more diverse. The sometimes rickety, often scruffy public sphere of suburbia performed remarkably well, keeping the gates of citizenship open for the newcomers. But now the gates of citizenship are slamming shut. Shadows of fear and antipathy are spreading across this bright, occasionally scorching, diorama of Australian life. Some formerly bright places are succumbing to the greys of poverty and neglect, whilst newer, exclusive communities are floodlit, like stage sets, with the garish, artificial light thrown out by relentless advertising and political spin. The consequences for democracy of these changes are surely profound. Similar, if not identical, shifts have been observed in Britain and the United States. The eminent British sociologist Anthony Giddens has characterised the phenomenon as the ‘voluntary exclusion of the elites’ and the ‘involuntary exclusion of the excluded’.37 Again, social and geographic polarisation is linked to a withering of the public realm. Another British commentator, Anna Minton, writes, ‘the result is that mainstream institutions—schools, hospitals and local government—become increasingly marginalised, with the consequent impact on the public sector services and local government and local democracy’.38 In suburban Australia these same social geographic shifts register in new polarities of outlook and morale. The strengthening moods of separatism and privatism amongst the growing number
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of affluent communities are mirrored by the deepening gloom and ill-humour of its excluded and poorer peoples. The quietly eroding possibilities for integrated social development signal in turn the decline of social solidarity. Social solidarity is not the dreary bogey portrayed by zealots of the Right: it requires neither homogeneity nor mechanical uniformity. David Malouf, a great observer of Australian suburban life, observes, ‘Wholeness does not necessarily mean uniformity, though that is how we have generally taken it. Nor does diversity always lead to fragmentation’.39 Social solidarity needs a rich and mixed societal soil if it is to survive and thrive. Practically speaking, this means communities that contain a balance of different views, skills, cultures and resources. As the political analyst and satirist Guy Rundle points out, the development of ‘communal and collective forms of life’ is the precondition for, not the antithesis of, a flourishing ‘selfhood and individuality’.40 Some forms of difference, however, are entirely antithetical to solidarity. The new exclusive—and exclusionary—residential communities are one such form. Differences based on separation not mixing are harmful to collective democratic purpose. The expression of ‘choice’ by those seeking asylum in privatopias masks a deep opting out of the social. The same is true of the other publicly subsidised realms of private choice that are undermining the collective interest in schooling and healthcare. That these actions which injure democracy should be publicly subsidised is a perversity of the age. Has the erosion of the public realm in suburban Australia reduced the possibilities for mutually enriching social interaction whilst increasing the risks of cultural segmentation and misunderstanding? WSROC thinks so, expressing its deepening concern that gated communities are promoted as the way to escape from ethnic conflict perceived to be endemic to the middle ring suburbs of Sydney.41 It is highly doubtful that these encampments of a broader Fortress Australia will provide tolerant, well-integrated communities where differences are understood and respected and where
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diversity is celebrated. A consequence of this taxpayer supported narcissism is the further erosion of both the public realm and social solidarity in urban regions as they evolve into increasingly balkanised social landscapes. Time for the public realm may be running out. The political analyst Ian McAuley asks the question: ‘Is Australia becoming an “opt out” country? That is, a collection of physical and metaphorical gated communities, where those with the means opt out of using public education and public health services’.42 He believes that Australia may be approaching a ‘tipping point’, when public services and facilities will topple into a precipice of social gloom and marginalisation. There is strong evidence already that the middle class is fleeing the public education and health systems, which increasingly service a troubled and poorer population. Citing the analyses of American economist Thomas Schelling, McAuley observes that ‘Once systems tip into black/white, male/female, or rich/poor divisions, mixed systems are hard to re-establish—even if the vast majority want a mixed system’.43 In some parts of our cities, the public realm has already capitulated to the neo-liberal siege. The Sydney Morning Herald recently reported that ‘Public education in Sydney’s inner suburbs is dying . . .’, whilst ‘. . . private schools in these areas have recorded strong growth’.44 An obvious conclusion is that the withering of the public realm observed in Australia’s cities is progressively undermining the preconditions for national democracy and social harmony in this most urban of nations. The market occupies more of our lifeworlds than ever before. It has steadily consumed social time during the neo-liberal reform phases and is now breaking into social space. On the surface, the public realm is merely splintering, broken apart by new intrusions and flows of choice. Below, however, one senses that the bases for Australian democracy are shattering. Terra Publica is breaking apart.
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CHAPTER
6
Toxic Cities: Urban Australia and the Young here is much hand wringing about the implications of population ageing. Not a week passes it seems without a new report urging us to consider the problems that will beset an older Australia. But what about children? They seem to have disappeared from public focus, only to return in bouts of wild panic about abuse and various other calamities that occasionally touch young lives. Governments and business lobbies may want to prepare us for a greyer population. But are we planning for a future Australia that will nurture children and young people? Our pop demography debates have led us to obsess about a very partial view of the future: one fixed on ageing baby boomer legions escaping the treadmill and flocking to seachange regions. The prospect must disconcert the prophets. However, the future will contain a far greater range of human needs and interests than this simple picture would suggest. And they will be concentrated in the cities. Australians overwhelmingly continue to prefer living in the subregions of our main cities. Our future will not be decided by the fortunes of new seachange or treechange regions, but by the ability of our suburbs to provide inclusive and sustainable living environments for the bulk of our population. And in many places this population will include more children, not less, than is presently the case. It is strange that this obvious reality is so absent from public and popular debates. The emergent will to brush children aside may reflect in part the cults of individualism and materialism that have flourished during
T
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the era of neo-liberal reform. Children necessarily restrain the lure of individualism—they are by nature dependent. They remind us that we are of nature. Their upkeep dilutes the material flow and their care reduces the time for self. Every social prohibition has its geography and thus we will surely witness the surfacing of new islands of demographic exclusion, such as Aurora, the child free ‘community’ proposed for the Gold Coast by developer Craig Gore (son of Sanctuary Cove’s founder Mike Gore). Aurora was scuttled in 2003 but it raised a semaphore warning of the new islands of exclusion that lie on the horizon of selfishness we are steadily approaching. Walls may keep the kids out but population ageing will not free us from their claims. An increasing weight of evidence tells us that a growing number of older Australians, typically grandparents, are assuming the role of primary carer for children. Nearly 28 000 children aged under 15 are presently being raised solely by grandparents.1 Many have had to step into the social breaches created by the storms of structural change as parents succumb to mental and physical breakdown, drug dependency and criminality. Others are providing the care that working parents cannot access or afford. A mixture of love and necessity drives these older Australians back to parenting, but often in stressful circumstances. As an overwhelmingly urban nation, we must look to our cities to provide healthy living environments for our young and for the increasingly diverse range of people who care for them. We have reason therefore to be gravely concerned about steadily accumulating health and social commentary that is reporting deterioration in the lifeworlds of young Australians. The previous chapters surveyed great shifts underway within children’s homeworlds and within the policy areas that structure their lives, especially education, health and childcare. These shifts—social polarisation and the contraction of the public domain —threaten to reduce the life chances of the poor, and their young, and to deepen their entrapment in degraded urban realms.
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Meanwhile, in the new islands of suburban privilege, the relative absence of a public domain impoverishes the young in a different way, excluding them from the principal civic resources and social experiences that nourish the development of strong citizenship values. Early childhood services have been a key theatre in the War on Terra Publica. The hostility of Tollway Tory Jackie Kelly to public provision of childcare was noted in the previous chapter. In the past decade this cottage, community-based industry has been transformed by corporatisation, rising public subsidies to private providers and the rapid growth and scale of for-profit provision. In 1990, for example, about 80 per cent of Queensland’s childcare centres were managed by the community sector. By 2005, the ratio was reversed with corporate entities, such as the ABC Learning Group, providing the bulk of care.2 (In 2005, Larry Anthony, previously federal Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, joined ABC Learning as a non-executive director.) Just over 70 per cent of Australia’s 4300 childcare centres are now run for profit.3 During this transformation, quality community-based centres have struggled to compete with corporate providers which emphasise lower wage costs and mass service provision. Brian Elvish, chief executive officer of C & K, one key community-based provider, remarks, . . . the prime culprit in the rise of the corporate sector and the demise of the community sector is the Federal Government. Its free-for-all development policies have encouraged entrepreneurs by significantly increasing the number of childcare places available. However, the simultaneous removal of operational subsidies to the community sector has virtually eradicated the right of choice [emphasis added] for . . . families.4
Elvish points to a fundamental difference in the quality of service provided by community-based centres, which emphasise parental accountability and individual child welfare, and that offered by the corporates which, ‘like the fast food industry’, are dominated by the logic of shareholder accountability and thus cost
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minimisation.5 For Elvish, the politics of choice are fraught with paradox: In our consumer orientated society we are bombarded with choice and variety. Yet, ironically, at one of the most important periods in a child’s life families are increasingly given a ‘one size fits all’ option to early childhood.6
The market driven approach is also causing a significant mismatch between the location of commercial centres and the geography of parental need. Brisbane’s Courier Mail newspaper recently reported ‘. . . a chronic shortage of childcare places in many urban neighbourhoods where land is more expensive’.7 Consequently, ‘Parents are being forced to make direct choices: leaving their children unattended or in “backyard care” minded by untrained strangers or aged relatives’.8 Windfall profits, driven by relentless cost minimisation and by record federal subsidies, are not leading to pay improvements in a notoriously low pay industry, or to better services in high need communities. A study undertaken by the Australia Institute demonstrates that low- and middleincome parents struggle to access formal care. Its author, Michael Flood, concludes ‘. . . poorer parents are priced out of the care they need for their children, and parents in disadvantaged communities are more likely to find that no childcare places are available’.9 The issue is hardly a social sideshow. The relentless parental enslavement to work, and the consequent loss of family time (especially weekends), have rendered childcare one of the most important domains for socialisation and a key determinant of child, later adult, well-being. There are now over 730 000 Australian children in formal childcare (up from approximately 570 000 in 1999) and an unknown number left to the vagaries of informal care. The shift in logic from a focus on children as individuals with specific care needs to ‘units of subsidy’ whose service costs must be minimised marks the transition to a heartless, and ultimately self defeating, mode of childcare.
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For children, the problems arising from human service changes have been compounded by the public liability crisis that represents yet another solvent force eating away at the urban public realm. The early years of the new millennium witnessed an outpouring of concern from local government and community organisations who pointed to a rapid collapse in the quality and volume of community cultural and sporting activities. The public liability pandemic is not, however, a natural outcome reflecting the inherent vulnerability of children in urban contexts, but arises simply from the unwillingness of governments, especially the Commonwealth, to secure the health and safety of citizens in civic spaces. The storm of liability claims has broken most severely across the municipal public realm. Nearly all of Queensland’s local governments, for example, now regularly have major (that is, over $5000) liability claims made against them relating to incidents occurring in public places.10 The crisis might well reflect what Greg Hallam, Executive Director of the Queensland Local Government Association, describes as a growth in the ‘absurdity and the avarice of people’.11 He blames the long reign of the ‘nanny state’ for a culture of public dependency, but neglects to add that nanny, if ever she existed, has long departed the scene, ushered off to oblivion by the prophets. Perhaps more accurately, the explosive growth of public liability litigation reflects the melding of three social forces that have been deliberately conjured during the neo-liberal reform phases: heightened individualism, fading respect for the public realm, and the relentless growth of economic insecurity. The latter anxiety manifests in public liability claims when individuals frightened by the perceived or real decline of public support for health and human care attempt to find other ways of registering their potentially reasonable claims for social assistance after the experience of some injury. The net result is a rapid contraction in the size and quality of the public sphere that services children. The journalist Jessica Lawrence reports, ‘Public spaces are becoming boring because of
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public liability fears’.12 She cites the urban designer and scholar Danny O’Hare, who observes that a culture of obsessive risk aversion, especially amongst local governments, has caused a widespread decline in the quality of play environments for children, at least in the public sphere, whose guardians cannot afford the hefty insurance levies which a more sanguine approach would attract. Lawrence’s report details the outright removal of play equipment in many Queensland municipalities and the shift away from adventurous and stimulating designs in other contexts. In 2002, a people’s panel convened by the Victorian government linked the public liability crisis to children’s declining health, especially evidence of growing childhood obesity. The panel lamented the culture of risk aversion that had blanketed the public realm, reducing the ability of public schools especially to act as centrepoints of child focused community activity.13 In harsher historical times children were assets, workers from the earliest possible ages. Most families surely cherished them, but love was blended with necessity. Civilising reform put a stop to that and created for many young people a childhood. Now it seems they are back on the accounting schedule, this time on the other side of the ledger. On the long march of reform, kids became liabilities: they made it harder to keep up. Many adults got the message and stopped having them.
Modernity’s Paradox: Fatter, Sicker and Sadder The growing endangerment to our children arising from the reform project is surely reflected in the accumulating scientific evidence telling us that they are getting fatter, sicker and sadder. Australia has become an immensely wealthier country over the past three decades, but this material enrichment has been accompanied by a startling decline in the health and well-being of our children. A similar pattern of simultaneously rising rates of wealth and morbidity has
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been registered in other developed countries. Canadians Daniel Keating and Clyde Hertzman have described this as ‘Modernity’s Paradox’.14 In the United States, the psychologist David Myers believes that compared to the 1950s, contemporary Americans . . . are twice as rich and no happier. Meanwhile the divorce rate doubled. Teen suicide tripled . . . Depression rates have soared, especially among teens and young adults. I call this conjunction of material prosperity and social recession the American paradox.15
Fiona Stanley, epidemiologist and 2003 Australian of the Year, reports an exhaustive review of physical and mental health indicators for children which shows that ‘whilst death rates are low and life expectancy is terrific, trends in almost all other outcomes have got worse [emphasis added]’.16 Consider just some of the indicators that have registered declines for children during the era of neo-liberal structural reform: birth weight, asthma and diabetes, obesity, intellectual disability, depression, anxiety, behavioural problems, drug use and child abuse. With colleagues Sue Richardson and Margot Prior, Fiona Stanley comes to the appalling conclusion that, ‘The present generation of children may be the first in the history of the world to have lower life expectancy than their parents’.17 The dismal picture was recently confirmed by an Australian Institute of Health and Welfare study that reported rising obesity and mental health problems for Australian children, and indications of worsening dental health.18 One worrying indicator of child safety showed the number of children on care and protection orders to have risen almost 50 per cent in the past six years. It was not all bad news, however. Fiona Stanley’s observation about improving infant mortality rates was confirmed, though for Indigenous children the rate was still 2.5 times higher than for the mainstream. This surely reflects the power of public health to improve individual life chances. For young people, mounting evidence suggests a sadder, more fragile outlook than was previously the case but, again, not all trends are in decline. The Australian social researcher Richard
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Eckersley points to ‘fractured views’ of youth well-being, including both positive assessments based on self-reported life satisfaction studies against countervailing research on mental health which shows many young people to be struggling. He concludes that these seemingly contradictory trends (also evident in other western nations) are not necessarily irreconcilable, and indicate new complexities in the human condition. Most young people are, and have always been, optimistic about their own futures, but most are pessimistic about the state and prospects of society or the world. Most do not believe quality of life in Australia is improving, and they are more likely to think that, globally, this century will be a time of crisis and trouble than an age of peace and prosperity.19
The fractured reality of youth well-being may reflect in a specific way the Great Unsettlement of the nation wrought by structural reform and cultural pluralisation. Young people, perhaps more than any other social group (certainly demographic), are best placed to embrace positively the new opportunities and experiences that have arisen through cultural pluralisation and through the new fluidity of employment structures and of life courses generally. At the same time, they may be most vulnerable to the heavy mantle of uncertainty that has settled over life in general, coupled with greatly increased social expectations that they engage relentlessly in ‘reflection, reinvention, and flexibility’.20 The transience and impermanence of liquid neo-liberal modernity pose heavy psychic costs for children. Richard Eckersely enlists Zygmunt Bauman, who insists that for every head in the currency of change there exists a tail: the ‘exhilarating adventure, turns into an exhausting chore’.21 Again, what is lost to young people, as to many, is time: a humane temporality that allows for secure, reflective development contrasts with the constant, instant reaction to chronic change demanded of them today. The endless acts of instant gratification (or disappointment) that choreograph the life of Homo consumens are
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an existence marked by the absence of time. If time has been stolen, little wonder that young people report limited enthusiasm for the future—an avalanche of time over which they will have little mastery. The yearning for time stolen, for time never experienced, resonates in the social surveys that register children’s loss. A study by the Australia Institute recorded the laments of young people who desired more time from their parents, not more family wealth.22 Seventeen-year-old Smithy told researchers, ‘I wouldn’t mind seeing them [his parents] make less money if it meant they don’t have to work so damn hard’.23 Kelsey, aged twelve, grieves for parental time, ‘Dad earns money . . . but he hardly spends any time with you’.24 Whilst poor teenagers, as with children, are most exposed to the worst breakdowns of contemporary life—notably, violence and homelessness—social evidence suggests that liquid modernity presents much more general threats, especially to their psychic health. The growth in materialism and individualism which has accompanied both phases of the neo-liberal reform project—and most acutely the last—seems, as Eckersely observes, to ‘. . . breed not happiness but dissatisfaction, depression, anxiety, anger, isolation and alienation’.25 Young people, with little historical experience of the many layers of social solidarity that have been peeled away during the reform project, are most vulnerable to the chill winds of alienation. Commentary points to the growth of ‘urban tribalism’, whereby young people fashion tightly bound friendship networks that function like extended families. The tribalism may be a positive selfcorrecting response to the gales of individualism and materialism.26 But their long-term socialising potential is unknown and may well be counter-balanced by anti-social forms of tribalism, such as the occasional outbreaks of disorder amongst middle class youth that have produced moral panics in the media and amongst parents and governments in recent years. A case in point is the gatecrashing epidemic that has surfaced across the continent, from Perth to the
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Gold Coast, with the popular media raising the spectre of swarms of ‘. . . drunken often drugged-up gatecrashers’ descending like youthful Visigoths without warning on homely family celebrations.27 The anger and ennui unleashed in these events are hardly reflective of content, socially adjusted youth. What happened to the great historical promise of modernity? Why has escalating wealth not lifted also the prospects for our young? How can it be in the first years of the third millennium, two centuries after the Industrial Revolution, that Australia’s leading scholar of the young could declare ‘. . . childhood is rapidly vanishing’?28 Fiona Stanley writes: Clearly, our nation’s economic prosperity has failed to deliver the social dividend that was promised. While Australia prospers economically, alarm bells have been sounding in the suburbs—witness increases in divorce, family violence, child abuse, homelessness, working hours and social isolation [emphasis added].29
Could it be that the centuries long Growth Fetish30 has produced cities and communities that are environmentally and socially injurious to their most vulnerable human inhabitants, the children and the poor? In explanation, Fiona Stanley speaks of the shattering consequences of the growth machine economy and the social changes engendered by this: unprecedented levels of family breakdown and discord; ever longer working hours; cultural alienation; and rising wealth inequality. She asserts that children have been made vulnerable to psychic, moral and physical injury by the weakening and withdrawal of the public domain from many urban communities: What’s been decreasing are some of the protective factors for these things [morbidity levels]: community cohesion and participation, neighbourhood trust, and I think, children’s services and facilities in many communities . . . [H]ave you talked to any child health nurses lately to see how angry and worried they are
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about support? . . . [T]here has been a decrease in facilities at a time when parents actually need them more than ever . . .31
Macro indicators mask how vulnerability affects young Australians in different ways. As noted, wealth polarisation—Fiona Stanley terms it the ‘toxic social divide’—produces distinct forms of endangerment for the young. In our new urban poverty sinkholes, the endangerment is real, even life threatening.
The Jaded and Foul One Saturday in early November 2003, the lifeless body of fiveyear-old Chloe Hoson was found discarded amidst refuse in the reserve opposite her home, Lansdowne Caravan Park, in southwestern Sydney. Chloe had been raped, strangled and cast aside like rubbish by her killer. A young man resident in Lansdowne Park was later charged with her murder. In a moving and insightful piece of journalism, The Australian’s Christine Jackman took readers beyond the monstrous crime that ended Chloe’s life into the lifeworld that she had inhabited all too briefly.32 Her essay recalls the higher forms of Victorian era slum journalism, which explored the realms of urban abjection and recorded them with humanity and empathy. Jackman enters the Lansdowne netherworld to find and interview Chloe’s playmates; just some of the many children who live with their parents in the tightly packed, poorly ventilated trailers and cabins that crowd the caravan park. The children knew well the tawdry reserve where Chloe was found because their parents had declared it off limits. It was a magnet for prostitution and drug dealing, where council workers would regularly find up to 150 syringes a week buried in the sand beneath the playground’s swings. Jackman speaks to ‘Dave’, a father of three children under the age of three. He fumes with helpless anger about the impossibility
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of keeping kids safe in a den of drugs, pollution and quietly smouldering rage. Jackman observes: ‘. . . beneath this father’s fury is a deeper, brooding resentment at the powerlessness of life on the fringes of Australia’s wealthiest city’. Dave speaks of entrapment, of not being able to access even the scruffier private rental market that thrives in parts of Sydney’s middle west. He and his family have been told that they will wait at least six years for public housing in the area. The heartless contradictions of contemporary postwelfare Australia are revealed when his partner ‘Cara’ informs Jackman that the family could move almost immediately to a public dwelling in Dubbo, but the move would send them even further backwards: ‘. . . Centrelink will cut our (unemployment) payments because you can’t move to an area with less jobs’. The long shadows of Victorian poor laws and their brutish prosecution of the ‘undeserving’ continue to darken the lives of Australia’s urban poor. Lansdowne, like many other urban welfare camps, is the last stop before outright homelessness. It provides none of the conditions for a healthy and happy life. In Dave’s words: ‘There’s nothing here, mate’. The politics of choice seem to have sidestepped Lansdowne’s 1000 residents: ‘. . . we’ve got no choice’, laments Dave. Jackman writes: ‘The only shopping centre within walking distance boasts a liquor store, a Chinese takeaway and a McDonald’s—but the fruit and vegetable shop has closed down’. The problem of transport poverty is highlighted: ‘Those without cars must rely on the local service stations for ready supplies—but often must dodge another sort of trade on their way to pick up milk’. Jackman inscribes her sad portrait of Chloe’s life and death with this epitaph: She was an innocent battling to thrive in a world where the fresh and the natural are constantly under siege from the jaded and foul.
Australia’s cities are peppered with ‘jaded and foul’ places that are home to countless numbers of children and young people. They have been allowed to increase in number and to fester during the
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rule of state Labor governments in reform phase two. The federal Coalition government has completely ignored them. More than one-fifth of the nation’s children live in low-income households, and nearly as many live in families with no employed parent.33 A number of recent studies confirm that many of the poorest urban localities in Australia contain high concentrations of children (that is, over one-quarter of their population).34 These places include the new and lingering poverty concentrations reviewed in Chapter 3: welfare camps, like Lansdowne; the sinkhole public housing estates; places of urban Indigenous disadvantage; and the emerging pockets of exclusion in the mouldering middle suburbs of the major cities. A study published in 2004 by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare examined the relationships between health inequalities and mortality, exploring as part of this the influence of socioeconomic disadvantage on life expectancy.35 The study closely scrutinised well-being in socio-economically disadvantaged communities. Its findings confirm the argument made above that poverty is literally life threatening. The study report makes the chilling conclusion that, ‘If all [poor communities] in Australia experienced the same death rate as the least socioeconomically disadvantaged areas, more than 23 000 deaths could have been avoided in 1998–2000’.36 This figure included nearly 2700 children.37 Lives tossed into the furnace of reform. Caravan parks like Lansdowne are amongst the worst and yet least known communities of disadvantage. The little we do know about these new urban poverty spaces was powerfully summarised in a study by researchers at the Urban Frontiers Program at the University of Western Sydney.38 In 2001, 62 per cent of households in caravan parks earned less than $500 a week, compared with an Australian average of 29 per cent. More than four in ten park residents were in rental stress, paying more than 30 per cent of their income on rent. Some 80 per cent of residents had no postschool qualifications. We do not yet properly know the extent or
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precise character of these new urban netherworlds. Our social scientific understanding of them is poor because such knowledge seems to attract little political or policy interest. It seems you can know too much in the clever country. The problem of Lansdowne, at least, might soon be dealt with. The owner of the caravan park, development behemoth Meriton, has lodged an application to rezone the park from ‘private recreation’ to ‘residential’, potentially paving the way for a lucrative redevelopment. Meriton has announced that it is ‘considering options for the best use of the land occupied by the park. At this time, it is considered that a traditional, low density, residential subdivision is the most appropriate use’.39 A masterplanned enclave estate might be just what is needed to reclaim the haunted grounds of Lansdowne Caravan Park. But who will calm its ghosts?
Poor (Not So) Little Rich Kids What about the other end of the social scale? Let’s imagine the situation of the children and young people who might live in the masterplanned estate that could eventually replace Lansdowne Caravan Park. It is also likely to look very crowded, in a middle class way: lots of large houses, many of them two storeys, packed into small lots, separated by narrow streets and pocket parks—it may or may not have footpaths. Some commentators have derisively called such estates McMansion Land, perhaps because their supersized contents seem steroid enhanced. In truth, the observation is condescending and rather unfair: the large structures reflect a growth in the national appetite for more housing space that has been a feature of Australian life for much of the twentieth century and now beyond.40 At the same time, the plots on which they are set have been dramatically compacted as the Urban Consolidation Diktat has been applied in various ways to new subdivisions by state and local governments.
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The journalist Janet Hawley, resorting to mild hyperbole, describes contemporary project homes on the newer Sydney masterplanned estates: . . . four bedroom, spiral staircase, open-plan, kitchen-familydining-lounge, multiple bathroom, rumpus room, big-screen media room, barbecue, spa, multi-garage bigger-is-beautiful-isbetter houses.41
Whilst condescension is unwise, there are growing reasons for disquiet about McMansion Land. The growth in dwelling size is an environmental concern—the suburban palazzos are energy guzzlers—and also, perhaps, a health concern. Evidence on the national epidemic in childhood obesity points to a relationship between the expanding girth of dwellings and the growing waistlines of their inhabitants. The contemporary suburban mega house internalises activity, allocating large amounts of space to passive recreation: home theatres, lounges, rumpus and computer rooms, courtyards and monster garages for the storage of adults’ toys. Sociologist Gabrielle Gwyther explains: ‘They love cocooning inside their McMansions, which are like castles, fun factories and mini resorts in one’.42 These relatively sedentary residential landscapes contrast with older suburban forms that were premised on far greater levels of outdoor activity, especially for children. The traditional backyard has gone, along with its trees, garden veggie patch, often pool, washing line and shed, where children could let their bodies and imaginations run free and build tree houses, cubbyhouses, billycarts, dig in the dirt and invent games. Now, it’s indoor computer games, and, given there’s no room for a decent run-up in most McMansion courtyards, children are driven to sport and formally organised activities most days of the week.43
Recent survey evidence confirms the picture of sedentary children. A Newspoll study reported in early 2005 found that
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children were spending only about one-tenth of their time in outdoor play. Further, one in twenty admitted that they never left their homes to play. In response, the parenting educator Michael Grose linked rising childhood obesity to the fact that ‘. . . houses are getting bigger and backyards smaller’.44 He also decried the programming of children by parents and educators, observing, ‘Everything we know about child development says that children need to spend more time outside in unstructured activities, giving them a chance to explore their environment’.45 Those McKids who actually do participate in organised sport—a chore for parents working long hours on the mortgage treadmill—will experience at least some level of physical activity. But missing from these new suburban landscapes are the opportunities for spontaneous, constant freeplay available to children of previous generations, and those lucky enough still to have backyards. As Hawley observes, many parents cite space as the principal reason for rejecting inner city ‘shoe boxes’ in favour of the new masterplanned estates. And yet free, permeable space seems to be almost absent from the new residential estates. Declining quality and quantity of residential activity space diminishes children’s capacity for self-determination. The sovereignty of many middle class kids is further reduced by the highly routinised and supervised lives imposed on them by anxious parents and performance obsessed institutions. The Canberra-based geographer Paul Tranter believes that Australian children are subjected to unprecedented levels of surveillance and control, driven by an epidemic of parental and institutional concern about environmental risk and crime.46 Many now live highly scripted lives, marked by pervasive anxiety and the absence of free and independent play. Journalist Jane Cadzow depicts the ‘bubble-wrap generation’: So reluctant are we to let our offspring out of our sight that we drive them to the playground and everywhere else rather than allow them to walk or ride their bikes. Strapped into the
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backseat of the family sedan, chauffeured to and from school, soccer practice and piano lessons, middle-class Australian boys and girls are like pampered prisoners—cosseted, constrained and constantly nagged.47
Children need autonomy from adults for their psychic and social development. Little wonder then that the ‘pampered prisoners’ flee the bounds of their suburban cells for the horizonless expanses of computer generated worlds where freeplay is always possible. They may not be permitted to climb trees, ride their bikes to the shops or go unaccompanied to parks, but here they can wage global and intergalactic wars, build cities and even design the perfect family. The problem with simulated worlds, however, is that they are pretty poor training grounds for life. A tour of duty in SimCity can never emulate the sensuous complexity of urban life; life with the Sims is unlikely to help a child to cope with any family dysfunctionality or prepare them for the joys and strains of adult life. The ‘ordinary maladies’ of life come then as insurmountable shocks to bubble-wrap kids. Melbourne clinical psychologist Andrew Fuller tells Cadzow, ‘when bad things do happen, they’re just thrown for six. They end up in my bloody therapy room and I’m sick of it’.48 By the time they reach their teenage years, many such children will be quaking from prolonged exposure to the chill winds of materialism and individualism. For many, drugs—illegal and prescribed—will help to stop the shakes. Health Insurance Commission data show that Australia has joined the ranks of Prozac nations, reflecting rapid growth in prescriptions for happy pills during the early years of the new millennium. In 2004, over a quarter of a million prescriptions were issued to adolescents to treat various forms of sadness. Mental health expert Professor Ian Hickie warns of ‘. . . the future burden of youth mental illness’ arising from a rapid growth in conduct and mood disorders amongst young people.49
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Many of the saddest children are from affluent homes. Australian and international evidence confirm that children frequently bear what the American psychologist Suniya Luthar calls the ‘psychological costs of material wealth’.50 Empirically based research links disorders which appear to be growing amongst wealthier teenagers—notably substance abuse, depression and anxiety—to a combination of two key factors: pressures to achieve and isolation from parents. She crafts the image of the remote yet overbearing parent. Luthar reports a variety of studies in the United States that suggest the costs of wealth are especially acute in upwardly mobile suburban communities—in Australia, the aspirational belt—where pressures to excel in academic and extracurricula activities combine with isolation from parents working long hours in the contemporary treadmill economy.51 Despite evidence showing Australia to be a greatly safer place for children than it was three decades ago, an obdurate culture of fear drives the ever-increasing parental colonisation of children’s lifeworlds.52 The colonisation project seems strangely disconnected to real social evidence including, for example, a hardly reported Australian Bureau of Statistics survey that shows a significant drop in crime in New South Wales in the 2001–03 period and an increase in the number of people who reported that their neighbourhoods were crime free.53 Parental anxiety about child abduction, driven by relentless high-pitched media reportage, means that many more children are driven to school than previously. One result is growing traffic chaos around schools, which perversely poses new dangers for children. The president of a parents’ association at a Gold Coast school recently remarked: It’s absolutely hideous. There’s [sic] cars everywhere. It’s dangerous around schools and it’s all because of the child abduction issue . . . It’s a bit sad. Kids don’t have much freedom . . . They can’t be kids any more. We feel like we are part time security guards. It’s the way society has made us these days.54
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Fear, the potent flag bearer for despair, is a difficult wraith to banish, especially when the popular media and contemporary ‘law and order’ politics give it the free pedestal it so desperately craves. The rising numbers of kids in therapy and the epidemic of child obesity are unambiguous markers of the extent to which fear rules our cities and communities.
Postscript: A Battle Quietly Rages Like most advanced capitalist nations, Australia has long craved greater wealth, more freedom to use it, and more stimulating ways to expend it. Before the neo-liberal revolution three decades ago, the lust for gold was restrained by a diverse set of moderating influences with deep cultural roots: conservatism, religion, socialism, conservationism. The manipulated panic about ‘state fiscal crisis’ that brought neo-liberalism to power throughout the Englishspeaking world in the late 1970s saw the suspension of these moderating orders. The growth machine unleashed by neo-liberals promised to drive whole nations to heaven through the eye of the materialist pin. The health assessment for our urban societies suggests that the Growth Fetish is a morbid desire whose indulgence has generated material enrichment at the cost of great civic and human impoverishment. A nation that denies the chance for health and happiness to many of its young is not a rich society, because it is brutish by nature and because it thieves from its own future. The attack on young people suggests that we have, as a society, lost the (re)generative impulse that is a precondition for a national future worth having. The open disregard of successive national and state governments and business elites for the highly apparent, indeed blatant, polarisation of our cities reeks of doom. The steady, nihilistic progress towards an Australia divided is surely a death march. A splintered nation will not weather history’s storms. The attack on
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the public domain represents another way in which Australia has campaigned against its own future, producing urban communities and cities that cannot undertake the task of nurturing and constantly modernising the civic values that underscore nationhood. The polyglot and increasingly fractious social landscape of the contemporary Australian city registers the marks of a battle that quietly rages between hope and despair. Those who cheer on anxiety and fear have set themselves in opposition to the future and its inhabitants. Against them are those who retain hope, and struggle to maintain the inclusive values and institutions that are the only soil in which a healthy future can thrive. The urban field is crowded with a wrestling mass of knaves, saints and sinners. Despair’s captains are visible and voluble, holding the high grounds of power, conquering through dissection. Hope’s scattered legions struggle on, awaiting new leadership and a remoralisation of will and purpose. Amidst this ruckus, ordinary things are happening that will craft the future. Children and young people are trying to live and grow, everywhere quietly in the shadows of great events. The glowing structures erected around them, and the riches piled up in their sight, provide no shelter it seems from a nature enraged by human perfidy. Our misshapen young must pay the debts that we accumulate. Fatter, sicker and sadder, they face the future of furious miserable change that we are preparing for them.
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CHAPTER
7
Cities in the Sand: A Chant of Urban Doom Dead night, unholy quiet, doom, and weird Are heavy on its roof, The palace-keep that prosperous Evil rear’d Defiant, heaven proof . . . Christopher Brennan, ‘A Chant of Doom’ 1915–18
e cannot know the future with any certainty, but we can be relatively sure about the legacy we will be leaving new generations. The principle and the science of inter-generational impacts are now firmly understood, if not always appreciated. Human societies constantly accumulate wealth and debts that are carried into the future. Economic, natural and human forms of capital are relentlessly expended, transformed and collected. The Industrial Revolution and the long rise of global capitalism immensely expanded our powers of accumulation. The scales of our social and natural transactions have been vastly increased, as has our capacity to acquire riches and debts. The economic historian Angus Maddison calculates that the value of European output tripled in real terms between 1000 and 1820.1 The arrival of industrial capitalism put growth into overdrive, with GDP in Europe, its New World offshoots and Japan increasing nearly twenty-fold between 1820 and 1998.2 Growth in other world regions was more uneven during the industrial period—Latin America nearly matched western economic growth rates, whilst Africa performed
W
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much more modestly, managing only to triple output. Overall global growth rose nearly ten-fold. There was little time or inclination to consider the long-term costs of growth. At the heart of modernisation has lain the belief that humanity has the power to repay any of the debts accumulated by progress. Within the ‘ordinary chaos’ of human accumulation lurk a number of distinct tendencies. One transformative tendency is the chronic need for the reconciliation of debts, in constant tension with its twin dynamic, the desire for greater wealth. These twin forces drive a process of accumulation whose calculus is registered at every human scale, ranging from the individual to the nation, and even to the species. Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss of the Australia Institute contend that after two centuries of capitalism, most western people now possess a deeply implanted and apparently limitless desire for greater affluence.3 And yet, a spectacular historical growth in material wealth has left us impoverished in many ways, suffering from what they describe as ‘affluenza’. The term was coined in the United States to describe ‘An epidemic of stress, overwork, waste and indebtedness caused by dogged pursuit of the American Dream’.4 Phase two of the neo-liberal program saw the epidemic at work in Australia. Our new postmodern penury is registered in surveys betraying a tired population that is troubled by the changes that have been imposed on it during the neo-liberal reform phases. Wealth and debt seem to be two sides of the same currency in market societies. History suggests that the higher the social and natural scale, the stronger the patterning of accumulation. National economies, for example, seem to be characterised by discrete phases where wealth and debt gain the upper hand. Despite these cyclical ups and downs, the material size of economies has increased steadily over the past two centuries. By contrast, the accumulation of natural assets and debt at the national and global scales has not been marked by the grand episodic reconciliations (e.g., depressions, recessions) that
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have governed economies. Rather, a relentless accumulation of ecological debts has occurred against the background of constant resource depletion as natural capital has been transformed into other forms of wealth. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) monitors the ‘ecological footprint’ of humanity, defined as a measure of human demand on the global biosphere. The WWF warns: In 2001, humanity’s Ecological Footprint was 2.5 times larger than in 1961, and exceeded the Earth’s biological capacity by about 20 per cent. This overshoot depletes the Earth’s natural capital, and is therefore possible only for a limited period of time.5
The Canadian historian Ronald Wright, deploying a different metric, reports: Ecological markers suggest that in the early 1960s, humans were using about 70 per cent of nature’s yearly output; by the early 1980s, we’d reached 100 per cent; and in 1999, we were at 125 per cent. Such numbers may be imprecise, but their trend is clear—they mark the road to bankruptcy.6
What is distinctive and surely concerning about the present historical conjuncture is the looming coincidence of three moments of reconciliation—economic, human and natural—when growth will be halted, and order disrupted, by the claims of debt. The indications are that in the developed world all three ‘accounting’ cycles are on a path for convergence some time in the next decade. Australia appears to be right in the centre of the storm’s path, having installed a growth machine economy that has simultaneously exhausted its workforce and accelerated a long-run drain on its natural resource base, threatening wild and cataclysmic disruption. In short, we have put our faith in debt, and this most obstinate creditor now insists upon repayment terms that signal ruin. At the centre of the ruinous bargain sits what the Australian geographer Phil McManus calls our Vortex Cities:7 cities that remain transfixed
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by the allure of easy money and the exploitation of natural and social capital as if each was a boundless, senseless resource. The Magic Pudding, to recall Norman Lindsay’s fable, is getting grumpy and restive. When he takes off, as he must, will we be prepared for the disorder that will follow? Who will help the masses of debt junkies who have learned to have their cake and eat it? Will the dealers in debt—the neo-liberal prophets—be held accountable? Questions for history no doubt. But their resolution looms in the near not distant future: the sands are shifting, the foundations of our cities are shaking and the storm looms.
Economy: The Fairytale Darkens Founded in fraud, mortar’d with blood, and clamp’d With clutching iron hands . . . Christopher Brennan, ‘A Chant of Doom’
After a decade of growth, an increasing number of economists are forecasting a slump in western, certainly Anglophone, economies beginning probably with a recession in the United States that would rapidly affect dependent economies such as Australia. The noted American economist James Galbraith writes of the looming ‘abrupt adjustment’ of the debt-driven US economy.8 Spiralling household and public debt, collapsing employment and investment and, perversely, the health of the Amex Defence Index indicate the economy’s morbidity.9 Galbraith, already observing the changes in the rear-view mirror, notes ‘. . . the boom was based on dreams, illusions, and mortgages’.10 Australia is vulnerable to the external shock scenario, and has its own mounting internal debts to acquit. In February 2005, the Commonwealth Treasury Secretary, Ken Henry, reportedly aired fears that ‘. . . the US is heading for a devastating financial crash that could ravage Australia’s economic growth’.11 The nation’s economic
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vulnerability, however, is hardly the fault of the United States. The fabled miracle economy is teetering on a precipice of internally generated debt. In early 2005 the Sydney Morning Herald witnessed the ‘. . . fairytale turn nasty’ as ‘. . . the current account deficit ballooned to a 50-year peak’.12 The nation now also runs the highest current account deficit (six per cent of GDP) of any wealthy economy.13 This gold medal debt performance marked ‘. . . our growing dependence on debt and an insatiable appetite for imports . . . It shows that Australia is spending more than it earns’.14 Australian gross debt is presently about 150 per cent of GDP (it was 50 per cent in 1980). Overseen by the Howard administration, foreign debt as a proportion of GDP rose rapidly during reform phase two from 39.3 per cent in 1996 to 49.9 per cent in 2005.15 The Reserve Bank of Australia’s Assistant Governor, Ric Battellino, recently observed: It could be argued . . . that the sustained expansion of financing relative to GDP has made the economy more vulnerable to financial shocks, since it is now more highly geared than used to be the case.16
At the household level, Australians are no longer net savers and have accumulated record debt. The Economist reported in March 2004: A new study by Goldman Sachs has assessed the vulnerability of consumers in 19 countries, based on trends in debt, saving rates and house-price gains. The bank finds that Australia’s consumers (jointly with Spain’s) are the world’s most exposed to higher interest rates or recession.17
As the Australian political analysts Shaun Wilson and Nick Turnbull have shown, the past decade of economic growth has been dependent upon escalating household expenditure and debt, encouraged by what they term as a ‘privatised Keynesianism’ that has seen a massive government subsidisation of private collective consumption.18 The War on Terra Publica has lured and cajoled
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households into reliance on subsidised private services, thereby weakening the nation economically as well as socially. Financial deregulation, subsidised property investment (negative gearing), the desire for ever grander dwellings, and high rates of household mobility have contributed to a metropolitan housing market boom. The escalation in housing value has further stimulated the growth of household consumer spending and debt. At the same time, and linked to the growth in household debt, dwelling investment has taken on a new significance, now rivalling business investment in its contribution to overall economic growth. The Economist has observed the property rush with increasing concern: . . . what makes Australia’s house-price boom look even more fragile than those in Britain or America is the extraordinary importance of the buy-to-let market, which accounted for 45% of all new mortgage borrowing last year. One Australian household in six owns an investment property. New construction has produced a glut of homes, and net rental yields (after maintenance and letting costs) have been driven down to 2%, far below the 7% mortgage rate. People have been buying purely in the expectation of capital gain, regardless of the underlying income stream. This is the very definition of a bubble.19
Will record rates of productivity save us from penury? Wilson and Turnbull doubt it: Recent economic growth has little or nothing to do with increased market dynamism. In fact, it is the same old indebted economy we have always had, but with an ever greater reliance on household consumption, debt and long working hours to keep it booming.20
Households, or a proportion of them, have been encouraged to take on the state’s traditional responsibility for maintaining growth by raising their levels of consumption and debt. If the feared international ‘abrupt adjustment’ occurs, the Australian government’s
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ability to maintain privatised Keynesianism may be suddenly undermined by plummeting income. At the same time, households facing new debt vulnerability and worse may very quickly demand that the government resume the task and the risks associated with growth stimulus: that is, by providing public services in cities and regions, and by carefully managing a broadscale retreat from private collective consumption (especially in education and health spheres). This would be damaging to neo-liberalism. The War on Terra Publica might lose its footsoldiers. And they could be the first to return to ransack the citadels from where their campaigns were directed.
Society: The Workhouse Economy Fails The enginery they wrought, whose maw they fed With fume and fire of hate, To break his house above his neighbour’s head, Hath left theirs desolate . . . Christopher Brennan, ‘A Chant of Doom’
Accumulating social pressures—debts by another name—present an imminent form of structural correction that is closely linked to the looming economic adjustment. The ‘low road’ productivity gains of the 1990s (based on harder work) appear to be petering out as national workforces approach exhaustion, whilst the ‘high road’ to growth has been blocked by plummeting private investment in capital improvement. Labour market deregulation has produced benefits, such as flexibility in work practices for some, but has contributed to a relentless increase in work stress and insecurity for the majority. The previous chapter observed how the theft of private time had placed greater stress on relationships and families, with particularly severe consequences for children. Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss remind us that work intensification tends also to dissolve the wider bonds
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of solidarity because overworkers simply have no time to give back to community services and activities: ‘Working long and irregular hours does not just cause accidents and make us sick and tired: it breaks down the bonds that hold our communities together’.21 The economist Doug Henwood suggests that the relentless growth in the intensity and length of work has reached its limits in the United States.22 Similar evidence exists in Australia, which shows a trend toward lengthening hours for full-time employees. Since 1982 the average weekly hours worked by full-time employees has risen sharply, largely driven by increases in unpaid overtime.23 Hamilton and Denniss report: . . . Australians now work the longest hours in the developed world: 1855 hours a year compared with 1835 in the United States and an OECD average of 1643. Our first placing is even more noteworthy for the fact that Australia has the second highest proportion of part-time employees (27 per cent) in the workforce, something that acts to drag down the average.24
More than 25 per cent of employees now work at least fifty hours per week, up from around 15 per cent in 1987. Survey evidence indicates that a majority of those workers would like to work fewer hours and that a sizeable proportion of the workforce is unable to use its annual leave entitlements.25 Rising exhaustion is not limited to blue-collar workers—excessive working hours have deeply affected middle and higher income earners as well. A longterm study by sociologist Michael Pusey suggests that the middle class has sacrificed about as much social and private time as it can in the cause of growth.26 In Australia, aspirational politics, which have to now been well aligned with the imperatives generated by private Keynesianism, may soon undergo some readjustment. An increasing weight of social survey evidence tells us that the middle class, for example, now aspires not to greater material wealth, but to a restoration of social time and non-material forms of gratification. Downshifting
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has been used to describe the social phenomenon whereby a small but growing number of households have voluntarily simplified their economic circumstances, often substituting enhanced social and personal time for income.27 As downshifting gains momentum, and with population ageing, there may be hardening resistance to further intensification in work patterns and attempts to make the workforce more flexible. There may also be new demands for certainty, security and limits in worklife and in access to welfare enhancing public services.
Ecology: The Debt Falls Due Ay, but this has been of old. Earth remembers in its mould All her motherhood defiled By the frenzy of her child . . . Christopher Brennan, ‘A Chant of Doom’
The looming ‘abrupt adjustment’ of debt economies is set to collide with new finitudes within human and natural resource stocks. No more so acutely than in Australia, which has long feasted on the Magic Pudding of its renewable resource base. Jared Diamond’s magisterial historical enquiry, Collapse, fixes on Australia as an exemplary candidate for societal and ecological failure. The continent’s renewable resources—its fish stocks, soil and forests—are: . . . being overexploited at rates faster than their renewal rates, with the result that they are declining. At present rates, Australia’s forests and fisheries will disappear long before its coal and iron reserves, which is ironic in view of the fact that the former are renewable but the latter aren’t.28
Mining may be the gravedigger of the carbon economy, and agriculture its deathly handmaiden, as Diamond suggests, but it is
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cities that are most deadly to nature. As in all developed countries, ecological footprint analysis confirms the destructive embrace between city and countryside in Australia.29 Relentless depletion of the energy stocks that have fuelled growth for two centuries has brought us to the ‘end of the age of oil’.30 Further, the dependency on oil and other non-renewable energy sources has accumulated ecological debts—notably, stored atmospheric carbon emissions— which soon must be acquitted. This debt will manifest during the next decade as a series of ecological disruptions whose precise forms are as yet unknown. What we do know in Australia is that climate change will occur sooner than previously thought, and indeed already seems to have manifested in our major cities, which are plagued by long-term drought and weather variability. Western Australia’s southwestern corner is one of the world’s first confirmed climate change regions. Over the past three decades, the region has lost 20 per cent of its annual rainfall. In that period, the water reaching Perth’s catchments has plummeted from 340 to 160 gigalitres: a reduction of more than 50 per cent.31 Other impacts are likely to include significant loss of biodiversity and damage to key natural assets (rainforests, the Great Barrier Reef ), more severe bushfire seasons, hotter summers, extreme and catastrophic weather events, and heightened risk to human health arising from the spread of insect-borne diseases.32 Climate change, as the term suggests, marks the transition from relative predictability to variability. Its ecological impacts and social implications will also vary between regions and between countries. Diamond writes, ‘. . . global climate change is producing both winners and losers, and Australia will be a loser’.33 The new wildness of weather and its increasingly fearsome impacts is likely to be a catalyst for political uncertainty and restiveness during a period of economic downturn and deepening social exhaustion. Socio-economic disruption will be further intensified by the rapid, sometimes sudden, escalation of resource prices, especially for households, as the new energy and water finitudes are reached.
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Ian Lowe, eminent scientist and president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, indicts the neo-liberal growth machine economy: The growth imperative leads to the presumption that each year we will use more resources (and generate more waste) than the year before . . . now that we have reached the point of perturbing the global climate, it is a dangerous illusion to think that our impacts can be expanded still further with impunity.34
A restrained charge given the deeply unsettling evidence he assembles of climate change in Australia—a phenomenon which may generate huge economic and social destabilisation in the relatively near future. Ronald Wright is less restrained, calling the neo-liberal model a ‘suicide machine’.35
Storm Surge And now, the sentinel deserts that gate Nor bar protects, nor pin, But high and wide the portal yawns, till Fate And Judgment enter in . . . Christopher Brennan, ‘A Chant of Doom’
The simultaneous ending of economic, human and natural credit lines and the arrival at critical debt levels raise the prospect of serious political and economic disruption at the national and global scales. It may be too much to cast the scenario as a perfect storm, but it cannot be doubted that western societies, and therefore the globe, face a series of fundamental crises in the next decade and beyond whose cumulative impacts are unknown but surely severe. What makes the scenario more compelling is the fact that these ‘debt shocks’ will occur against the backdrop of the new permanent world War on Terror. George W. Bush assures us that:
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We are in a long war. The war on terror is not going to end immediately. This is the war that other Presidents will be facing as we head into the 21st century.36
The war itself surely registers a claim by the dispossessed and the despondent against the political economic debts of the west accumulated during two decades of freewheeling globalisation. What is certain is that the War on Terror, or more particularly the Iraq misadventure, will accelerate and complicate the triple debt crisis. We can discern already the debts we have accumulated and that we will carry into the near future. Failing a cataclysm, it is probable that the west, or whatever geopolitical order emerges, will find a way to settle these debts and restore the basis for peace and prosperity. It is also probable that the path to reconciliation and beyond will be tumultuous and costly. One likely consequence is a general rise in state intervention, driven and justified by a perceived need for stronger central coordination to address multiple unfolding crises and the social dislocations arising from these destabilising influences. Allied to this may be a period of intense ideological ferment producing new political outlooks and movements that will seek a break from the political and economic path that produced the triple debt crisis. Cities will provide the centre stages for the unfolding drama as: the new homelands of humanity, where a growing majority of the world’s population now resides; the lynchpins of a global economy overshadowed by United States debt; the ‘workhouses’ that are draining the life force from human capital;37 and the principal consumers and despoilers of natural capital. Humanity and urbanity have fused: modernisation and globalisation have pushed and pulled a majority of human beings into urban areas, many of whom subsist in the vast slumscapes that surround the megacities of the developing world. As Mike Davis reports, the dawn of the new millennium revealed the ‘. . . astonishing prevalence
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of slums’.38 Neo-liberal globalisation has been vastly productive of urban misery: . . . rapid urban growth in the context of structural adjustment, currency devaluation and state retrenchment has been an inevitable recipe for the mass production of slums. Much of the urban world, as a result, is rushing backwards to the age of Dickens.39
The dreadful attacks of 11 September 2001 may have been signposts of despair, pointing to the new urban misery. And yet, history teaches that cities are also the centre points of human ingenuity and repositories of knowledge and hope. A hopeful future must surely emerge if the urban badlands can be transformed into human homelands. Cities—western and non western—are likely to remain the chief theatres of action in the chronic War on Terror. The analogy is Europe’s grinding, and ultimately devastating, Thirty Years War (1618–48) whose conclusion marked a transition to an era of geopolitical stability and economic prosperity. This war was motivated by religious antipathies and by economic rivalry and produced a widespread and prolonged climate of gloom amongst the peoples of central Europe. ‘Uncertainty, fear, disruption and brutality marked everyday life and remained a memory in German consciousness for centuries’.40 Cities were pivots, offering both stages for conflicts and redoubts against the prolonged international disorder. Some cities—notably Hamburg and Bremen—prospered during the conflicts whilst others, especially unfortified towns and villages, suffered decline or ruin. In this time, urbanisation was largely guided by the logic of fortification. It is telling that ‘securitisation’ is now a leading strategic concern for urban policy and urban development in western cities. Its contemporary meaning in global cities—security backed assets—is the mirror image of its function in globalised finance.41
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For the British geographers Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin securitisation preoccupies the age of ‘splintering urbanism’, reflected in an epidemic of popular anxiety about disorder and by the desire of elites to secure wealth in increasingly fortified, though globally integrated, urban enclaves.42 At the other end of the wealth spectrum, the poor and the abandoned have become increasingly trapped in poverty enclaves by the centripetal forces of social, financial and technological exclusion. Those outside the emerging archipelago of enclaves are left to the vicissitudes of a declining public sphere and the putrefying, insecure lifeworlds of the working and lower middle classes. The broadscale prosperity of the 1990s, particularly in Anglophone countries, and evident in reform phase two in Australia, blanketed the underlying process of splintering, subduing panic among the ‘ordinary classes’ about the long-term consequences of structural economic change. It also cloaked chronic under investment in the strategies and technologies needed to address accumulating ecological and social debts. By the early years of the new millennium, even the citadels of neo-liberalism were echoing with muttered doubts about the ‘sustainability’ of the growth machine economy. By 2005, the editors of The Australian were prosecuting the failures of the ‘political class’: While every nuclear family seems to have two or more cars and TVs, topped up with a DVD player, and iPod and an average one mobile phone per person, the public train system in Sydney is a disaster, the power system seems stretched in just about every state, urban water restrictions are in place in several states, the public hospitals are plagued with horror stories and the bulk handling ports can’t keep pace with what we dig out of the ground.43
And yet the plank in thine own eye . . . No recognition was made, of course, that it was the very policies they themselves had trumpeted for decades that undermined the public realm whose dysfunction they now decried. No admission that these same
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ideologies worked to withhold the crucial investments needed to renew the ecological and social foundations for our cities. Now they evoke an indulgent outrage—someone wasn’t there to fill up the holes and remove the filth left in the wake of the growth machine. So much for the ecological shroud that we know now as the miracle economy. The looming ‘abrupt adjustment’ of western economies will remove this mantle of consolation with potentially major political consequences. The following speculations on urbanisation and urban policy attempt to signpost some of these social and political reactions. Social adjustments to any sudden economic and ecological shifts will surely be eased if public debate begins to anticipate the looming claims of debt. Six Speculations on Urbanisation Involuntary downshifting. The coming storm may see the involuntary downshifting of vast swathes of households who in recent years have used debt and private consumption subsidies to move up the (apparent) economic scale. The enforced and voluntary downshifting arising from a combination of economic decline, resource scarcity and workforce fatigue may swiftly undermine the basis for the consumer urbanisation that has flourished in the past decade, rapidly cutting back masterplanned estates, premium medium density developments, a burgeoning home furnishings sector and new lifestyle industries such as gyms, home maintenance and pet grooming services. The lifestyle estate that promised refuge and repair from a life of independent contracting may not be viable or relevant when the debt economy splutters to a halt. Declining residential and household mobility. If downshifting is forced, demand for new housing will slacken considerably, greatly dampening the recent frenzy by the aspirational and middle classes in search of larger houses and more exclusive
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environments. A smaller greenfield development sector may be marked by reduced dwelling sizes, and an absence of lifestyle features such as manicured parks and ornamental water features. Forced downshifting is also likely to reduce the motivation, and the means, for everyday travel—especially motorised travel—for many urban dwellers. In the case of extreme spikes in energy costs, demotorisation will affect some, perhaps most, social layers. The unhindered use of motor cars may become the preserve of ‘mobility elites’. Public transport may even enjoy enhanced viability and significance. These changes will reflect and enforce a new imperative for households and individuals to reduce regional and cross metropolitan travel, and to access goods and services locally. The building of higher density dwellings in redevelopment sites will increase, locked in by the commitments made in existing metropolitan plans. This will be further stimulated by governments, including public land developers, searching for ways to accommodate housing demand in a context of resource depletion. The long entrenched decentralisation of economic and social activity in Australian cities will continue, but at a slower rate. The urban centrifuge will slow as aspirationals are no longer able to afford to rehouse themselves. As the outward tide recedes, the ecological and socio-economic costs of unmanaged urban growth will be exposed. A new emphasis on sustainability will encourage governments to refocus on existing urban centres. These changes would be accompanied by a contraction of the communal consumption sphere (privatised health, education and recreation landscapes) that has grown rapidly in recent years. Growing insularity and splintering. In a context of resource rationing and rising socio-economic insecurity, new political
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tensions may emerge. Conflict over access to resources may intensify as elites seek to withdraw further from a long neglected public realm that suddenly must cope with an influx of refugees fleeing the collapse of private consumption sectors. Mounting economic and personal security fears will deepen the already insular mood of elites in exclusive and exclusionary landscapes as they strive harder to secure the private and collective wealth they have capitalised in the built environment, including in dedicated high quality security systems and autonomous energy and water supplies. In a time of rationing and disorder, these starship communities may attempt to free themselves from the urban landscapes in which they are embedded. Their social orbit would be made viable by secured telecommunications systems that would keep them in contact with key political networks and other secessionist communities, and by fire wall policing that would protect their boundaries and their economic supply lines. Many of the poor will be trapped in ‘network ghettoes’ characterised by poor infrastructure and a degraded public realm.44 Limited new regionalism. Political support for decentralisation is likely to increase as pressures on metropolitan regions grow. However, rising ecological dysfunction, notably climate change, combined with entrenched economic weaknesses, will reduce the capacity of inland regions to accommodate any new urban decentralisation program. One of Jared Diamond’s radical measures for preventing collapse in Australia is the phasing out of much of the nation’s agricultural enterprise. He is well aware that this heroic solution lies beyond the ken of conventional politics. Yet the proposition underscores the fact that Australia’s future is likely to be even more resolutely urban than its past. And it is likely to be metropolitan urban. Recent decentralisation to coastal
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seachange regions will stall as growth spots are despoiled or fail, for a variety of reasons, to satisfy social expectations for lifestyle enhancement. End of the migration growth model? The spectre of eco-refugees fleeing regions disrupted by the onset of sudden climate instability will deepen national anxieties about immigration. Pressure on environmental resources, especially water, may further undermine the growth machine population policy that has been premised on the import of large numbers of migrants.45 The internal migration that has fuelled growth in some metropolitan regions, especially southeast Queensland, will slacken as residential mobility declines nationally.46 Rescaling of national urban hierarchies. International economic adjustment and global war are likely to recalibrate global and national urban hierarchies in ways yet unknown. It may be that ‘doldrums’ cities (e.g., Adelaide) will be reinvigorated, many possessing the added allure of minimal strategic (military) significance. Six Speculations on Urban Governance Ecological modernisation. Ecological modernisation (EM) attempts to reconcile those feuding twins—growth and nature—whose quarrels look increasingly deadly. EM will sweep the public sphere and finally break the deadlock to change presented by institutionalised neo-liberalism. Real ecological impact assessments will ensure we know the true costs of development such as the deeply institutionalised cult of road building in Australian cities. A recalibration of technological change will see investment urgently driven into the task of reducing the ecological impacts of production, consumption and governance. In time EM itself will be exposed to greater intellectual and popular critique, as the
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chronic ecological crisis grinds onward and faith in technological salvation begins to wane. EM will be criticised as the rearguard defence of the growth machine model of social development. Alternatives based upon a radical assertion of ‘steady state’ social development will attract greater political and institutional interest. Decline of big network infrastructure. Urban households generally cannot comprehend how their consumption patterns affect natural resource bases. This is largely because basic resource needs—especially water and energy—are supplied from large, abstract infrastructure networks. Nor can they understand the cumulative impacts of waste, which is by nature an invisible household ‘export’. Rising pressures on catchments and other resource bases will dramatically expose this key failing of big infrastructure networks. Self-provision will emerge as a governance and consumption imperative as the urban ecological crisis deepens. Houses and residential estates that are not coupled to increasingly dysfunctional network infrastructure will proliferate. Localisation of hydraulic services and household self-containment will be the new principles of urban resource use. Militant local communalism versus resocialisation. The voluntary exclusion of elites will continue as the involuntary exclusion of the downshifted ‘ordinary classes’ gathers pace. Elites may seek new political and electoral means for opting out whilst a new populism will boil from below, driven by a mass of households reeling from economic blows. In this context governments at all levels would need to heighten their powers of conflict management and, inevitably, social control. This might include extinguishing episodic unrest in the cities as tensions driven by the unfolding multiple crises boil to the surface. One way for governments to prevent unrest and to begin the process of acquitting debts will be to assert deeper
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control over the choices and activities of households. The urban commentator Elizabeth Farrelly predicts that ‘. . . the bony fingers of necessity are beginning to point our way’ past the urban consumption economy based on the fiction of endless, limitless choices.47 Dictatorial responses are unlikely but a creeping institutional authoritarianism is probable and possibly necessary to the resolution of the crises. In a recent wish list Farrelly imagines the features of an ideal city. She includes—doubtless with intended irony—a ‘sophisticated’ dictator who can break the ‘deadlock’ of democracy to secure sustainable and attractive urbanism.48 Resort to dictatorship will be the sure sign that democracy ignored the warning signs. The Rise of metropolitan governance and strong urban crisis management. Authoritative metropolitan management will harden as a government imperative, even in reluctant Australia. The securitisation process driven by the War on Terror will help to ensure this shift. Strong urban management will be part of the armoury of increasingly defensive and problem focused cities. The ecological crisis will further underline the need for stronger systemic management of urban regions. A rescaling of responsibility is likely to occur away from state administrations that appear chronically unable and/or unwilling to rule cities effectively. State governments will cede power, reluctantly at first, to metropolitan authorities with strong crisis management mandates. Social rebalancing. Workforce fatigue and a population wearied by ceaseless structural change will begin to corrode the political foundations of ‘privatised Keynesianism’, eventually triggering a collapse in the sphere of private communal consumption. This will produce a surge of new demand for government provision of social support in a context of declining private communal provision. The demands will fall
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on bewildered political and bureaucratic ears. There no longer exists in most government and corporate institutional spheres any philosophical understanding of the civic realm and its critical democratic function, let alone any operational knowledge of how to provide and nurture a vibrant public sphere in Australia’s diverse and fluid contemporary cities. New constructs of the public realm will need to be forged. The new public sphere will be securitised in the context of continued popular anxiety about crime and external threat, and yet it will embrace novel ways, based on new technologies, of linking individuals and households across cultural, social and economic divides. National and sub national public realms are likely to be forged within the World Wide Web. Federal intervention. As the triple debt crisis unfolds, the Howard government’s refusal to assume responsibility for national urban policy will prove untenable and federal intervention in the cities will be inevitable. The vulnerability of cities in the face of threats that only national policies can sensibly address will be too obvious to ignore any longer. Stronger national coordination of cities can be expected. The stubborn refusal of the present administration to engage urban issues, however, may mean that federal responsibility will not be assumed until after regime change. With the ecological debt crisis in mind, Ian Lowe observes: ‘John Howard’s views will be seen by history as a speed-bump on the road to our future, merely delaying inevitable changes by a few years’.49
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Hell to Pay The time for acquitting the debts accumulated during the growth surge of the past decade may soon be approaching. The growth fetish may dissolve and be replaced by a new social mood favouring economic moderation and the calming and localising of human activity. The aspirationals will pull their heads in, or lose them. In the wake of its 2004 election defeat the Australian Labor Party seemed to commit itself, at least rhetorically, to a closer political embrace with the aspirational class whose affluence has been sourced in the debt economy. If the debt crisis unfolds soon, and the aspirationals retreat en masse to the public sphere, the ALP may find itself clutching at ghosts. The reconciliation of socio-economic debts will collide with an intensification of ecological crisis arising from prolonged resource depletion and sustained biospheric damage. The potential for these intersecting pressures to generate social dislocation and institutional disruption cannot be discounted. ‘Institutional shocks’ may manifest as the sudden onset of paralyses in the fundamental resource allocation systems that cities depend upon for their everyday functioning. An abrupt, and unplanned for, reaching of finitudes in the availability of resources, such as water, may be one instance of this. In 2005 Jared Diamond remarked, ‘One wake-up call might be for Sydney to run out of water’.50 He believes that the shock will come to Sydney within the next two to three years. The Chant of Doom is a warning not a curse. There is the chance to prevent ruin. The task now is to acquit the mounting socio-economic and ecological debts before the final default line is reached. Beyond that line looms the age old debt collector. If we fail to act there will be hell to pay. Vengeance finds him, late but full: Man shall thrust and hell shall pull Till the pit has claimed its own . . .
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CHAPTER
8
Making Space for Hope ntil now this book has been absorbed by a critical and concerned reflection on changes that have undermined the ecological and social foundations of Australia’s cities and suburbs. Little time has been spent considering the many good things that have emerged in our cities during the great changes of the past few decades. Consider the benefits of plurality: the generations of women freed from social expectations about marriage and reproduction and from lonely entrapment at home; the new cultures and lifestyles that have enriched our inner cities and suburbs; the resilience of many of our young people who have resisted the alienating tendencies of liquid modernity by establishing urban tribes for support and by using new technology to tie these networks together; and the slowly spreading respect for, and interest in, Indigenous Australians. This list is hardly exhaustive. There has, at the same time, been a slowly advancing environmental consciousness amongst the urban citizenry. More people than ever are interested in sustainable housing design and the conservation of environmental assets, such as our remaining metropolitan greenspaces. New and highly viable visions of the Australian green city have been forwarded.1 In the major cities, there is a broadening consensus about the need to rescue public transport from the malign neglect of state and federal governments. And there are slowly strengthening grounds for political opposition to the road building coalitions that would tunnel and asphalt us to penury and oblivion. Some innovative urban institutions have survived the onslaught of neo-liberalism, including the state government land developers
U
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bequeathed by the Whitlam government’s Land Commission Program (1972–77) which sought to restrain land speculation and provide homes to ordinary Australians at a fair price.2 These underutilised agencies are potentially powerful vehicles that governments could use to drive urban development and redevelopment towards a more sustainable and socially just path.3 Some public land agency initiatives are already signposting the way to sustainability including New South Wales Landcom’s Moderate Income Housing Scheme and the Brisbane Housing Company’s growing suite of affordable accommodation projects.4 Public developers also have the welldemonstrated potential to return to the community a share of the super profits made from urban land development, thus driving improvements in an industry that is innately risk and innovation averse. Certain economic changes have also helped and not harmed ordinary people, such as the new spaces in paid work routines that have opened for women and for those unwilling or unable to work conventional hours. The benefits of ‘flexibility’ stop there, however: a fact that the Australian public seem increasingly aware of. In December 2005, the Howard government implemented new industrial relations laws that further diluted workplace protections. Surveys and opinion polls revealed widespread public antipathy for the changes. An increasingly restive public suggests that the political limits to neo-liberalism are being approached. The plunder may be coming to an end: little remains in the vaults of personal and family time for the reformers to steal. In short, after nearly three decades of structural reform the resources for urban hope remain, indicating the deep richness of the social and ecological foundations of our cities and their marvellous suburbs. This book, however, is not intended to be a round of applause for the many ways in which our cities have matured and improved during the past few decades. Rather, the purpose here has been twofold: to identify the changes that have harmed our greatest national assets, our cities and suburbs, and to urge greater public
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discussion about the possibility for a different course of social development that would nurture Australia’s heartlands. The remainder of the book takes on the second labour in a modest way by pointing to new directions in public policy that would set a course for social and ecological repair, and beyond that towards happier and more sustainable heartlands. The task is both significant in scale and pressing. Hope is not an end state—there is no prospect of heaven on earth—but a setting for social development and individual aspiration that cultivates the present whilst accommodating the future. And hope, if it exists, is pervasive and indivisible: it cannot be contained or commodified. It doesn’t reduce to lifestyle in a gated community and it isn’t confined to towns in the United States that bear its name, even if they spawn presidents.5 The public realm, the space of pervasive, inclusive and indivisible citizenship, is both the crucible and the guarantor of hope. Its state of health tells us much about the conditions for hope. Hope acknowledges interdependency—between humans and between humanity and nature—establishing thereby the structures of reciprocity that safeguard us all. In short, hope is not a place, and certainly not an island in uncertain social seas. To survive and thrive, it must be a defining quality of Australian suburbia. We know hope is present when people, including communities, look outwards as much as they look inwards. The exchange of respect not commodities builds the wealth that we know as hope. This isn’t merely an abstract social virtue, but a practice that strengthens individual character and thus well-being. As eminent US sociologist Richard Sennett puts it, ‘. . . exchange turns people outward—a stance which is necessary for the development of character’.6 The massive task waits of reopening the Australian suburban psyche and thereby the social and political spaces in which hope can thrive. Hugh Mackay tells us that during the phases of structural reform, especially the last, Australians, as individuals and communities, turned ever more inwards, their gaze diverted from the ungoverned monoliths that had come to rule their lives—globalisation, war and
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reform.7 Historian and social observer Mark Peel reads this mood as ‘pessimistic inevitabilism’, reflecting a popular mind vexed by the seemingly unstoppable nature of reform and disruption.8 Chapter 6 drew out the idea that we—at least in rich countries—live in paradoxical times: the simultaneous rise of GDP and social melancholia has been described variously as the American paradox and modernity’s paradox. Hugh Mackay, adapting the political language of the Howard government, describes the Australian paradox as ‘relaxed, comfortable . . . and anxious’.9 The relaxation reflects the progressive loosening in the later half of the twentieth century of previously fixed cultural bonds and norms that many have experienced as a truly liberating era of change. Comfort derives from greater material wealth, though the price for many has been high, including an impoverishment of relationships and sharply reduced possibilities for a lifeworld that is autonomous of the market. In 2005 researchers at Edith Cowan University surveyed people’s opinions about the relationships between workworlds and home lives. The study revealed that many workers felt trapped on consumption treadmills, working long hours to secure material comfort whilst acknowledging the costs of overwork, including a loss of relationship intimacy and integrity and less time for rest.10 Anxiety stocks are rising, driven by economic vicissitudes, notably employment insecurity, mounting ecological pressures and the grinding War on Terror. The three elements of the Australian paradox sit uncomfortably side by side. The pieces don’t fit together and the social jigsaw in any case portrays an image many would rather not see. Disengagement has emerged as the suburban motif of our times. The current mood is characterised by disengagement—from politics, from current affairs, from social issues. Feeling daunted by a ‘big picture’ that seems beyond their control, they bring their horizons up close: me, the family, the backyard, the street, the school, the weekend, the holidays.11
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The disengagement has responded to, and in turn strengthened, the politics of cultural enclosure. The asylum seekers flooding into gated and exclusionary estates seek disengagement from the ‘social’ as much as they pursue the embrace of ‘community’. Hugh Mackay nominates the ‘ “sea-change” fantasy’ as another dimension of disengagement. He knows that this is a national mood inching towards despair, and that the conditions for hope urgently need to be re-established. Echoing the analysis in chapter 7, Mackay fears that only institutional shocks will have the power to disrupt the authority of neo-liberalism: ‘Let’s hope we won’t have to wait for a national crisis—political, environmental, military—to precipitate . . . re-thinking on a large scale’.12 He hopes that the deepening mood of national introspection will induce more popular critical thinking about the individual and collective consequences of chronic reform. If this occurs, the prospects for new political alternatives will be greatly improved.
Sealed in the Tombs of Privilege The dysrhythmia in our heartlands has been traced to the broad attacks on the body politic made by neo-liberals through successive rounds of political and economic reform. The Great Unsettlement of Australia has been a costly, painful and wasteful project—at least from a societal perspective, recognising that elites have gained enormous material advantage from it. (The disease of affluenza is a price they may yet rue.) This is a reading of the times, and the recent past, that many will resist, focusing instead on the surface of things: the nervy glee of Homo consumens, the hero of the miracle economy; and the economic fairydust that glitters in official statistics on consumption, unemployment and interest rates. What this book has aimed to show, however, is the terrible costs registered and the mounting debts accumulated during the long march of reform.
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Reform has thrown body blows against the social fabric: the new tidelines of social and geographic division that have been surveyed in the early chapters point to a fragmented society characterised by increasingly isolated and delusional economic elites who laugh off the mounting testimony of social hardship and who simply cannot see what all the fuss is about. From the new urban enclaves of privilege, and the sealed, gilded lifeworlds of the winners, it must indeed be difficult to sense the broader, much less favourable social reality that is contemporary urban Australia. Waspish opinion pieces aimed at the ungrateful Left and treacherous cultural elites are born each day on laptops in Qantas Club lounges and on flatscreens in the golden towers of the media heralds. Indeed, the towers . . . Never were the fabulously fictitious ivory towers of the hated academe so lofty, so wonderful and so ethereal as the citadels of the prophets. From up there everything must look fine, though the lack of oxygen cannot be good for the mind. In 2005, neo-liberal herald Greg Sheridan chastised the makers of Three Dollars, an Australian film based on Elliot Perlman’s novel of the same name.13 It tells the story of a professional couple who suddenly lose their positions and descend afterwards into the netherworlds of urban poverty. The tale is greeted with incredulity by Sheridan, who uses the occasion, and the advantage of his citadel (The Australian), to upbraid the deluded ‘left art-class’ for their addiction to ‘Dickensian fantasy’. Sheridan clearly prefers Barbara Cartland to Charles Dickens, offering the romantic depiction of a ‘. . . time of near record low interest rates, near record low unemployment and acute shortages of skilled labour’.14 Only a mind that is sealed in the tombs of privilege could hold to such a lifeless view of contemporary suburban Australia, where the prophets’ own beloved aspirationals are fleeing from the angry, the excluded and the harmed. The depiction of economic insecurity in Three Dollars is not a fantasy, but a rarely viewed canvass of social realism that captures the long shadow hanging over the collective shoulders of middle Australia. Many people are far less indispensable to the neo-liberal project than is Greg Sheridan and
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know precisely what the film means when it portrays vulnerability in contemporary liquid modernity. This points to the immediate danger of allowing social and urban division to continue. The process after a time ‘learns’ to armour itself and deflect any attempt to change its course. The winners begin to redefine the world in terms of their microscopic and secluded experience of it. From the top of the ladder, they can never imagine or understand the eternal gloom that hovers above and around what Mark Peel calls the lowest rung.15 Peel’s intimate account of poverty in neo-liberal Australia, drawn from real conversations with the poor (prophets take note), shows how people manage to dispel the gloom, at least for a time, with clever survival strategies and a remarkable belief in the possibility of hope; that is, a fairer future. If the suburbs ache with the torments of poverty during fairytale economic times, what will things be like when the inevitable, cyclical, mechanical recession hits? No point asking the prophets, who remain lost in their political hallucinations. Power is the most potent narcotic. So where are we ultimately headed? The question is never addressed by the reformers. Whilst there is no horizon on the long march of reform, a line will eventually be crossed that will mark our passing into a purgatory of chronic division, conflict and waste. Witness this dystopian future in the cities of the United States, whose energies are dissipated in fear-fuelled sprawl, grinding underlying social anxiety and sporadic open conflict. There is therefore real urgency about the task of restoring hope to our cities and suburbs before the forces of fear and division put this project beyond the realm of politics. Heaven help us then.
Recivilising Society Neo-liberalism, the ideology of the reform project that has undermined Australia’s cities and suburbs, has been a key theme of this
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book to now. But the focus has largely been on the urban consequences of neo-liberalism rather than the political and conceptual foundations of the ideology itself. That larger analysis and critique has been made by many other commentators, including a great observer of urban Australia, Peter Self, who surveyed the broad political project of rolling back the market in 2000.16 He declared that the first steps on the road to renewed political choice must be the tearing up of economic dogma and the dethronement of the dogmatists—what the economic writer Kenneth Davidson has termed ‘defrocking the priests’.17 It must also surely involve tearing down, or at least ‘downsizing’, the citadels from where the prophets have ruled public opinion for too long. The prophets laud ‘diversity’ and yet have proven to be its most potent enemies. The contemporary public sector is ruled by the infallible citadels of Treasury (State and Commonwealth), which provide policy encyclicals, not advice, thereby destroying the capacity of governments to undertake rational and creative thinking in response to new problems and opportunities. In the media, corporate watchtowers gaze down upon a civic realm laid waste by deregulation, globalisation and the theocratic reign of the prophets. The Internet keeps dissent alive but cannot match the brute cultural power of mainstream media. A review of neo-liberalism’s impacts on Australian political culture moved Boris Frankel to produce the famously insightful injunction, From the Prophets Deserts Come.18 The rule of the clerics must be ended. The public domain of critical citizen discussion must be rebuilt through enhancement of media diversity, involving the restoration of Australia’s neglected public and community broadcasting networks. It is not this book’s purpose to attempt to outline the national political project of dethroning the prophets. Luckily, we are richly blessed with thinkers who are proposing ways out of the mire of neo-liberalism. The great Australian public intellectual Hugh Stretton sees the need for a second Australian Settlement based on new ways of containing and humanising key elements of glob-
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alised capitalism, especially the harebrained finance markets. The purposes of the refounded Settlement would include ‘. . . more secure employment, more family friendly employment, more affirmative action for handicapped workers, less unequal pay scales and much less executive plunder . . .’.19 His 2005 work, Australia Fair, is a compelling outline of this vision.20 More than three decades ago, Stretton’s Ideas for Australian Cities produced thoughtful arguments about why children should be at the centre of city life and urban policy. Australia Fair continues this theme, based upon his assessment that we have ignored his earlier advice and pushed children and their carers increasingly to the edge of public thinking. Fiona Stanley, Sue Richardson and Margot Prior are having none of this. Their Children of the Lucky Country? argues on strong logical and philosophical grounds that ‘A society with children at the centre’ is a society good for all.21 They urge us to arrest the drift to a society divided between those who have and care for children and those who want nothing to do with them. This is not to turn back the clock to a conservative pro-natal order that expects all women to conceive and care for children. Freedom from the obligation or the inevitability of reproduction is one of the great advances of the last half-century. But these authors share Hugh Stretton’s concern that ‘Children are being pushed to the margins of public consciousness’.22 Evidence of this is found in the growth of child free and/or child unfriendly places throughout our cities and in the emergent viewpoint that the childless shouldn’t have to support through taxation other people’s choice to have kids. Our three authors warn us that this is an adult society that is ‘Losing contact with the future’, including with the generations who will have to care for it in old age. They outline a comprehensive program for achieving a child centred society, which prioritises two of the key concerns of this book: overcoming urban disadvantage and segregation and re-establishing a strong civil society pivoted on a flourishing public realm.
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Figure 8.1 A civil or an uncivil society? CIVIL SOCIETY focusing on:
UNCIVIL SOCIETY accepting of:
Equality/diversity
Inequalities
Trust, care
Fear/violence
Collective good
Priority for material wealth
Valuing parents
Parents not valued
Valuing childhood
Fast-tracking childhood
Prevention more than cures
Cures more than prevention
Protected environments
Environmental degradation
Safe places for all
Safe places for the few
Effective use of helpful technologies
Excessive use of damaging technologies
Children’s needs as well as adults’
Adults’ needs more than childrens’
Source: Adapted from Stanley, Richardson & Prior, Children of the Lucky Country?
One construct that cannot be taken into a post neo-liberal future is the growth machine economy. The urban dimensions of the social, psychic and ecological harm caused by the neo-liberal economic model have already been outlined. They are part of a more general ‘enginery of ruin’, which threatens to lay waste to the earth’s entire biosphere and to exhaust its human inhabitants, physically and spiritually. New forms of human development— growth if we must persist with the term—need to be identified and pursued. One of the more convincing and workable visions of a new approach to human well-being is outlined in the Australia Institute’s ‘Political Manifesto for Wellbeing’, which draws upon and contributes to an international conversation that is presently debating the directions for a post neo-liberal future.23 This conversation, though accommodating a spectrum of views, imagines and heralds the dismantling of the growth machine and the
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replacement of the consumption orgy by an economy of repair and investment. The manifesto’s vision is premised on a rebalancing of social, economic and ecological priorities. Important to this are the recovery of personal and family time and a reinvestment of care in children. The poisonous undervaluing of children’s needs, which has been a feature of neo-liberalism and which has produced toxic cities and communities, must be purged and replaced by a new phase of investment in their well-being. We must also recover and revalue those left behind in ruinous trail of the growth machine economy. So many lives have been blighted during reform; an incalculable social cost, and an uncomfortable reality that will never figure on the balance sheets of the fairytale economy. The neo-liberal state has reduced its dependants to clients, allowing them only the attention that marketised relationships permit. The manifesto shares Richard Sennett’s view that post neo-liberal support, especially in stressed and poor urban ‘welfare’ communities, will need to invest much more time in the care of individuals who bear the injuries of structural change.24 Respect, care and time are the watchwords for a humane and lasting solution to the social wounds that have been so publicly revealed in Australia’s cities, most recently in the Sydney riots of 2005. The mother of a child living in Redfern’s Block was recently quoted as saying, ‘These kids are taught if someone doesn’t give you respect then you don’t give them respect’.25 There can be no slowing of the dystopian spiral in Australia’s urban poverty holes until governments and their agents treat their citizen subjects with respect. Slowing and downshifting are the inevitable and beneficial consequences that will follow the dismantling of the neo-liberal growth machine. The Canadian journalist Carl Honoré has written In Praise of Slow, attracting a growing international following to his cause which opposes the ‘. . . over-stimulated, over-scheduled and overwrought’ temporality of neo-liberalism.26 The ‘Slow Movement’
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rallying around Honoré’s banner seeks a reinstatement of human time, and a more deliberate (self-aware) and deliberative (democratic) approach to everyday life. Reform junkies will object that these values sound suspiciously historical and therefore unsuited to liquid modernity, an amusing charge from the same interests that revived the zombie of nineteenth century flat earth economics, reclothed as neo-liberalism. The renewal of historical political values is a vital element in the program to resettle Australia and restore hope. Renewal in this sense is conceived through two stages, recovery and renovation. The work required and the difficulty involved in the first stage should not be underestimated. It will take an enormous political and intellectual effort to rebuild the institutional capacity needed to shift the course of national development from consumption and debt towards investment, repair and saving. As Michael Pusey has pointed out, the state and Commonwealth bureaucracies have deliberately squandered much of this capacity.27 There exists little belief in the higher realms of the public service in the efficacy of collective action or in the need for independent, critical advice to governments. The Canberra-based political analyst Ian McAuley tells us that senior public servants are focused on ‘three minor things: keeping their ministers out of trouble, writing glowing speeches, press releases and correspondence for ministers, and managing their portfolios within budgetary constraints’.28 From the ruins of the ‘reformed’ public service must be rebuilt a truly civil and civilising service whose burning animus is fearless commitment to the collective good. To provide sound advice to governments, a civilised service must do more than simply receive and pass on the opinions of consultants (many of them ex-public servants), as the neo-liberalised public service too often does. The current culture of reliance upon expensive external consultancies for advice must give way to a new spirit of confidence in the power of collective, public interest thinking, backed by restored research capacities in the public service. The public sector must begin to
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think seriously about the cities again and must rebuild the capacities it once had to undertake rigorous analysis of urban change. Allied to this is the task of civic education, which must renew in civil society understanding of why a flourishing public realm and a base level of social justice are fundamental not optional features for a democracy. And this must not simply be an exercise in political archaeology, excavating and dusting off traditional civic values. Stage two of political renewal will renovate old values in the light of new social achievements, especially cultural pluralisation, and new conceptual and scientific insights. ‘Care’ for example can never be exclusively identified in a plural and fair society with one social group, as it was for women during the Australian Settlement. Neither can ‘respect’ have its traditional authoritarian overtones in a plural society recommitted to egalitarian values. Finally, if ‘public man’ has fallen, toppled by the iconoclasts of neo-liberalism, his demise now invites the flood of a newly liberated citizenry into public realms freed from the glaring statuary of male domination.29 This is the type of values renewal that must underpin the project of restoring our cities and suburbs, to redress the injuries of reform, to strengthen the existing and emerging positive forms of change, and to prepare urban Australia for the trials and challenges that loom in the near future. Homo communitas must be given a chance at life. The city and the citizen are indissolubly linked, in language and in history. Cities are deeply harmed as viable social formations if civil society withers, when the citizen subject is reduced to a puppet of power, like the all singing and all dancing Homo consumens. The contemporary aspirational improver embodies very few of the rich range of aspirations that humans have cherished and pursued through the project of civilisation. It is a vision of ‘improvement’ that neglects those values that nurture and ensure the sustainability of civilisation. Fortunately, the aspirational identity hardly describes the rich field of desires and needs that motivate Australia’s diverse urban inhabitants. Consumens, the support act in the prophets’ romp, is in
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reality a performance inflicted by power on the urban citizenry. All subjectivity tends to be idealised, especially those forms that serve power. Homo consumens is a script, not fate. It is an ultimately destructive role that must no longer be imposed by governments on our urban populations, especially the starry-eyed aspirationals. The prophets will decry this view as patronising, neglecting to acknowledge, of course, the repressive force of the too visible hand that has scripted Homo consumens. Zygmunt Bauman’s depiction, rendered in past tense, is the epitaph of this unhappy being: . . . the lonely, self-concerned and self-centred shopper who . . . adopted the search for the best bargain as a cure for loneliness and [knew] no other therapy; a character for whom the swarm of shopping malls customers [was] the sole community known and needed; a character whose lifeworld [was] populated with other characters who share all those virtues but nothing else besides.30
But who is there to bury the zombies of neo-liberalism? A politics of hope is needed to halt the march of the bloodless reform monster. This politics cannot thrive unless the shroud of neoliberalism is lifted from urban consciousness. In contemporary Australia, that politics, if it exists, lies outside the political mainstream. Consider the spectrum of politics. At one end stands a Labor Party unwilling, as yet, to question the growth machine and which, remarkably, shows no enthusiasm for the progressive urban policies that have won it broad followings in the past. Facing the dozing Labor behemoth, a Liberal Party that has largely abandoned all pretence of philosophical liberalism, including the deep historical commitment of liberals to a strong public domain and to the traditions of civil institutions. And yet, the seeds of hope are rising in a variety of fields, from the downshifters and slow movers who are refusing the fool’s gold of material wealth, to the increasingly restive citizenry that is reporting to pollsters its anxieties about ecological decline and its
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antipathy for further structural reform. These and other slowly emerging resistances may force a politics of hope on the mainstream; with any luck before our stressed social and ecological systems collapse and produce wild feedback effects for cities and communities.
Directions for Urban Hope This book cannot detail what is necessarily the task of a broader political conversation—how to completely reset the compass of change in our cities. It can, however, contribute to the awakening of that conversation by charting a few broad directions for immediate change, focusing on suburban Australia—defined loosely as the vast assemblage of metropolitan communities that lie outside the largely prosperous and well endowed residential areas that ring city centres. This is not to pose or suggest a polarity of wealthy inner cities versus struggling suburbs—the analysis of earlier chapters illustrated the polyglot reality of contemporary suburban Australia, which includes many new enclaves of privilege. Mark Latham’s opposition of urban ‘insiders’ to suburban ‘outsiders’ overlooked the fractured, increasingly dispersed ways in which power is distributed in the contemporary Australian city.31 Reform phase two witnessed the eclipse of cultural elites by lifestyle elites, and the growing political potency of the Tollway Tories. And yet, beyond the bright new gates, in the many mouldering middle and outer suburbs, legions remained outside the miracle economy’s feast. The inner cities have, however, long been spoiled with political and institutional attention. With some notable, isolated exceptions, they have largely benefited from the storms of structural change, and do not display the wider tensions, contradictions and injustices that neo-liberal reform has inflicted on the suburbs. In pursuit of strategic economic advantage in globalisation’s war amongst cities, Australian state and federal governments have showered investments
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in infrastructure and facilities on the inner cities, further entrenching the advantages enjoyed by their relatively small populations. By contrast, the nation’s suburban heartlands have been largely neglected. They have been left to weather the storms of structural changes and have, not surprisingly, emerged damaged, divided and pensive. In the vacuum, raw economic processes—especially housing and labour markets—have sorted households and neighbourhoods into winners and losers. The directions for a more sustainable and fair Australia must therefore first be signposted in the suburbs. The many new ecological directions that will be needed to reset the activities of government, industry and communities are left to broad discussions and to expert debates beyond this book. This is not simply an issue of space or the expertise of the author, but reflects the widely held premise that justice is the precondition for sustainability. Only just human institutions and tolerant, caring societies can produce lasting solutions to the ecological crises that threaten Australia’s cities and the planet generally. We will not enter the era of ecological sustainability until we pass first from what Richard Sennett calls ‘The Age of [Human] Inequality’.32 When the flood of contradictions from the growth machine is unleashed, the enclaves will be engulfed. Perhaps a few sad island citadels might survive the storm surge, fortified against social and ecological ferment. Those with a sincere interest in Australia’s future will oppose this miserable future with its lonely survivors and its drowned outcast masses. There is a dangerous, self-destructive tone within everyday politics, especially in the shrill dog whistling and snarling wedge politics that have come to redefine popular debate. Doom’s refrain echoes in the comic-Churchillian declamations on terror that are issued daily from the pulpits of neo-liberalism. No amount of prosperity preaching or New Age mysticism can mollify or subdue the agonies unleashed by the politics of division. The Great Flood when it comes will drown all to silence, the bickering tribes, the choristers of affluence.
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Salvation is the right of all, not simply the (self ) elect. Only a strong civil society with deep foundations in robust urban public realms will turn back the storms and harbour the political climate that is needed to sustain the many tasks of social and ecological repair that lie before us. What is required is nothing less than the resettling of a troubled Australia. This is not the gloomy preoccupation of a weepy Left. It is a bright new definition of purpose for a strengthened and sustainable Australia—a nation of wonderful suburbs. It is a politics of hope.
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CHAPTER
9
Making Hopeful Spaces e are a long way from a new course of national development to deal with Australia’s deepening urban social divisions, a declining and abused public realm and eco-cidal growth. But cracks are appearing in the foundations of the political project and urban despoiler that is neo-liberalism. This is a human cult not a natural order and there is no reason to think that it will continue indefinitely. Indeed, the mounting evidence of dysfunction in our cities and suburbs is producing political feedback that looks increasingly dangerous to neo-liberal ideology and to the power of its servant prophets. Neo-liberalism by its nature rejects the very idea of a geography of human interests and feelings that departs from the universal laws of the market. In this view, for example, employees are simply atoms whizzing about on a flat plane of possibilities. They should be ready to move on when propelled away by an employer towards any new offering wherever it is. Anyone who doesn’t is a ‘job snob’. This absurd and venomous view of workers neglects the fact that we are peoples of places with roots, through families, friends and networks, in real communities. Forcing us to uproot and move in reaction to the whims of an increasingly wild, and liberalised, labour market is inhumane and generates enormous social and ultimately economic costs. There are signs that the popular consciousness is beginning to resent the forced labour marches of neo-liberalism. Decades of increasingly erratic employment migration doubtless helps explain why national sentiment turned so
W
162
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implacably against further labour market reform when the Howard government introduced its industrial relations legislation in 2005. This is just one of the ways in which the reform project fails to comprehend the social and economic significance of cities and their subject communities. This mute incomprehension, surely reflected in the Howard government’s disavowal of urban policy, is a critical failing of neo-liberalism and one that is likely eventually to convince even business elites that the long march to the deserts needs to be halted. In recent years, a range of business and industry lobbies, including the Property Council of Australia, have implored the Commonwealth to intervene in the cities and to prevent their increasingly uneven and eco-cidal development from continuing. There has been much shouting into the wind: the prophets aren’t listening. There can be no complete urban renaissance without the death of neo-liberalism, and it seems certain that our urban decline will help to contribute to that big shift in politics. It is a premise of what follows that this shift is already underway. It may not generate a sudden rupture with neo-liberalism but, more likely, a messy set of advances and retreats marking progress towards a new development course. If a series of progressive urban interventions were to slow the descent to social splintering and ecological breakdown, the case for a wholesale alternative reform path would be immeasurably strengthened. The most powerful and transformative interventions must surely involve, and probably be led by, the Commonwealth. We have one great historical precedent of national urban intervention, the Whitlam government’s Department of Urban and Regional Development (DURD). It is notable that its demise marked descent into the purgatory of structural reform. The programs conceived and implemented through DURD exemplify how a national urban policy framework can address the manifold problems inevitably generated by cities and their hinterland regions.1 DURD was characterised by the strength of its analytical framework, and was underscored by a rich endowment
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of highly educated and public-spirited staff. The rigorous and systematic nature of the program, which brought improvements to cities and urban institutions, was signalled by the fundamental role played in its design and implementation by Australia’s greatest urban scholar and activist, Patrick Troy. These improvements included practical works, such as the building of sewerage systems and parks in neglected areas of the cities, as well as the establishment of land commissions which sought to supply new homes at fair prices. By contrast, the next federal intervention in the cities—the Hawke–Keating Building Better Cities (BBC) program (1991–96)— seemed largely adrift from any analytical framework, producing a much more opportunistic and less coherent set of urban policies. BBC was simply more a program of actions in cities than a program of cities. Some of these actions were very worthwhile, others less so. The need for any future national urban policy to have solid analytical roots, and to enlist the contribution of scholars who can help to provide this, is underlined by the contrasting experiences of DURD and BBC. The point is to have policies for urban improvement based upon a thoroughgoing understanding of how cities work and what things are likely to improve their functioning. Ad hoc interventions don’t amount to an urban policy framework. The resolute determination to avoid responsibility for the cities seems to be one of the few promises the Howard government has been prepared to keep. A core promise no less. We cannot expect federal urban leadership soon. And the states have hardly rushed to take up the slack. As Mark Spiller, president of the Planning Institute of Australia, argues, the states are in a better position than they have been in for a long time to undertake large-scale urban interventions.2 Their fiscal independence and strength has been greatly enhanced by the GST revenue they now receive from the Commonwealth. Spiller would doubtless agree that this new fiscal autonomy does not lessen the need for a national urban policy framework. Leadership on national urban issues is a key duty for
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the Commonwealth. The states and territories cannot manage our national urban system on their own. Spiller argues that the states and territories should use their newfound strength to increase investment in cities and to effect improvements to the institutions and political structures that govern urban life. Justice is surely served by the proposition that the consumption taxes fleeced from Homo consumens be used to rehabilitate this unhappy creature and its suburban homelands. Federal leadership may be awaited and its absence decried, but the urban failings of the states during the era of reform deserve equal censure. Labor administrations have ruled almost unanimously during reform phase two, but their record on urban management ranges from dismal to mediocre. It surely reflects Patrick Troy’s observation that the Labor Party in general has largely disengaged itself from intellectual and practical consideration of urban issues.3 The cities haven’t had a chance when state administrations have aligned with, and reinforced, the broader structural forces of reform. The splintering of urban institutions and of the urban social fabric has been largely carried out, or at least abetted, by state not federal governments. Both conservative and Labor state governments have aided the cause of neo-liberal reform in the War on Terra Publica. The sell-off of Melbourne’s public transport system is but one example of this. This was undertaken by the Kennett state government (1992–99) and entrenched by the subsequent Bracks administration, even in the face of rising system collapse and soaring operating costs.4 State administrations have also tended to be mesmerised by the alleged benefits of Public Private Partnerships—for example, for motorways and schools— without considering the consequences for equity and democracy of allowing the private sector to operate the core elements of the public domain. It is astonishing and lamentable that urban residential segregation, including the rise of new poverty sinkholes, has been allowed to become as bad as it has during the long rule of state
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Labor governments. The poverty blighting the residents of places like Lansdowne Caravan Park (Chapter 6) has emerged in a region, Sydney’s west, that has always loyally voted Labor, but which now is decomposing into much more complex social formations. This social differentiation helps to explain the weakening grip of federal and state Labor on the traditionally working class subregions of the cities. The aspirationals have been bribed to jump the electoral fence—they are yet to realise that the corrupter’s cheque will bounce. This has produced much hand wringing in Labor, which continues to neglect those left behind in the debt scramble. The urban poor have no champions in government anywhere it seems. There is remarkably little shame about this amongst those who traditionally claimed this role. One small note of hope is signalled by federal Labor’s Wayne Swan, whose 2005 book, Postcode: the splintering of a nation, recommits his party to the cause of the urban poor.5 Postcode is a commendable contribution that addresses many of the themes raised in this book, including the worsening of urban segregation and the War on Terra Publica. It signals a potential revival of federal Labor’s interest in urban issues, building perhaps on the more uncertain start made by Mark Latham’s From the Suburbs (2003).6 Swan notes, for example, that to comprehend poverty one must recognise and study ‘the link between income, geography and lack of opportunities’.7 He looks to a politics that will ‘revive the notion of government as a means of mutual social protection, and . . . reverse the collapse of community and civics’.8 He laments the rise of gated urban communities and the drift towards a ‘Patchwork Nation’. What goes unrecorded, however, is the divisive consequences of federal Labor’s phase one structural reforms and the ways in which state Labor administrations have overseen, and in some instances seemingly encouraged, the proliferation of gated and exclusionary communities. Another, perhaps more significant, development within the federal ALP was the release in December 2005 of Australia’s Future Cities, a discussion paper on urban development, housing and local
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government.9 The thinking in the paper is raw and significant work would need to be done to turn its contents into a rigorous and systematic national urban policy framework. But the initiative is a welcome sign that one of the major national parties is prepared to end the farce and acknowledge the fundamental obligation of national governments to provide national urban leadership. It is at the state and territory level, however, from where the first attacks against neo-liberal urbanism must be launched. Because of the dominant size of our urban regions, these governments are in many ways city-states that rely upon the metropolitan cores for survival. The quality of metropolitan health is therefore a first order priority for the states, although state politics tends to undermine the possibilities for robust metropolitan governance. This problem has been well recognised amongst Australian urban scholars and commentators. The frequent inability of state administrations to implement effective metropolitan strategic planning frameworks reflects powerfully this ‘governance deficit’. The (self-defeating) mismanagement of Sydney during the Carr government’s tenure (1995–2005) is a case in point, but it is hardly isolated. That government’s failure to produce an effective metropolitan strategy left Sydney with a mounting set of growth management problems. Mark Spiller and the Planning Institute of Australia have proposed new metropolitan planning commissions with a clear and well-resourced brief to manage the cities’ sustainability and in the collective interest.10 This would contrast very favourably with the present situation too often marked by weak, lazy and/or underresourced state planning departments that leave urban management to the eco-cidal road agencies and to ill-equipped local governments. There is no ultimate reason why state governments couldn’t effectively manage the cities—they have all the powers and most of the resources needed. But their frequent inability and/or unwillingness to do so suggest that the independent metropolitan commission model has substantial practical merit. One example, the Melbourne Metropolitan Board of Works (1891–1991), arguably provided
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some of the best periods of urban management witnessed in Australia during its century-long tenure. The Board may not have been perfect but it was nonetheless a very effective model of cooperative urban governance, based upon direct representation from the municipal layer over which it presided. Such state-based structures of urban intervention could be subsequently built upon and reinforced when the Commonwealth re-enters the cities, as one day it must. A debate is already emerging on what this national framework must entail. The Planning Institute of Australia has traced the outline for a new governance structure overseen by a National Sustainable Development Commission that would fund jurisdictions and their agencies, including presumably metropolitan planning commissions, that met specific sustainability goals.11 The idea has substantial merit. The Commonwealth must, of course, extend its own urban role beyond simply managing a system of economic engines. It must have a humane and social concern for the cities as the basic life support systems for the bulk of the citizenry. The Commonwealth, should acknowledge and embrace the importance of the nation’s heartlands, the suburbs, in its urban policy ambitions. Their social, economic and ecological health must be a leading concern of national politicians and national governments. The task of resettling Australia and making hopeful spaces is an extensive one that spans the many interrelated social, economic and ecological threats facing our cities. The ecological stresses our cities and suburbs are under cannot be denied, but it is social stability and solidarity that are preconditions and not parallel concerns for ecological sustainability. Ecological dysfunction can only be really addressed when its social and political sources are brought back under control, most immediately by restoring and modernising the urban public domain, and by turning back the forces that are driving social and residential segregation in the cities. Neo-liberal reform was prosecuted through two stages, and it is likely that an alternative progressive politics will similarly be a
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multi-staged, cumulative project, marked by setbacks, victories and intensely fought struggles. It is now the time to start the counterattacks—to secure what remains of the urban public realm and to begin its renewal and enlargement.
Direction One: Resocialising the Cities Australia’s urban public realm must be rebuilt and remoralised— that is, given new political and ethical value—if the conditions for a democratic future are to be bequeathed by this generation to the next. If twentieth century sociology resolved anything, it was surely the problem of social anomie that prevails in societies marked by an emphasis on isolation or even predation rather than cooperation. All remedies it seems are premised on the need for continuous meaningful human contact at a personal and daily level as the principal means for ensuring tolerance, harmony and contentment in dynamic multicultural societies. The ‘culture of anxiety’ that pervades public discussion and private behaviour in suburban Australia might well be dissipated if we were to re-establish public spaces, facilities and services that invite inclusive participation and interaction by all. The instant, masterplanned village—walled and willed back into history via new urbanism—does not easily provide the inclusive social base that is necessary for urban democracy. And urban democracy must have a social base—that is, an urban citizenry—if it is to exist at all. If the urban community dissolves into a balkanised landscape of inward looking communities, urban leaders will find it very difficult to manage the cities that are reconstituted by such changes. Heightened communal insularity and opting out at the local scale are likely to make the task of sound management of cities very difficult. This sort of militant local communalism plagues cities in the United States, which are often just confusing jumbles of jurisdictions,
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many created by communities opting out from county structures. The difficulty of finding unified urban government structures in this context helps to drive relentless, sprawling and costly growth at the urban fringe, in rural and semi-rural counties where urban planning questions can be delayed or simply ignored. The relative absence of anti-social communalism and opting out in Australian cities has been one of the nation’s quiet, though largely unacknowledged, social and economic strengths. Amongst current governments, culpability for the erosion of the public domain in urban Australia lies principally with the Commonwealth, which is at least partly responsible for rising socioeconomic stresses and widening geographical cleavages in our suburban heartlands. It is therefore not possible to argue that their amelioration is simply a state or local responsibility. There are, however, many things the states can do to arrest the trend towards the development of communities that have no public realm. They could use metropolitan planning commissions, at arm’s length from politics, to ensure that all local development follows broadly similar planning guidelines, which must include the provision of public domain and minimal use of communal tenure to provide public facilities. Local governments seem vulnerable to the entreaties and designs of those developers practising urban exclusion, especially the municipalities in traditionally working class subregions that have come to view them as investment prizes and/or means for reducing their own planning and servicing responsibilities. This misguided enthusiasm for development that undermines municipal public realm needs to be countered and countermanded by strong metropolitan policy and (if needs be) statutory frameworks that prohibit gating and prescribe minimum public domain standards in all new urban developments. The use of community title to deliver collective facilities such as community centres and parks must be sharply curtailed and limited to small higher density developments where communal not public provision of certain services and amenities (such as a pool) makes sense
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and does not undermine the broader civic realm. A resocialisation of privatopias is also a necessary part of the revitalisation project. Exclusionary communities should be weaned from communal provisioning by new compacts that see services and facilities owned and managed in the public domain. Elite asylum seekers must be rescued from their gilded prisons. The resocialisation process will in many instances be gradual, involving the careful resolution of property rights and agreement on what standard of services each community will be entitled to receive from the public domain. There will be much squawking about ‘rights’ from development privateers if these measures are implemented. Public planning agencies will have to stand firm and explain, as a matter of urgent civic education, why it is necessary to restrain the secessionist instinct. It has never been the right of citizens in a democracy to secede from civil society and take from and not give to its core social and political resources. This simple democratic premise must inform urban policy. The determination needed to bring about a revival of urban public domain and to proscribe its enemies underlines the case for the strong metropolitan governance bodies. Metropolitan commissions or district councils would possess the mandate and powers to ensure the resocialisation of whole urban regions. Strong, evenhanded pursuit of this key democratic imperative will be needed to counter any attempt by industry buccaneers and secessionist elites to establish privatopian holdouts in particular subregions or areas. For its proper functioning, the public realm must be pervasive, but not omnipresent and stifling. It is a separate task for metropolitan agencies to ensure that households have decent private residential space for their rest and repair. This will require them to turn back the tide of wild, market driven consolidation that has produced so many inhumanely designed dwellings that deny their inhabitants this fundamental need. Consolidation can occur but must be guided by comprehensive planning and by humane design principles.
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Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, the metropolitan planning commissions will need to act swiftly to repair the broken and impoverished public domains in the ageing and more blighted middle suburban regions. This is critical as a matter of basic justice and enfranchisement for those left behind by the miracle economy and left out of the new private Keynesian state with its bloated middle class welfare. It is also a vital element of the broader strategy that is needed to prevent further fear-driven outward migration by the aspirationals and worsening urban segregation generally. In these regions, major reinvestment is required in the recreational spaces, and the health, educational, training and community support facilities that are the building blocks of urban public domain. This project, and the task of resocialising the privatopias, indicates the significant finances and strong coordination powers that the states will need to invest in the metropolitan commissions. The commissions must also lead the task of re-educating urban professionals, especially planners, urban designers and architects, who seem to have either completely lost any comprehension of the democratic significance of the public realm, or who have reduced its conception to a hollow design problem, a simple container of pedestrian movement and interaction. And yet the War on Terra Publica has not overwhelmed democracy. There are plenty of surviving and flourishing fragments of public realm, even in the most stressed and excluded of our urban subregions, from which we can learn how to nurture urban democracy and from where its revival can be started. For example, there has been much fine work on public domain in recent years by the Western Sydney Regional Organisation of Councils (WSROC) and by Brisbane City Council. WSROC has been particularly innovative in its search for public space design and functioning that suits the highly culturally diverse nature of its region. These designs recognise and cherish cultural difference, whilst inviting the melding of these differences in a broader public forum. Brisbane’s Southbank parklands are an excellent example of planning and
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design that has produced accessible, exciting and inclusive public domain. The mixing of social classes and cultures achieved every day at Southbank is testimony to the fundamental democratic significance of Terra Publica. The possibilities for hope that emerge from a flourishing public realm are vividly illustrated by the socialising role played by a major public secondary school in Cabramatta, a western Sydney suburb that has been the focus of popular anxiety about ethnic tension, poverty and crime. The journalist John Huxley describes Cabramatta High as ‘a garden of peace and cultural tolerance’ and notes its widely acclaimed success as an educative institution and the harmony of its diverse student body.12 In Cabramatta, a fragment of the public realm is functioning quietly to nurture solidarity in an area enduring considerable socio-economic and cultural tensions (some of them externally imposed for example, by a stigmatising media). There can, of course, be no final ending of the War on Terra Publica until the Commonwealth’s commitment to privatised Keynesianism is overthrown and replaced by a model of investment in universal provision. The federal policies and service subsidies that have contributed to social segregation need to be replaced by alternative programs that fund and renew public spaces, facilities and services. It is probably also only the Commonwealth that can break the deadlock of the public liability crisis that has particularly harmed those parts of the public domain that are important to the well-being of children. It is urgent that we make space again for children in our cities and that we desist from the cold fantasy of a nation of rich greybeards holed up in swathes of insular retirement resorts. Finally, resocialising the cities will involve more than restoring what has been lost—the spaces and places that fit the conventional notion of ‘public’. The project must locate the new civic forms that emerge inevitably at the frontiers of technological and cultural change. An obvious contemporary example is the World Wide Web.
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History discards elements of the public domain and absorbs new forms in a process of continuous transformation. It is vital that societies identify and embrace new public domains as they manifest and not regret too deeply the need to let ageing fragments dwindle and die. One of those ageing fragments is the centralised system of public museums, many of which are little known by an increasingly distant suburban citizenry. Our public museums have served us remarkably well, but they need to evolve to embrace the fact that Australia is predominantly a nation of suburbs. In most major cities, there have been attempts in recent decades to decentralise the location of public health facilities and to refocus health services towards the needs of suburban populations. The project has at times met with fierce resistance from professional elites who recoil at the prospect of leaving well-feathered CBD nests. But the project of health service decentralisation is gradually being achieved. It is vital to social justice and to public health. The same must happen with public cultural institutions. Suburban Australia lacks the sort of insistent calming influence that public museums can bring to everyday life. Social history, publicly aired and fairly and fully told, raises cultural tolerance by highlighting the rich social texture of contemporary and historical Australia. This in turn works against the forces of suburban fear that pull at the threads in the social fabric. What would a suburban engagement agenda for museums involve? It might include: • New regional museums, based on collaborations between the Commonwealth, states, regional and local governments. • State museums in and of the suburbs; that is, new campuses that take regional and local suburbia as a key theme. • New ways of presenting exhibitions, including through the Internet but also with mobile (event-based) and micro (shopfront) forms that are affordable and accessible for suburban communities.
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• Multi institutional approaches, for example partnerships with suburban and regional universities, many of which have underutilised and accessible campus space, as well as researchers and teachers working on social and natural history. It is equally important to recognise that the contemporary citizenry may reasonably desire modifications to public realms— for example, the installation of security cameras—that civic defenders have traditionally decried. Until the shadow of urban anxiety is lifted it will be important to reassure communities that the public realm is safe. To lure people away from urban forts, it will be necessary and appropriate to undertake policing and some surveillance in public realms by public not private agencies, and with strong safeguards for civil liberties. The obvious starting point for innovation in the new millennium is the realm of new information technologies, including the Internet, pay-television and other newer electronic media. Access to the Internet is now a necessity for the practice of citizenship, though many are still denied this facility. Consequently there are compelling grounds for the establishment of national public realms within the World Wide Web. A Commonwealth Domain that provided access to a continuously growing reservoir of civic resources would greatly enhance the public sphere. It would be important to make this a stimulating, interactive resource, not simply a warehouse of official data. This, of course, is only half the task: it would be necessary to provide unlimited and ready access to the Web, and especially to the Commonwealth Domain, to ensure this initiative complemented the public sphere. Access in public as well as private spaces (homes, workplaces) would help to overcome the ‘digital divide’ and democratise information. The arrival of a Commonwealth Domain centre in suburban shopping malls would help to transform these uncertain public spaces into real civic centres. Australia’s cities are also littered with small backstreet and ‘high street’ strip shopping
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centres, most of which are deeply embedded in neighbourhoods and therefore highly accessible. Many of these are dying or have died economically: they would provide cheap, highly accessible points from which to deliver the Commonwealth Domain. Some will argue that the prospects for a progressive urban agenda have been fatally undermined by the apparent success of the politics of choice—the reform program which the Right has deployed in its reconstitution of the social landscapes of Australian cities. However, this counsel of despair overlooks the extent to which many urban Australians resent the active reframing of choice over basic public services, such as health, childcare and education. Surveys that point to mounting concern about the state of public health and education reflect a broader desire for the reinstatement of a strong public sphere. As part of its reportage on the national budget in 2002, The Australian provided a cameo story on the attitudes towards federal spending priorities of one ‘typical’ middle class western Sydney family, the Clancys.13 The Clancys believe that the ‘increasing deterioration of public services is pushing them into expensive private sector education and health . . .“We have no choice [emphasis added]” ’, they declared. ‘The Government doesn’t put any money into the public sector so if you want better and you have the money then you pay your way.’ They know that the politics of choice is an Orwellian fiction. Even the language of opting out is a fantasy in an era overshadowed by privatised Keynesianism and war on the public realm. As political analyst Ian McAuley memorably puts it, families like the Clancys face ‘. . . eviction without any option’.14 And yet Ian McAuley also reminds us that ‘Opinion polls confirm that the vast majority of Australians want to share their health care and education costs through their taxes’.15 This consistently confirmed evidence of popular support for the public realm is firm ground for a politics of civic reconstruction. There is nothing radical about the projects of regoverning the cities and restoring the civic domain. Both will open immense vaults of electoral capital.
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Direction Two: Desegregating the Cities A substantial international literature now recognises the need to achieve socially representative diversity in new urban developments and to restore it in areas that have been residualised by change.16 Other robust social scientific evidence points to the tendency of geographically concentrated poverty to produce inter-generational disadvantage. The same science underlines the ability of poverty dispersion programs to significantly improve the well-being and life chances of poor households.17 Such programs might involve spot purchasing of public housing in wealthier residential areas, or initiatives to attract middle and upper class families to poorer localities and subregions. International evidence suggests that good local public schools are the key to attracting and maintaining socioeconomic diversity at the local level. Families are unlikely to leave less affluent areas when they have high quality schools. Obviously, it is better to prevent the concentration of poverty in the first place, as dispersion programs are costly and potentially stressful for the households involved. The growing social imbalances in Australian cities are a major issue that will need to be addressed soon if they are not to worsen, especially when the current national economic growth cycle begins to taper off. The idea of balance—of socio-economic opportunities (especially employment), of access to valued cultural and environmental goods—is a crucial guiding value. This does not mean prescribing the detail of social and environmental balance but rather ensuring that public and private investment is shared to ensure equality of opportunity for all urban inhabitants. Balance should also be a guiding principle in planning the new communities that will emerge on the urban fringe, particularly in terms of ensuring a better mix of housing choices and therefore a more sustainable social structure. This principle must also be adopted in the major task of redeveloping the older middle suburb areas.
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We have drifted a long way from this ideal towards a much more segregated and unbalanced urban reality. To begin the process of rebalancing we need to prevent the further segregation of residential communities along economic and/or cultural lines. The task is vital and pressing: there can be no prospect of a broad politics that will support transition to fairer, more sustainable cities until the forces of segregation have been blunted and eventually demobilised. The most urgent project is to douse the flames of fear that radiate from our more dysfunctional public housing estates. Repair of these injured communities is needed both as a matter of justice for their excluded residents and to unplug them from the broader circuitry of urban fear that is driving segregation in the cities. This task involves both correcting the public’s misapprehensions about public housing and its inhabitants, the vast majority of whom are law abiding, and doing something about those estates and communities where things have really gone wrong. This is not the place for an extended essay on public housing reform, a process that must involve public tenants and prospective tenants as well as experts and governments. The point is that the scandalous neglect of public housing by governments at all levels, including those municipalities that resent its presence, must end and a new era of reform and reinvestment must begin. This project is urgent because the combined problems and broader misconceptions about public housing are powerful, though rarely acknowledged forces that are driving the exodus of urban asylum seekers into exclusionary communities in the major cities. Repair and renewal of public housing will involve further dispersal of the stock and the dissolution of some large estates, a program that many state agencies have been pursuing for some time. But in many other cases estates will be renewed not broken up. Most public estates have stressed not dysfunctional communities who rightly expect governments to address their needs with investment and respect not bulldozers and real estate agents. The patchy renewal record needs to be overtaken by a complete system renova-
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tion based upon substantial new funding. There have been renewal success stories in every major city, as there have been failures. The Kensington Redevelopment Program in Melbourne is recasting a run-down inner city public housing estate, providing in its place a socially balanced community, including private owners and tenants, and a stock of modern, high quality public housing. The new estate’s design and its social composition are clearly aimed to generate a climate of respect and inclusion for its public tenants. The nation’s public housing system has been allowed to slide towards dereliction at the very time when a substantial social housing sector is desperately needed. A rapid expansion of social housing— provided both by governments and by community organisations —would do much to address the problems of housing affordability, suitability and quality faced by many urban households, especially families. The community sector could very effectively and efficiently undertake a far greater social housing task than it presently does if it was allowed to extend its role to providing accommodation for a broad range of moderate income earners, including first home owners. Social housing should also be dispersed, not concentrated, throughout the urban fabric, including within all new residential developments. It should be high quality, well designed and supplied in a diversity of sizes. To do this, it needs kick-start funding to expand its capacities. It is certainly not only the troubles of public housing that drives elites into islands of urban exclusion. Earlier chapters pointed to other larger contributing political and social factors, such as the deepening general mood of insecurity and gloom sourced in anxieties about terrorist attacks and environmental breakdown. But within the cities, there are other centrifugal forces behind the migration of affluent asylum seekers. These are the private dystopias that have begun to surface amidst the tidelines of structural change: the new poverty clusters in ageing middle ring areas, those lost spaces haunted by the homeless, the mentally ill and the drug dependent; and the gulag of dilapidated suburban caravan
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parks that warehouse the very poor. Something has to be done to address the disadvantage, which Bill Randolph says is ‘piling up’ in these urban netherworlds,18 partly reflecting the fact that the poor are being increasingly displaced from ex-urban coastal areas to the middle ring by seachange migration.19 Bill Randolph sees the concentration worsening unless governments become involved and he urges new interventions that will address poverty and urban blight in private areas. One initiative he has in mind is a set of community renewal agencies for non public housing areas, agencies that will have to tackle the unique problem of disadvantage in the new urban sinkholes that largely comprise low quality private rental stock. The skills, mechanisms and commitment evidenced in recent successful public housing estate renewal programs, such as Melbourne’s Kensington Redevelopment, will need to be mobilised to arrest the further decline of the private dystopias. Many innovative solutions will be needed including finding ways of upgrading ageing medium density housing that is multiply owned; halting the further decline of degraded public and communal realms that lack ‘ownership’; and preventing ad hoc, market driven redevelopment that introduces new poor quality housing and undermines prospects for block- or neighbourhood-scale renewal. Randolph argues these special purpose renewal agencies will need strong planning, development and coordination powers to address these and other challenges in the new urban netherworlds. The new agencies would compete for and draw from a local improvement fund, supported by the states and the Commonwealth. It would be sensible for this fund to be managed for each city by the metropolitan commissions suggested earlier. The agencies’ brief must include some of the less visible poverty pockets, not just the obviously stressed areas centred on swathes of ageing medium density housing. The welfare caravan parks need immediate intervention: first, to prevent the opportunistic redevelopment that threatens many, casting most of their residents into outright homelessness; and second, to begin the task of identifying ways out for their inhabitants into
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secure, quality accommodation. Preventing redevelopment and buying time for a humane rehousing program will necessitate that many vulnerable caravan parks are bought by renewal agencies (even by compulsory acquisition), working in conjunction with local government. Public land bodies could be part of the process, managing redevelopment when residents are rehoused, and returning some of the profit to social housing and renewal programs. An important additional task for the renewal agencies would be preserving social balance by encouraging economically independent households to stay and by attracting more affluent new settlers. Randolph writes: . . . one of the keys to the [renewal] problem will be to retain moderate and higher income households through innovative and attractive housing development that will persuade them to stay local and not migrate to the fringe . . . It is only by arresting the exodus to the aspirational fringe suburbs that mixed income communities can be retained.20
The focus shouldn’t entirely be on the aspirationals, however. The tendency of affluent, culturally articulate people to migrate to the inner cities also robs the middle and outer ring areas of a balancing influence. Conservative commentators enjoy singling out and chastising those who live in the inner urban republics. The prophets resent, and possibly fear, the noisy, democratic discussions of politics, some of it microscopic in focus, that bubbles away in the liberal cantons. These are hardly the domains of political elites, or insiders, as conservatives charge. Many of the chatterers see themselves as refuges from the dictatorship of neo-liberalism. And yet, the concentration of so much cultural literacy does tend to reinforce politically the long over-centralisation of public cultural investment and activity in Australian cities. The chatterers need to join the conversations in the suburbs, to enrich their own outlooks and to engage, at times surely critically, the worldviews of suburbanites. Their own views could do with some suburban ground truthing.
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How to prevent the flood of aspirationals from the middle areas and how to attract the garrulous inner city democrats to these stressed subregions? International experience, especially in the United Kingdom and the United States, suggests that improving the quality of local public education facilities, especially schools, is the key to holding and attracting higher income groups in stressed urban areas.21 As suggested earlier, many chatterers and aspirationals feel pushed into private education by the decline of the public domain, and are attracted therefore to the wealthier suburbs where private schools are concentrated. Investment and intervention that provided high quality public education in middle ring areas would be a strong drawcard for such groups and could do much to improve social mix in areas that are losing economically independent households. The special purpose renewal agencies suggested by Bill Randolph could participate in the rejuvenation of schools in stressed areas, and encourage their transformation into mixed use facilities that harbour community building activities out of school hours. The rehabilitation task must address the misconceptions the middle and upper classes carry about poverty spaces—public and private—that generate exaggerated anxieties about urban disorder (which remains almost unknown in Australia). We need to break the circuitry of urban fear, and ensure justice and respect for all our citizenry.
Nothing to Fear Australia’s cities and suburbs are drifting apart carried by currents of fear and uncertainty. What are the prospects for more harmonious and sustainable cities? The answer surely rests on our ability to reset the political compass away from neo-liberalism towards hope. The present course needs to be shown up for what it is—a politics of despair whose only possible conclusion has already been starkly revealed in the broken, violent cities and paranoid,
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defensive suburbs of the United States. A new course of national development needs to be charted and followed to rescue Australia’s heartlands from this grim, highly plausible future. But this is not to urge return to an idyllic urban past. The resettlement of the nation must address the ecological and social imperatives that face us now, some of which were bequeathed by long standing urban development patterns. Not all our urban ills can be blamed on the rule of the prophets. The confidence in ever expanding material wealth that has been the traditional stimulant for suburban growth in Australia may well have run its ecological and psychological course. There is no need to be misty-eyed about the traditional Australian suburb, which had its own peculiar depredations as well as its strengths. In 1970 Hugh Stretton remarked, ‘It does not follow that all the suburban monotonies should continue’.22 Though not yet aware of the new forms of monotony that would emerge in later decades—asylum seeking and exclusionary development—he saw it necessary to ‘. . . variegate the suburbs, mix the age groups more, and diversify many people’s residential options’.23 The more enlightened forms of contemporary planning are attempting now to do just this. The nation needs new suburbs for its diverse and growing population who can never be adequately or happily housed in inner city high rises or dreary villa units. These new spaces can be produced in two ways. First, by developing new greenfield areas that are sustainably designed with strong public domain, and that are well integrated into the metropolitan structure. Second, by remaking the secessionist enclaves and the residualised netherworlds into new suburbs by reintegrating both into the socio-economic and cultural mainstreams. The renewal task is especially pressing. The nation needs to renovate and revive the suburbs constructed in the twentieth century as a matter of urgency so that their decline does not become a negative stimulus for wasteful and divisive outward urban expansion. These suburbs can be even better than the ones we designed previously—masterplanning is a valuable new innovation that
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delivers services and amenities when they are needed and has no necessary relation to gating or exclusion. It is a recent improvement to urban development worth taking into the future, for all and not just for the elite few. Its more inclusionary form will rely upon state and Commonwealth governments being more prepared than they have recently been to pay for and service the public domains of new urban areas. All this presumes a politics that will openly renew Australia’s long, secretly cherished love affair with its suburban heartlands. Political renewal, however, seems a long way off. The Left has failed utterly to forward a new vision for suburban hope and has in the past decade been outflanked by the Right, notably the Tollway Tories, whose seductive politics of privatism, and generous subsidies, have proved attractive to the reform fatigued working and middle classes. Neither is attempting to rally and mobilise the slumbering Australian spirit of egalitarianism, which may prove to be our best protection against the threats on the urban horizon. The spirit of Homo communitas will need to be reawakened and consumens exiled to history before the course for despair can be broken. A politics of urban hope will take time to form. There is, however, no reason to delay the struggle against the urban fear that is undermining the public domain and the fraying bonds of social solidarity. That is why this book closes by urging state governments to undertake immediate interventions in the processes that are dragging us towards urban ruin. The defence of hope must begin with an assertion of what is not acceptable in a humane and democratic Australia, and which surely erodes the life prospects of our young. These intolerable outposts of fear include: • The new sinkholes of urban poverty emerging, in the larger cities, within ageing middle ring suburbs. • The urban pockets of cultural despair inhabited by some Indigenous Australians, which need help and respect not sanitising renewal.
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• The fortified camps of affluence that eschew the public sphere and which amount to open acts of secession. • The ‘non-places’ of suburbia where the drug dependent, the angry and the homeless are forced to range, out of mind if not out of sight. A politics that laid siege to these outposts would begin to rekindle the prospects for hope. Plans for post-war reconstruction must necessarily follow. How will we know when have made space for hope in the suburbs? Surely when we see the return to our heartlands of those threatened species that depend on hope for survival. When children become part of the ordinary fabric of our cities again, freed from anxious, overbearing routines, from motorcar prisons and from exile in electronic fantasy worlds. When the elite asylum seekers shrug off the burden of self-imprisonment and look confidently and curiously to life beyond the walls. When older Australians are freed from the mouldering, lonely twilight of retirement resorts and return to the suburbs and embrace the civic tasks that await them, and the children and families that need them. When laughter resonates again from families enjoying private time restored to them by a restrained and fairer labour market. When parents and carers have time for kids again. When the angry and the excluded return to the suburban fold, their rage doused by new waves of institutional care and respect. When communitas strides confidently at last in safe, flourishing suburban public domains. When consumens is displayed in the extinct species collections of new suburban museums. When the occasionally inane chatter of the cultural elites joins the noisy, civic conversations of suburbia. When the only refugee camps in the suburbs are repair resorts for downshifters seeking sanctuary from corporate treadmills. When these and other signs of communal biodiversity are manifest we will have the conditions for an urban politics of sustainability. The great task of urban ecological repair cannot
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proceed without solidarity. Justice and peace within humanity are the best protections we can give to nature. Australia’s heartlands bear the scars of neo-liberalism. These vital national organs have been starved of social investment by the privateers, stressed by market driven redevelopment and poisoned by the eco-cidal growth machine. Inevitably, the prognosis if the abuse continues is not encouraging. Social circulation has already slowed—atrophy and breakdown loom. Neo-liberalism offers quack cures—the amateur bypass surgery of the market that seals off the healthy elements from the dying. And yet, still beats the pulse of hope. There has been no mass exodus from our ailing suburbs whose historically accumulated riches are far from dissipated. Australians continue overwhelmingly to want to live in the suburbs. The love affair shows no sign of ending. Or does it? The passion for suburbia will surely fail if the dystopian tendencies of neo-liberalism are allowed to prevail. And then where would we be? There is no chance to start again elsewhere in a brown, aged and drying continent. Elites might escape to the islands, literally, but the rest of us would have to endure existence in the smoking ruins of neo-liberalism. It is a matter of practical necessity, and of basic justice, that we prevent this from happening. We are a nation of cities and our future is indissolubly linked to the fortunes of our suburban heartlands. Restoring them to hope and to health is surely our most urgent priority.
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Heart Murmurs
1 Recalling the utopian socialist communities—‘New Australia’ and ‘Cosme’—founded by William Lane and his followers in the 1890s. 2 B. Salt, The Big Shift: welcome to the third Australian culture, Hardie Grant, Melbourne, 2001. 3 Nearly all of Australia’s cities are, in any case, located by the sea—we have always been a nation of coast watchers. 4 P. Hamilton, A Nation of City Dwellers, Nelson, Melbourne, 1976. 5 Capital cities presently contain almost two-thirds (64 per cent) of Australia’s population and their growth accounted for almost three-quarters of Australia’s population increase in the 2000–01 period. Between 1996 and 2001, the capital cities collectively grew by 1.3 per cent while the balance of the states and territories grew by 0.9 per cent (Australian Bureau of Statistics 3218.0 Regional Population Growth, Australia and New Zealand, Canberra, 2003). 6 C. Forster, Australian Cities: continuity and change, 3rd edn, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2004, p. xvi. 7 In Forster, Australian Cities, 3rd edn, p. 3. Anti-urbanism was of course rife in nineteenth century Europe and its new worlds. In the United States, Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) declared, ‘The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body’. What is distinctive about Australia’s anti-urbanism is our deeply embedded tendency to deny that we are even urban. 8 F. Stanley, S. Richardson & M. Prior, Children of the Lucky Country?, Macmillan, Sydney, 2005. 187
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CHAPTER 2 Settled in Suburbia 1 J.W. McCarty, ‘Australian cities in the nineteenth-century’, Australian Economic History Review, vol. 10, no. 2, 1970, pp. 107–37. 2 A. Gilbert, ‘The roots of Australian anti-suburbanism’ in S.L. Goldberg and F.B. Smith (eds), Australian Cultural History, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1988. 3 Gilbert, ‘The roots of Australian anti-suburbanism’, p. 33. 4 In Gilbert, ‘The roots of Australian anti-suburbanism’, p. 34. 5 In Gilbert, ‘The roots of Australian anti-suburbanism’, p. 33. 6 I’m grateful to Patrick Troy for pointing this out to me. 7 C. Forster, Australian Cities: continuity and change, 3rd edn, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2004. 8 Gilbert, ‘The roots of Australian anti-suburbanism’, p. 34. 9 Excerpt from the poem, ‘Faces in the Street’. 10 P. Kelly, The End of Certainty: the story of the 1980s, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1994. 11 C. Forster, Australian Cities: continuity and change, 1st edn, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1995. 12 M. Neutze, Urban Development in Australia, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1977. 13 P.N. Troy, ‘Suburbs of acquiescence, suburbs of protest’, Housing Studies, vol. 15, no. 5, 2000, pp. 717–38. 14 H. McQueen, Social Sketches of Australia 1888–2001, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2004, p. 99. 15 McQueen, Social Sketches of Australia 1888–2001. 16 J.W. McCarty, ‘Australian cities in the nineteenth-century’, Australian Economic History Review, vol. 10, no. 2, 1970, pp. 107–37. 17 McQueen, Social Sketches of Australia 1888–2001. 18 Neutze, Urban Development in Australia. 19 McQueen, Social Sketches of Australia 1888–2001. 20 Forster, Australian Cities, 3rd edn. 21 Forster, Australian Cities, 3rd edn, p. 17. 22 L. Frost & T. Dingle, ‘Sustaining suburbia: an historical perspective on Australia’s growth’ in Australian Cities: issues, strategies and policies for urban Australia in the 1990s, P.N. Troy (ed.), Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1995, pp. 20–38. 23 P.N. Troy, ‘The structure and form of the Australian city: prospects for improved urban planning’, Issues Paper 1, Urban Research Program, Griffith University, 2004.
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24 Pat Troy reminds us, ‘The view that flats were occupied by people who did not have children and who were in some way socially deviant . . . persisted well into the 1960s’. (Troy, ‘Suburbs of acquiescence, suburbs of protest’, p. 723). 25 In Gilbert, ‘The roots of Australian anti-suburbanism’, p. 37. 26 In McQueen, Social Sketches of Australia 1888–2001, p. 236. 27 H. Stretton, Ideas for Australian Cities, Orphan Books, Adelaide, 1970, pp. 20–1. 28 Stretton, Ideas for Australian Cities, p. 10. 29 Stretton, Ideas for Australian Cities, p. 10. 30 Forster, Australian Cities: continuity and change, 1st edn, p. 14. 31 For example, E.J. Harman, ‘Capitalism, patriarchy and the city’, in Women, Social Welfare and the State in Australia, C. Baldock and B. Cass (eds), George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1983, pp. 104–29. 32 McQueen, Social Sketches of Australia 1888–2001, p. 237. 33 Troy, ‘Suburbs of acquiescence, suburbs of protest’. 34 P.N. Troy, ‘Introduction’ in Australian Cities: issues, strategies and policies for urban Australia in the 1990s, P.N. Troy (ed.), Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2005, pp. 1–18. 35 Sprawl is an American not Australian term that means unregulated, lowdensity development. Australian cities have been plagued by poor planning and bad development but not sprawl. Our fight against bad planning and development is not the ‘brawl against sprawl’. 36 Forster, Australian Cities, 3rd edn, p. 22. 37 Forster, Australian Cities, 3rd edn, p. xvi. 38 Z. Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2000.
CHAPTER 3 The Great Australian Unsettlement 1 P. Kelly, The End of Certainty: the story of the 1980s, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1994. 2 H. MacKay, Reinventing Australia: the mind and mood of Australia in the 90s, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1993. 3 Kelly, The End of Certainty, p. 13. 4 D. Malouf, A Spirit of Play: the making of Australian consciousness, ABC Books, Sydney, 2001. 5 Kelly, The End of Certainty. 6 M. Pusey, The Experience of Middle Australia: the dark side of economic reform, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2003.
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7 C. Hamilton, Growth Fetish, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2003. 8 The French revolutionaries had cast down religion only to later attempt to reinstate their own authorised version of metaphysics. There was something of Robespierre’s great festival of the Supreme Being in the exultations surrounding aspirationalism. 9 B. Badcock, ‘Towards more equitable cities: a receding prospect?’ in Australian Cities: issues, strategies and policies for urban Australia in the 1990s, P.N. Troy (ed.), Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1995, pp. 196–219. 10 MacKay, Reinventing Australia. 11 Badcock, ‘Towards more equitable cities’. 12 MacKay, Reinventing Australia. 13 MacKay, Reinventing Australia. 14 P. Mullins, ‘Households, consumerism and metropolitan development’ in Australian Cities: issues, strategies and policies for urban Australia in the 1990s, P.N. Troy (ed.), pp. 87–111. 15 F. Stilwell, Reshaping Australia: urban problems and policies, Pluto, Sydney, 1993. 16 Badcock, ‘Towards more equitable cities’, pp. 199–200. 17 M. Peel, ‘The urban debate: from “Los Angeles” to the urban village’ in Australian Cities: issues, strategies and policies for urban Australia in the 1990s, P.N. Troy (ed.), pp. 39–64. 18 G. Woods, ‘What is happening in Australian housing markets? Why policy makers should be concerned’, 11th Annual F. Oswald Barnett Oration, Melbourne, 9 November 2004. 19 C. Forster, Australian Cities: continuity and change, 1st edn, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1995, p. 112. 20 A. Harding, ‘Recent trends in income inequality in Australia’, presentation to ‘Sustaining Prosperity’ Conference, Melbourne, 31 March 2005, National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling, University of Canberra, accessed at: www.natsem.canberra.edu.au. 21 S. Kelly, ‘Simulating future trends in wealth inequality’, paper presented to Australian Conference of Economists, NATSEM, Canberra, 2002, accessed at: www.natsem.canberra.edu.au. 22 B. Headey, G. Marks, & M. Wooden, ‘The structure and distribution of household wealth in Australia’, Melbourne Institute Working Paper No. 12/04, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, University of Melbourne, 2004. 23 Kelly, ‘Simulating future trends in wealth inequality’. 24 Kelly, ‘Simulating future trends in wealth inequality’, p. 20. 25 I. Watson, J. Buchanan, I. Campbell & C. Briggs, Fragmented Futures: new challenges in working life, Federation Press, Sydney, 2003.
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26 G. Stolz, ‘Little time for sun in the state of hard work’, Courier Mail, 20 May 2005, p. 3. 27 Watson et al., Fragmented Futures, p. 95. 28 N. Gruen, ‘Workers are out there somewhere’, Courier Mail, 6 April 2005, p. 17. 29 Australian Bureau of Statistics, Year Book Australia 2004, Australian Government, Canberra, 2004. 30 R. Gregory & L. Cai, ‘Our real and stubborn social and economic crisis’, paper presented at the Second Economic and Social Outlook Conference: Pursuing Opportunity and Prosperity, Melbourne 13 & 14 November 2003, accessed at: www.melbourneinstitute.com, p. 1. 31 In P. Sheehan, ‘How a clever world could self-destruct’, Sydney Morning Herald, 15 May 2005. 32 P. Dawkins, P. Gregg & R. Scutella, ‘Employment polarisation in Australia’, Melbourne Institute Working Paper 9/02, University of Melbourne, 2002. 33 Dawkins et al., ‘Employment polarisation in Australia’. 34 For example, Woods, ‘What is happening in Australian housing markets?’. 35 Commonwealth of Australia, SAAP Annual National Performance Report, SAAP National Coordination and Development Committee, Canberra, Australia, 2002; and AIHW (Australian Institute of Health & Welfare), Homeless People in SAAP, National Data Collection Report 2003–04, AIHW cat. no. HOU 126, Canberra, 2005. 36 G. Gwyther, ‘Paradise planned: community formation and the masterplanned estate’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Western Sydney, 2004. 37 C. Forster, Australian Cities, 3rd edn. 38 K. O’Connor, R.J. Stimson & M. Daly, Australia’s Changing Economic Geography: a society dividing, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2001. 39 Business Council of Australia, ‘Economic growth and social change in Australia, 1976–2025’, Research paper for Scenario Planning Project ‘Aspire Australia 2025’, 2004, accessed at: www.bca.com.au, p. 3. 40 B. Randolph, ‘Changing city structures: an overview’, paper presented to State of Australian Cities Conference, Parramatta, December 2003, Urban Frontiers Program, University of Western Sydney, p. 4. 41 Randolph, ‘Changing city structures’, p. 15. 42 A. Fels, ‘The very poor need homes too’, The Age, 22 March 2004, p. 11. 43 A. Fels, ‘The very poor need homes too’. 44 A. Fels, ‘The very poor need homes too’. 45 B. Randolph & D. Holloway, ‘Social disadvantage, tenure and location: an analysis of Sydney and Melbourne’, Urban Policy & Research, vol. 23, no. 2, 2005, pp. 173–202.
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46 M. Hajer & A. Reijndorp, In Search Of New Public Domain, Nai Publishers, Rotterdam, 2001. 47 ‘Our economic growth has been particularly strong over the past decade’ (Business Council of Australia, ‘Economic growth and social change in Australia, 1976–2025’, p. 1). 48 Forster, Australian Cities, 3rd edn, p. xvii.
CHAPTER 4 The Sea of Uncertainty 1 H. MacKay, Reinventing Australia: the mind and mood of Australia in the 90s, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1993, p. 17. 2 Australian Bureau of Statistics, Year Book Australia 2004, Australian Government, Canberra, 2004. 3 B. Randolph, ‘Changing city structures: an overview’, paper presented to State of Australian Cities Conference, Parramatta, December 2003, Urban Frontiers Program, University of Western Sydney, p. 9. 4 Randolph, ‘Changing city structures’, p. 10. 5 C. Forster, Australian Cities: continuity and change, 3rd edn, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2004, p. 126. 6 J. Jupp, ‘Ethnic and cultural diversity in Australia’, Year Book Australia, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canberra, 1995. 7 C. Forster, Australian Cities, 3rd edn. 8 ABC Radio PM, accessed at: www.abc.net.au/pm/stories/s682037.htm. 9 I. Burnley, The Impact of Immigration on Australia: a demographic approach, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2001. 10 M. Poulsen, R. Johnston & J. Forrest, ‘Is Sydney a divided city ethnically?’, Australian Geographical Studies, vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 356–77. 11 G. Lee, ‘Asian settlement and the media in Australia’, conference paper for the Influence of the Mainstream Media on the Settlement of Migrants and Refugees, hosted by the Vietnamese Community in Australia/NSW Chapter, on Friday 28 November 1997, accessed at: http://members. ozemail.com.au/~yeulee/Misc/biography.html. 12 Sydney Daily Telegraph, 13 November 1997, p. 21; Melbourne Herald Sun, 24 September 1997, p. 14. 13 G. Sheridan, ‘Policy of insane cruelty’, The Australian, 16 May 2002, p. 11. 14 B. Frankel, Zombies, Lilliputians and Sadists: the power of the living dead and the future of Australia, Curtin University Books, Freemantle, 2004, p. 190.
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15 In S. Bennetts, ‘New project to spark debate on “English-Speaking Disease”’, Uniken (University of NSW), 426, 1997, p. 1. 16 S. Wilson & N. Turnbull, ‘Wedge politics and welfare reform in Australia’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 47, no. 3, 2001, pp. 384–402. 17 J. Menadue, ‘Threats to democracy—insiders, spin-doctors and dog whistlers’, presentation to Effective Living Centre Public Forum, Adelaide, 27 November 2003, pp. 6–7. 18 S. Poynting, G. Noble, P. Tabar & C. Collins, Bin Laden in the Suburbs: criminalising the Arab other, Sydney Institute of Criminology, Sydney, 2004, p. 177. 19 Poynting, et al., Bin Laden in the Suburbs, p. 177. 20 Poynting, et al., Bin Laden in the Suburbs, p. 118. 21 Poynting, et al., Bin Laden in the Suburbs. 22 G. Hage, Foreword in Poynting, et al., Bin Laden in the Suburbs, p. 10. 23 S. Zreika, ‘Advance Australia Fair?’, New Matilda online journal, 14 December 2005, accessed at www.newmatilda.com. 24 In D. Marr, ‘One-way radio plays by its own rules’, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 December 2005, p. 6. 25 S. Sharp, ‘It’s a culture thing’, New Matilda online journal, 21 December 2005, accessed at www.newmatilda.com. 26 Sharp, ‘It’s a culture thing’. 27 Frankel, Zombies, Lilliputians and Sadists, p. 190. 28 D. Marr & M. Wilkinson, Dark Victory, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2003. 29 A. Henderson, ‘God isn’t a stranger in the suburbs’, The Australian, 20 December 2004, p. 7. 30 Information accessed at www.hillsong.com. 31 J. Connell, ‘Hillsong: a megachurch in the Sydney Suburbs’, Australian Geographer, vol. 36, no. 3, 2005, p. 330. 32 Connell, ‘Hillsong’, p. 330. 33 M. Maddox, God Under Howard: the rise of the religious right in Australian politics, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2005. 34 A. West, ‘Praise the Lord and pass the legislation’, The Australian, 26 April 2005, p. 9. 35 The new revivalism may not be hope’s saviour, but neither is it the enemy of solidarity. Hillsong Church, for example, explicitly commits itself to ambitious social justice works that transcend mere cold charity and which include support for Sydney’s urban Indigenous community. This and other faith-based endeavours are resources for a broader post neo-liberal project that would restore hope, fairness and sustainability to the cities.
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36 P. Totaro and E. Connolly, ‘When rage hits boiling point’, Sydney Morning Herald, News Review, 5–6 March 2005, p. 25. 37 A. Davies, ‘Carr searches for social trigger to riots’, Sydney Morning Herald, 5–6 March 2005, p. 1. 38 M. Devine, ‘A Fields day for the do gooders’, Sydney Morning Herald, 3 March 2005, p. 13. 39 J. Albrechtsen, ‘We should grow up and accept the blame’, The Australian, 9 March 2005, p. 15. 40 U. Beck, Democracy Without Enemies, Polity, Cambridge, 1998. 41 Menadue, ‘Threats to democracy—insiders, spin-doctors and dog whistlers’. 42 Z. Bauman, Liquid Love, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2003, p. 28. 43 Bauman, Liquid Love, p. 103. 44 M. Davis, City of Quartz: excavating the future in Los Angeles, Verso, London, 1990; and M. Davis, Ecology of Fear, Metropolitan Books, New York, 1998. 45 E. McKenzie, Privatopia: homeowner associations and the rise of private residential government, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1996. 46 E. Blakeley & M.G. Snyder, Fortress America: gated communities in the United States, Brookings Institution, Washington DC, 1997. 47 S. Low, Behind the Gates: life, security and the pursuit of happiness in Fortress America, Routledge, New York, 2004. 48 M. Burke, ‘The pedestrian behaviour of residents in gated communities’, Proceedings of Australia: Walking the 21st Century Conference, 20–22 February, Perth, 2001. 49 M. O’Sullivan, ‘Behind the urban curtains’, Sydney Morning Herald, 4 March 2005, p. 12. 50 Promotional material accessed at: www.sanctuarylakes.com. 51 M. Pusey, The Experience of Middle Australia: the dark side of economic reform, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2003, p. 118. 52 Domain section, 15–21 March 2001, p. 7. 53 D. Macken, ‘Home truths’, Australian Financial Review Magazine, November 2002, p. 33. 54 In J. Sommerfeld, ‘Gate keepers’, Courier Mail, Home Supplement, 9 August 2003, p. 21. 55 Promotional material accessed at: www.galli.com.au. 56 In M. Skelsey, ‘The gate escape come to Sydney’, Daily Telegraph, 30 April 2005, p. 15. 57 In O’Sullivan, ‘Behind the urban curtains’. 58 In R. Gibson, ‘Good fences make good neighbours’, The Age, 21 February 2000, p. 1.
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59 Bauman, Liquid Love, p. 110. 60 Bauman, Liquid Love, p. 75. 61 M. Flood & C. Barbato, Off to Work: commuting in Australia, Discussion Paper no. 78, The Australia Institute, Canberra, 2005. 62 This and previous quotes are excerpts from The Princeton Post Lifestyle Newsletter, Summer 2005, accessed at: www.princetonestate.com.au. 63 Promotional pamphlet, Noosa Springs: now this is living, Starco Group, not dated.
CHAPTER 5 Siege of the Realm 1 In the wake of the 2004 election win, Paul Kelly notes, ‘Howard knows there is a significant chance here to change Australia’s culture to a more entrepreneurial society’, accessed at: www.abc.net.au/insiders/content/ 2004/s1221664.htm. 2 See D. Mitchell, The Right to the City: social justice and the fight for public space, The Guilford Press, New York, 2003. 3 Body corporates are known in New South Wales as the ‘investor corporation’. 4 M. Hajer & A. Reijndorp, In Search Of New Public Domain, Nai Publishers, Rotterdam, 2001, p. 89. 5 R. Sennett, The Uses of Disorder: personal identity & city life, Knopf, New York, 1970. 6 J.K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1962. 7 K. Dovey, ‘On politics and urban space’ in Debating the City: an anthology, J. Barrett & C. Butler-Bowdon (eds), Historic Houses Trust of NSW , Sydney, 2001, p. 53. 8 Dovey, ‘On politics and urban space’, p. 61. 9 Dovey, ‘On politics and urban space’, p. 61. 10 P. Heinrichs & M. Reddy, ‘Watch this space: coalition fight for public land’, Sunday Age, 28 December 2003, pp. 1 & 4. 11 B. O’Connor, ‘The Kennett Years: scorched earth or creative destruction?’, paper presented to Joint AFS & Labour History Society Conference, October 2000, accessed at: www.fabian.org.au, p. 1. 12 Not that all federal interventions previously were to the advantage of public domain. The Keating government’s ‘Better Cities’ program (1991–96) was a series of national urban improvement projects that attempted to prioritise both social justice and its nemesis, micro economic reform. 13 A. Russell, ‘Just privately: Australia’s out of step’, The Age, Education Supplement, 17 November 2003, pp. 5–7.
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14 S. Maiden, ‘Private school funding surges’, The Australian, 2 January 2004, p. 1. 15 S. Maiden, ‘Push for $3bn lift to public schools’, The Australian, 20 April 2004, p. 2. 16 In M. Maddox, God Under Howard: the rise of the religious right in Australian politics, Allen & Unwin, 2005, p. 189. 17 In A. Crabb & O. Guerrera, ‘PM queries values of state schools’, The Age, 20 January 2004, p. 1. 18 Western Sydney Regional Organisation of Councils, 2003 State Election Issues Papers, unpublished mimeograph accessed at: www.wsroc.com.au, 2002, p. 33. 19 R. Grayson, ‘New aspirations and a changed global outlook require rethinking our role’, On Line Opinion, accessed at: www.onlineopinion.com.au, 7 March 2003. 20 G.M. Gwyther, ‘Paradise Planned: community formation and the master planned estate’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Western Sydney, 2004. 21 M. O’Sullivan, ‘Behind the urban curtains’, Sydney Morning Herald, 4 March 2005, p. 12. 22 O’Sullivan, ‘Behind the urban curtains’. 23 D. Burchell, Western Horizon: Sydney’s heartland and the future of Australian politics, Scribe, Melbourne, 2003, p. 31. 24 Burchell, Western Horizon, pp. 105–6. 25 B. Randolph, ‘Regional disadvantage in Western Sydney’, paper presented to the Responding to Disadvantaged Communities Conference, Liverpool, 23 March 2000. 26 Promotional material accessed at: www.hir.com.au. 27 B. Birrell & B-S. Seol, ‘Sydney’s ethnic underclass’, People and Place, vol. 6, no. 3, 1998, pp. 16–29. 28 In R. Wainwright, ‘Spend on our areas too, Arabic leader says’, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 December 2005, p. 7. 29 S. Sharp, ‘It’s a culture thing’, New Matilda online journal, 21 December 2005, accessed at www.newmatilda.com. 30 Currently, the federal health rebate subsidy alone amounts to about $2.4 billion per annum. 31 M. Davis, City of Quartz: excavating the future in Los Angeles, Verso, London, 1990. 32 J. Dullroy, ‘Witness objects as new citizens walk down the aisle’, Courier Mail, 22 March 2004, p. 7. 33 Letters, Sydney Morning Herald, 14 November 2002, p. 16.
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34 The scheme cost the taxpayer $1.76 billion in 2001/02 and was forecast to cost $784 million in 2002/03. 35 M. Smith & P. Ewer, ‘Changes to Childcare and Women’s Labour Force Participation in Western Sydney’, report prepared for Western Sydney Regional Organisation of Councils, 2001, accessed at: www.wsroc.com.au. 36 M. Latham, From the Suburbs: building a nation from our neighbourhoods, Pluto, Sydney, 2003. 37 In A. Minton, Building Balanced Communities: the US and UK compared, Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, London, 2002, p. 3. 38 Minton, Building Balanced Communities. 39 D. Malouf, A Spirit of Play: the making of Australian consciousness, ABC Books, Sydney, 2001. 40 G. Rundle, ‘Let them out for the dingoes’, Arena Magazine, 59, 2002, pp. 1–2. 41 WSROC, 2003 State Election Issues Papers. 42 I. McAuley, ‘Aspiring to opt out’, New Matilda online journal, accessed at: www.newmatilda.com, 4 May 2005, p. 1. 43 McAuley, ‘Aspiring to opt out’, p. 2. 44 K. Burke, ‘Public schools losing battle in inner suburbs’, Sydney Morning Herald, 17–18 September 2005, p. 3.
CHAPTER 6 Toxic Cities 1 D. Passmore, ‘Grandparents to the rescue’, Sunday Mail (Qld), 18 July 2004, pp. 56–7. 2 B. Elvish, ‘Freedom of choice lost in childcare maze’, Courier Mail, 25 January 2005, p. 17. 3 S. Murdoch, ‘Subsidies turn childcare barons into millionaires’, Courier Mail, 2 October 2004, p. 31. 4 Elvish, ‘Freedom of choice lost in childcare maze’, p. 17. 5 Elvish, ‘Freedom of choice lost in childcare maze’, p. 17. 6 Elvish, ‘Freedom of choice lost in childcare maze’, p. 17. 7 T. Thompson, ‘Childcare sites fail to meet real needs’, Courier Mail, 24 January 2005, pp. 1–2. 8 Thompson, ‘Childcare sites fail to meet real needs’, p. 2. 9 M. Flood, ‘Lost Children: condemning children to long term disadvantage’, Discussion Paper no. 64, The Australia Institute, Canberra, 2004. 10 M. King, ‘Councils under attack from injury claims’, Courier Mail, 5–6 March 2005, p. 5.
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11 In King, ‘Councils under attack from injury claims’, p. 5. 12 J. Lawrence, ‘Sorry kids, but fun is banned’, Sunday Mail (Qld), 27 February 2005, p. 42. 13 Victorian Government, A Healthy Balance: Victorians respond to obesity, Department of Human Services, Melbourne, 2002. 14 D.P. Keating & C. Hertzman, ‘Modernity’s paradox’ in Developmental Health and the Wealth of Nations: social, biological, and educational dynamics, D.P. Keating & C. Hertzman (eds), Guilford Press, New York, 1999, pp. 1–18. 15 In S. Luthar, ‘The culture of affluence: psychological costs of material wealth’, Child Development, vol. 74, no. 6, 2003, p. 1584. 16 F. Stanley, ‘Before the bough breaks: children in contemporary Australia’, Kenneth Myer Lecture, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 24 July 2003, accessed at: www.nla.gov.au/events/seminars/kmyer03.html. 17 F. Stanley, S. Richardson & M. Prior, Children of the Lucky Country?, Macmillan, Sydney, 2005, p. 52. 18 AIHW, A Picture of Australia’s Children, AIHW cat. no. PHE 58, Queensland University of Technology and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Canberra, 2005. 19 R. Eckersely, ‘Separate selves, tribal ties, and other stories’, Family Matters, no. 68, Winter, Australian Institute of Family Studies, 2004, p. 38. 20 Eckersely, ‘Separate selves, tribal ties, and other stories’, p. 38. 21 In Eckersely, ‘Separate selves, tribal ties, and other stories’, p. 38. 22 B. Pocock & J. Clarke, ‘Can’t buy me love: young Australians’ views on parental work, time, guilt and their own consumption’, Discussion Paper no. 61, The Australia Institute, Canberra, 2004. 23 In A. Horin, ‘Now it’s generation T for time—with mum and dad’, Sydney Morning Herald, 7–8 February 2004, p. 6. 24 In Horin, ‘Now it’s generation T for time—with mum and dad’, p. 6. 25 Eckersely, ‘Separate selves, tribal ties, and other stories’, p. 40. 26 E. Watters, Urban Tribes: Are friends the new family?, Bloomsbury, New York, 2003. 27 K. Dibben, ‘Bid to target party parents’, Sunday Mail (Qld), 22 May 2005, p. 14. 28 Stanley, ‘Before the bough breaks’ p. 8. 29 F. Stanley, ‘Help young before it’s too late: the early childhood agenda’, The Australian, 21 November 2003, p. 13. 30 C. Hamilton, Growth Fetish, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2003. 31 Stanley, ‘Before the bough breaks’, p. 11. 32 C. Jackman, ‘Chloe a victim of life on the fringe’, The Australian, 15 November 2003, p. 1. The quotes that follow are from this story.
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33 AIHW, A Picture of Australia’s Children. 34 R. Lloyd, A. Harding & H. Greenwell, ‘Worlds apart: postcodes with the highest and lowest poverty rates in today’s Australia’, paper presented to National Social Policy Conference Sydney, July 2001; and B. Randolph & D. Holloway, ‘The Suburbanization of disadvantage in Sydney: new problems, new policies’, Opolis, vol.1, no.1, 2004, pp. 49–65. 35 G. Draper, G. Turrell & B. Oldenburg, Health Inequalities in Australia: Mortality, Health Inequalities Monitoring Series No. 1. AIHW Cat. No. PHE 55, Queensland University of Technology and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Canberra, 2004. 36 Draper et al., Health Inequalities in Australia, p. 22. 37 Aged fourteen years or less. 38 E. Wensing, D. Holloway & M. Wood, On the Margins? Housing risk among caravan park residents, Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, Melbourne, 2003. 39 Letter cited by Paul Lynch, MP, state member for Liverpool, NSW Legislative Assembly Hansard Article No. 32 of 01/05/2003. 40 The average floor area of new houses in Australia grew by over 40 per cent between 1984/85 and 2002/03. In New South Wales and Queensland, growth for the same period was over 50 per cent. See T. Perinotto & V. Murphy, ‘Carr homes in on McMansions’, Australian Financial Review, 7–8 February 2004, p. 15. 41 J. Hawley, ‘Be it ever so humongous’, Sydney Morning Herald, Good Weekend supplement, 23 August 2003, pp. 24–31. 42 In Hawley, ‘Be it ever so humongous’, p. 25. 43 Hawley, ‘Be it ever so humongous’, p. 25. 44 E. Allen & P. Hammond, ‘Modern kids prefer the great indoors’, Courier Mail, 14 February 2005, p. 1. 45 Allen & Hammond, ‘Modern kids prefer the great indoors’. 46 In J. Cadzow, ‘The bubble-wrap generation’, Sydney Morning Herald, Good Weekend supplement, 17 January 2004, pp. 18–21. 47 Cadzow, ‘The bubble-wrap generation’, p. 18. 48 In Cadzow, ‘The bubble-wrap generation’, p. 19. 49 J. Lawrence, ‘“Happy pills” crisis’, Sunday Mail (Qld), 6 February 2005, p. 39. 50 Luthar, ‘The culture of affluence: psychological costs of material wealth’. 51 Luthar, ‘The culture of affluence: psychological costs of material wealth’, p. 1582. 52 Cadzow presents Australian Bureau of Statistics data that demonstrate a marked decline in the number of deaths of children aged five to fourteen between 1972 and 2002.
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53 Sydney Morning Herald, 6 December 2003, p. 3. 54 L. Robson, P. Weston & J. Lawrence, ‘Parents who must be security guards’, Sunday Mail (Qld), 6 February 2005, pp. 4–5.
CHAPTER 7 Cities in the Sand 1 A. Maddison, The World Economy: a millennial perspective, Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development, Paris, 2001, calculated from Table 1–2. 2 Ronald Wright reports that the world’s economy multiplied forty fold during the twentieth century. R. Wright, A Short History of Progress, Text, Melbourne, 2004. 3 C. Hamilton & R. Denniss, Affluenza: when too much is never enough, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2005. 4 From Affluenza.org. 5 World Wildlife Fund (WWF), 2004 Fund Living Planet Report, WWF International, Gland, Switzerland. 6 Wright, A Short History of Progress, p. 129. 7 P. McManus, Vortex Cities to Sustainable Cities: Australia’s urban challenge, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2005. 8 J.K. Galbraith, ‘Why Bush likes a bad economy’, The Progressive, 2003, accessed at: www.progressive.org/oct03/galb1003.html;w. / 30ggr hotrb1p0iw 3sc/ l.oand agevw J.K. Galbraith, ‘Boom times for War Inc.’, 2004, accessed at: www.ecaar.org/Articles/galbraith.htm. James Galbraith is the son of the esteemed Canadian born economist J.K. Galbraith, who coined the term ‘private affluence, public squalor’ (chapter 6). 9 The Amex Defence Index is a measure of the stock prices of fifteen corporations that together account for about 80 per cent of procurement and research contracting by the Department of Defense. Galbraith states in ‘Boom times for War Inc.’: ‘. . . the Iraq war is a huge question mark overshadowing the future of the American economy, and hence a deterrent to business investment’. 10 Galbraith, ‘Why Bush likes a bad economy’, p. 1. 11 D. Uren & R. Eccleston, ‘US deficits risk crash: Treasury’, The Australian, 25 February 2005, p. 1. 12 M. Wade, ‘Goldilocks and the three scares’, Sydney Morning Herald, 5–6 March 2004, p. 29. 13 The Economist, ‘A wonder down under’, 18 March 2004, p. 85. 14 M. Wade, ‘Yes we have no bananas’, Sydney Morning Herald, 5–6 March 2004, p. 29.
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15 M. Costello, ‘Complacent in our foreign debt’, The Australian, 19 August 2005, p. 16. 16 R. Battellino, ‘Some comments on securitisation’, speech to Australian Credit Forum, Sydney, 28 July 2004, accessed at: www.rba.gov.au/Speeches/ sp_ag_280704.html#graph 17 The Economist, ‘A wonder down under’, p. 85. 18 S. Wilson & N. Turnbull, ‘Australia’s secret Keynesianism’, Australian Review of Public Affairs, 2000, accessed at: www.econ.usyd.edu.au/drawingboard/. 19 The Economist, ‘A wonder down under’, p. 85. 20 Wilson & Turnbull, ‘Australia’s secret Keynesianism’, p. 3. 21 Hamilton & Denniss, Affluenza, p. 95. 22 D. Henwood, After the New Economy, The New Press, New York, 2004. 23 I. Campbell, ‘Cross-national comparisons: work time around the world’, 2004, accessed at: www.actu.asn.au/public/papers/crossnationalcomp. html. 24 Hamilton & Denniss, Affluenza, p. 86. 25 Hamilton & Denniss, Affluenza. 26 M. Pusey, The Experience of Middle Australia: the dark side of economic reform, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2003. 27 Hamilton & Denniss, Affluenza. 28 J. Diamond, Collapse: how societies choose to fail or survive, Penguin/Allen Lane, Camberwell, 2005, p. 378. 29 McManus, Vortex Cities to Sustainable Cities. 30 C. Campbell, ‘The peak of oil: An economic and political turning point for the world’ in Making Urban Transport Sustainable, N.P. Low & B.J. Gleeson (eds), Palgrave Macmillan, Hampshire and New York, 2003. 31 T. Flannery, ‘Address to Sydney Futures Forum’, Department of Infrastructure, Planning & Natural Resources, 18 May 2004, accessed at: www.metrostrategy.nsw.gov.au. 32 I. Lowe, Living in the Hothouse: how global warming affects Australia, Scribe, Melbourne, 2005. 33 Diamond, Collapse, p. 85. 34 Lowe, Living in the Hothouse, p. 202. 35 Wright, A Short History of Progress, p. 131. 36 Statement made 13 April 2004. 37 Henwood, After the New Economy. 38 M. Davis, ‘Planet of slums’, New Left Review, no. 26, March–April 2004, p. 11. 39 Davis, ‘Planet of slums’, p. 10. 40 O.M. Nelson, ‘Thirty Years’ War: VI Peace of Westphalia’, entry in Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia, 2004, accessed at: http//encarta.msn.com
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41 Securitisation is a commonly used term to describe asset-backed securities (http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Securitisation). 42 S. Graham & S. Marvin, Splintering Urbanism, Routledge, London, 2001. 43 ‘Sustaining prosperity’, The Australian, 19–20 February 2005, p. 19. 44 Graham & Marvin, Splintering Urbanism. 45 Lowe, Living in the Hothouse. 46 A long-term decline in residential mobility is probably already underway, driven by rising economic insecurity and near uniform housing inaffordability across the metropolitan regions. Between 2003–05 the numbers of people migrating intersate each year declined by around 10 per cent (Sydney Morning Herald, 23 September 2005, p. 3). 47 E. Farrelly, ‘City of larrikins loops the loop’, Sydney Morning Herald, Spectrum, 11–12 September 2004, p. 9. 48 E. Farrelly ‘Metro textual’, Sydney Morning Herald, Spectrum, 29–30 January, p. 16. 49 Lowe, Living in the Hothouse, p. 192. 50 In P. Robinson, ‘Diamond in the rough’, Qantas: The Australian Way, August 2005, pp. 116–17.
CHAPTER 8 Making Space for Hope 1 For example, N.P. Low, B.J. Gleeson, R. Green & D. Radovic, The Green City: sustainable homes, sustainable suburbs, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2005; P. McManus, Vortex Cities to Sustainable Cities: Australia’s urban challenge, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2005; and M. Mobbs, Sustainable House, Choice Books, Sydney, 1998. 2 The Land Commission Program outlasted the Whitlam government (1972–75) by two years. P. Troy, A Fair Price: The Land Commission Program 1972–77, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1978. 3 See B.J. Gleeson & E. Coiacetto, ‘Public Land Agencies in Australia: The key to positive planning?’, Research Paper 5, Urban Research Program, Griffith University, 2005, available at: www.griffith.edu.au/centre/urp. 4 See www.landcom.nsw.gov.au and www.brisbanehousingcompany.com.au. 5 Bill Clinton was raised in Hope, Arkansas. 6 R. Sennett, Respect: the formation of character in an age of inequality, Penguin, London, 2004, p. 226. 7 H. MacKay, ‘Australia and the world’, New Matilda, online journal, 20 June 2005, accessed at: www.newmatilda.com.
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8 M. Peel, The Lowest Rung: voices of Australian poverty, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2003. 9 MacKay, ‘Australia and the world’, p. 1. 10 L. Morris, ‘Marriage goes cold in chase for money’, Sydney Morning Herald, 28 November 2005, p. 3. 11 MacKay, ‘Australia and the world’, p. 2. 12 MacKay, ‘Australia and the world’, p. 2. 13 G. Sheridan, ‘Stuck in a three-dollar mindset’, The Australian, 12 May 2005, p. 13. 14 Sheridan, ‘Stuck in a three-dollar mindset’. 15 Peel, The Lowest Rung. 16 P. Self, Rolling Back the Market: economic dogma and political choice, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2000. 17 K. Davidson, ‘Defrocking the priests’ in D. Horne (ed.), The Trouble with Economic Rationalism, Scribe, Melbourne, 1992. 18 B. Frankel, From the Prophets Deserts Come: the struggle to reshape Australian political culture, Arena, Melbourne, 1992. 19 H. Stretton, ‘Australia Fair’, Occasional Paper Series 2/2001, Australian Academy of Social Sciences, Canberra, 2001, p. 16. 20 H. Stretton, Australia Fair, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2005. 21 F. Stanley, S. Richardson & M. Prior, Children of the Lucky Country?, Macmillan, Sydney, 2005, chapter 8. 22 Stanley et al., Children of the Lucky Country?, p. 86. 23 Sketched in C. Hamilton & R. Denniss, Affluenza: when too much is never enough, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2005, pp. 217–24; see the work of Britain’s New Economic Foundation, accessed at: www.neweconomics.org/gen, p. 178. 24 Sennett, Respect. 25 R. Wainwright, ‘Black and blue’, Sydney Morning Herald, 2–3 July 2005, p. 32. 26 C. Honoré, In Praise of Slow, Orion Books, London, 2004. 27 M. Pusey, Economic Rationalism in Canberra: a nation-building state changes its mind, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1991. 28 I. McAuley, ‘Insiders and outsiders, Dissent, number 17, Autumn–Winter, 2005. 29 R. Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1977. 30 Z. Bauman, Liquid Love, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2003, p. 69. 31 My characterisation of Latham’s insider/outsider divide here overlooks the way in which he valorised suburban outsiders as authentic Australians. For him, they remained outside the closed circuits of official power and influence. The inner city elites holding the keys to power (information/influence) were, by contrast, impermanent and ultimately irresolute by nature and by
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action—‘tourists’ in their own country. The polarity resonated with simple determinism, suggesting the inevitable, inexorable rise of the good and the grounded suburbanite to power. ‘Labor Party take note’, Latham warned. And yet, it now seems clear that only those suburbanites with the new keys to power (subsidised aspiration) were marked for success. As pointed out in chapter 4, the devil took the hindmost. (See M. Simons, ‘The ties that bind’, Griffith Review, edition 8, People Like Us, 2005, pp. 13–36. 32 Sennett, Respect.
CHAPTER 9 Making Hopeful Spaces 1 P.N. Troy (ed.), Federal Power in the Cities: essays in honour of Peter Till, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1978. 2 M. Spiller, ‘Unclogging our cities is the next step’, Australian Financial Review, 9 June 2005. 3 A personal comment offered to the author August 2005. 4 P. Mees, ‘Privatisation of rail and tram services in Melbourne: what went wrong?’, Transport Reviews, vol. 25, no. 4, 2005, pp. 433–49. 5 W. Swan, Postcode: the splintering of a nation, Pluto, Melbourne, 2005. 6 M. Latham, From the Suburbs: building a nation from our neighbourhoods, Pluto Press, Sydney, 2003. 7 Swan, Postcode, p. 13. 8 Swan, Postcode, p. 11. 9 Australian Labor Party, Australia’s Future Cities, Labor Discussion Paper on Urban Development, Housing and Local Government, Kingston, Canberra, 2005. 10 M. Spiller, ‘What’s Required for a Sustainable Melbourne?’, paper presented to the Sustainable Cities Forum convened by Green Capital, 2 June 2005, Hilton Hotel, Melbourne. 11 Planning Institute of Australia, ‘10 point plan for Commonwealth engagement in sustainable cities and regions’, 2005, accessed at: www.planning.org.au. 12 J. Huxley, ‘A garden of peace and cultural tolerance’, Sydney Morning Herald, 24 September 2002, p. 8. 13 The Australian, 15 March 2002, p. 3. 14 I. McAuley, ‘Aspiring to opt out’, New Matilda online journal, accessed at: www.newmatilda.com, 4 May 2005, p. 1. 15 McAuley, ‘Aspiring to opt out’, p. 3. 16 Starting with N. Schoon, The Chosen City, Spon, London, 2001.
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17 J.D. Feins & M.D. Shroder, ‘Moving to opportunity: the demonstration’s design and its effects on mobility’, Urban Studies, vol. 42, no. 8, 2005, pp. 1275–99. 18 B. Randolph, ‘Renewing the middle city: planning for stressed suburbs’, paper presented to Planning Institute of Australia Annual Conference, Hobart, February, 2004. 19 B. Randolph & D. Holloway, ‘Social disadvantage, tenure and location: an analysis of Sydney and Melbourne’, Urban Policy & Research, vol. 23, no. 2, 2005, pp. 173–202. 20 Randolph, ‘Renewing the middle city’, pp. 8–9. 21 On this, see the persuasive arguments by Schoon, The Chosen City. 22 H. Stretton, Ideas for Australian Cities, Orphan Books, Adelaide, 1970, p. 21. 23 Stretton, Ideas for Australian Cities, p. 21.
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Index Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, 20, 37, 53, 68, 100, 184 ‘affluenza’, 124 anti-suburbanism, 11–12 anti-urbanism, 5 arbitration system, see wage arbitration aspirational identity, 18, 31, 157–58 ‘aspirationals’ ALP’s response to, 98–99, 144 exodus to outer suburbs, 41–42, 70, 74, 90–92 fears and insecurities, 28, 39, 69–70, 89–90 and new suburban religiosity, 66–68 see also masterplanned residential estates asylum seekers, fear of, 65 Australia Institute, 154 Australian Labor Party, 98–99, 144, 165–67 Australian Nationalist Movement, 56 Australian Settlement, 12–14 dismantling, 23, 25–29 economic and social benefits, 13–14 social homogeneity and conformism, 26–27, 52 and suburbanisation, 22–23 Australian Unsettlement, see Australian Settlement: dismantling Bauman, Zygmunt, 24, 27, 70–71, 77, 158 Beach Culture, 4 Beck, Ulrich, 69 Bowling for Columbine, 70–71 Brisbane, Southbank parklands, 172–73 Building Better Cities (BBC) program, 164 Burchell, David, 90 206
Burnley, Ian, 57 ‘bush’, idealisation of, 11 Cabramatta, 55–56, 173 Cai, Lixin, 40 caravan parks, 113–16, 180–81 certainty, end of, 25 childcare, 98, 104–7 children in caravan parks, 113–16 as central to urban policy, 103–8, 153, 155 effect of neo-liberal policies on, 7–8, 103–8 in jobless households, 40 in masterplanned estates, 116–21 physical and mental health, 108, 112–13 Children of the Lucky Country, 7–8, 153–54 cities Australian hierarchy, 140 Australian versus US, 6, 20, 37, 57, 92, 95–96, 169–70 Australians’ commitment to, 5–6 effect of terrorism on, 81–82, 135, 142 engagement in the ‘new economy’, 42–43 growth rates, 35, 42 income variations between, 42–43 resocialisation, 169–76 civic education, 157 civil society, restoration of, 151–59 climate change, 132 coastal urban change, 4 Commonwealth State Housing Agreement, 21–22 communal insularity, 93, 141–42, 169–71
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communal realm, 83–86, 170–71, 179–81 ‘community’, as real estate commodity, 72–76 consumer confidence, 31 consumers, 31, 157–58 crime criminalising ethnic communities, 57–58, 62–63 fear of, 69, 89–90, 93 rates of, 90, 120 Cronulla riots, 63–64, 94 cultural pluralisation, 51–61 Davis, Mike, 71, 96 debt household, 37, 127–29 national, 127 see also triple debt crisis decentralisation, 138–39, 174 demographic pluralisation, 51–58 see also ethnic diversification; immigration Denniss, Richard, 124, 129–30 Department of Urban and Regional Development (DURD), 163–64 Diamond, Jared, 131, 139, 144 Disability Support Pension (DSP), 40 disease, 10–11 disengagement, 148 dog whistling, 61 downshifting, 130–31, 137 Eckersley, Richard, 110 ecological crisis, 125, 131–33, 141, 144 ecological modernisation, 140–41 economic crisis, looming, 126–29 see also triple debt crisis economic rationalism, see neo-liberal reform project; neo-liberalism edge cities, 95–96 employees, neo-liberal view of, 162–63 employment employment insecurity, 38–39 stress and overwork, 129, 148
suburban decentralisation, 17 working hours, 39, 130 see also unemployment enclaves, see gated communities; inner city localities; masterplanned residential estates; poverty enclaves ‘enemy stereotypes’, 69–70 estates, see masterplanned residential estates ethnic conflict, 56–57, 101 ethnic diversification, 15–16, 20, 53–58 exclusion, quest for, 72, 75, 100–01, 139, 141, 149 exclusive residential estates, see edge cities; gated communities; masterplanned residential estates families, see households fear and insecurity exploitation of, 61–62, 65 mood of, 23–24, 49–50, 69–71, 91, 139, 148 parental, 118–21 and rise of enclave estates, 75–77, 90, 92–93, 139 First Homeowner Grant Scheme, 98 Forrest, James, 57 Forster, Clive, 5, 16–17, 22–23, 49, 55 Frankel, Boris, 59–60, 152 Galbraith, James, 126 Galbraith, J.K., 84–85 gatecrashing, 111–12 gated communities, 71–72, 75–77 gays, 58–59 gentrification, 36, 44, 58 ghettos, absence of, 57–58 Giddens, Anthony, 100 Gilbert, Alan, 10, 11 globalisation, 2, 29, 42–43, 134–35 Graham, Stephen, 136 Grayson, Russ, 89 Gregory, Bob, 40 ‘growth machine economy’, 29–32
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looming crisis, 125–37, 144 negative effects, 31–32, 112–13, 121–22, 125–26, 133, 136–37, 154–55 see also neo-liberal reform project Gwyther, Gabrielle, 90, 117 Hage, Ghassan, 62 Hajer, Maarten, 46, 84 Hamilton, Clive, 124, 129–30 Hamilton, Paula, 4 Hanson, Pauline, 60–61 Hardgrave, Gary, 96–97 health care decentralisation, 174 public concern, 176 Henwood, Doug, 130 Hillsong Church, 66–67 home ownership, 11, 14–16 homelessness, 41 homo consumens, 78, 110–11, 157–58 Honoré, Carl, 155–66 hope, restoration of, 145–61, 182–86 Horne, Donald, 18 households mobility, 41–42 new types, 34, 53–54 housing ‘community’ as marketing concept, 72–76 downshifting, 137–38 gated communities, 71–72, 75–77 housing assistance, 97–98 masterplanned residential estates, 72–79, 91–92 social housing, 179–80 see also public housing Howard, John dog whistling by, 61 on private schools, 88 Howard government attack on political correctness, 88 disavowal of urban policy, 86, 164–65 public realm cutbacks, 80–82
reactionary cultural agenda, 59–61 subsidies to private schools, 86–88 Howe, Frederick, 10 Humphries, Barry, 18 identity politics, 52–53 immigration eco-refugees, 140 effect on cultural pluralisation, 51, 53–58 policy, 12, 140 see also ethnic diversification; migrants income polarisation, 33–34, 37–38, 113 income support, 40 Indigenous Australians, see Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians infrastructure decline of big networks, 141 state provision of, 12 inner city localities, 15–16, 19–20, 20, 36–37, 44, 48, 58, 159–60, 181 insecurity, see fear and insecurity Internet, 143, 173–75 Jackman, Christine, 113–14 Johnston, Ron, 57 Kelly, Jackie, 97 Kelly, Paul, 12, 25–26, 28 Kensington Redevelopment Program, 179 land agencies, public, 146 Lansdowne Caravan Park, 113–16 Latham, Mark, 89, 98–99, 159, 166 Lawson, Henry, 11 Lebanese-Australian youth, 62–64 ‘liquid modernity’, 24, 27, 110–11 local government communal provision of public amenities, 170 impact of economic crisis on, 141–43 privatisation of services, 86 public liability crisis, 107–8
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localisation of difference, 43–48 Long Boom, 13–14 end of, 25, 28–29 Luthar, Suniya, 120 Mackay, Hugh, 25, 27, 34, 51, 147–49 Macquarie Fields, 68, 76 Malouf, David, 26, 101 manufacturing industries destruction, 33, 35 shift to suburban locations, 17 Marvin, Simon, 136 masterplanned residential estates children’s life in, 116–21 emergence, 36, 41, 72–75 motives for exodus to, 75–77, 90, 92–93, 100–01, 139 public subsidisation of, 90–92, 97–98 resocialisation, 169–71 material gratification, pursuit of, 30–31, 148 McKenzie, Evan, 71 McQueen, Humphrey, 15, 19 media, migrant demonising by, 57–58, 62, 64 Melbourne Metropolitan Board of Works, 167–68 Menadue, John, 61 metropolitan planning commissions, 167–68, 171–72 middle class children, 117–21 craving family time, 130–31 craving for social time, 77–79 deserting the public realm, 102, 176 impact of structural adjustment, 34–35 suburban material gain, 19 middle-ring suburbs arresting the exodus from, 179–82 demographic shifts, 92–95 poverty clusters in, 179–80 migrants hostility to, 56–58
inadequate public provision for, 93–95 media demonising, 62, 64, 93–95 residential segregation, 16, 20, 53–58 Moore, Des, 41 Moore, Mike, 70–71 motor cars future use, 138 ownership, 15–16 multiculturalism, 26, 53, 63–64 museums, 174–75 national identity, 51 neo-liberal reform project assault on public realm, 80–82 dystopian future under, 151 ecological costs, 133 Gain after Pain?, 28–41, 49–50 impact on children, 103–8 impact on cities and suburbs, 6–8, 43–48, 97 impact on rural and regional areas, 1–2 political limits, 146 see also post neo-liberal urban agenda neo-liberalism attitude to employees, 162–63 as dogma, 1 need for analytical critiques, 152–54 public choice theory, 95, 97 ‘new economy’, 33, 42–43 One Nation Party, 60–61 Peel, Mark, 151 Perlman, Elliot, 150 Planning Institute of Australia, 167–68 political correctness, 88 politics of choice, 176 post neo-liberal urban agenda, 151–61, 169–82 see also hope, restoration of Poulsen, Mike, 57 poverty, 41, 115, 150–51 poverty enclaves, 113–16, 136, 179–81
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Prior, Margot, 7, 153–54 private collective consumption, 81, 127–29, 142 privatisation, 82, 85–86 ‘privatised Keynesianism’, see private collective consumption Protectors of Public Lands Coalition, 85 protest, see unrest public housing effect on suburbanisation, 21–22 repair and renewal, 178–79 waiting lists, 45 as welfare dependent communities, 35, 68–69 public liability crisis, 107–08 Public Private Partnerships, 165 public realm aspirationals’ use of, 91–92 as concept, 82–83 decline and loss, in cities, 85, 89, 93–95, 100–02 impact of public liability claims, 107–08 neo-liberal attack on, 80–82 policing of, 175 popular support for, 176 in private ownership, 83, 85 rebuilding and redefining, 142–43, 169–76 as socialising force, 84 public service, institutional rebuilding, 156–57 public subsidisation of masterplanned residential estates, 90–92, 98 of private collective consumption, 81, 87–88, 127–29 Pusey, Michael, 60 Randolph, Bill, 44–45, 54, 180 Reijndorp, Arnold, 46, 84 residential estates, see masterplanned residential estates residential segregation
driven by fear, 99–102, 178 ethnic, 15–16, 20, 53–58 need for desegregation, 177–82 socio-economic, 6, 34–37, 43–49 respect, 147, 155 Richardson, Sue, 7, 153–54 Rifi, Jamal, 94 riots, 63–64, 68–69, 94 Salt, Bernard, 4 schools as agents for social desegregation, 182 private, public subsidisation of, 87–88 seachange, 3–5, 41, 149 security, see fear and insecurity Self, Peter, 152 Sennett, Richard, 84, 147 Sharp, Steve, 63 Sheridan, Greg, 150 short-termism, 30 single parent households, 34, 54 ‘Slow Movement’, 155–56 slums, 10–11 social class, geography of, 6, 10–11, 19–20, 34–37, 41–49, 43–49, 154 social housing, 179–80 social segregation, see residential segregation social solidarity, 100–01, 129–30 Spiller, Mark, 164, 167 Stanley, Fiona, 7, 112–13, 153–54 Stretton, Hugh, 18–19, 152–53 structural adjustment, 6–8 phase one (1970s–1990s), 31–37 phase two (from mid-1990s), 37–41 suburbanisation and fear of crime, 90, 93 growth and attraction of, 9–12, 14–20 impact of public housing, 22 suburbs empty aspirations, 18 erosion of public realm, 99–101 impact of car-ownership, 16 industry and employment, 17
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need to renovate and revive, 169–86 progressive qualities, 18 revivalist Christianity, 66–68 as targets of satire and mockery, 17–18 see also masterplanned residential estates; middle-ring suburbs; poverty enclaves; residential segregation; social class Supported Accommodation and Assistance Program (SAAP), 41 Swan, Wayne, 166 Sydney Carr government’s mismanagement, 167 in ‘new economy’, 42–43 tariff protection, 12 taxation negative gearing, 98 redistributive effects, 38 terrorism, 57, 61–62, 65, 81–82, 133–35, 142 Three Dollars, 150–51 time, craving for, 77–79 Tollway Tories, 95–99, 105, 159, 184 triple debt crisis, 123–37, 144 effects on urbanisation, 137–40 urban policy consequences, 140–43 Troy, Patrick, 15, 164 Turnbull, Nick, 127 Twopenny, R.E.N., 10 uncertainty, see fear and insecurity unemployment, 32–35, 39–40 unrest, urban, 63–64, 68–69, 141–42 urban governance, 140–43, 167–68, 171–72 urban policy anathema to neo-liberals, 7 effect of triple debt crisis on, 143 need for independent planning commissions, 167–68 need for national intervention, 143, 163–67
211
states’ failings, 165–66 through ‘shadow’ planning, 20–22 van Tongeren, Jack, 56 Vietnamese communities, 55–56 wage arbitration, 12 War on Terror, 133–35, 142 War Service Homes Scheme, 15 water supply systems, 10 wealth inequality, 27–28 wedge politics, 161 Wellbeing, Manifesto for, 154–55 Western Sydney, 89–92, 98 see also Cabramatta; Lansdowne Caravan Park Western Sydney Regional Organisation of Councils, 89, 172 ‘White Australia’ policy, 12, 20 Whitlam government, 22, 163–64 Wilson, Shaun, 127 Windschuttle, Keith, 63–64 women feminist movement, 52 suburban isolation, 19 workforce participation, 34 see also childcare; children work, see employment working class material gain, 14, 19, 44 as new ‘aspirationals’, 31, 41 working class subregions, 46–47, 166, 170 working hours, 39 World Wide Web, 143, 173–75 Yan Yean Reservoir, 10 young people drug taking, 119–20 impact of ‘liquid modernity’ on, 110–12 urban tribalism, 111–12 Zreika, Salam, 62–63
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The Iremonger Award for Writing on Public Issues Allen & Unwin is Australia’s largest independent publisher, with a reputation for publishing ‘books that matter’. Accordingly, Allen & Unwin is pleased to offer The Iremonger Award for Writing on Public Issues, an award for non-fiction works of political, social and cultural commentary that deal with contemporary Australian issues and contribute to public debate. On offer is prize money of $10 000, guaranteed publication, royalties on book sales and editorial support to develop the proposal into a finished manuscript. John Iremonger’s outstanding 35 year publishing career helped shape Australia’s perception of its past and spotlighted the challenges of its future. He published many groundbreaking books and leading Australian writers and was integral to the establishment of Allen & Unwin’s reputation as a leading Australian publisher. John also founded the independent publishing house Hale & Iremonger and was Director of Melbourne University Press. Entry forms can be downloaded at: http://www.allenandunwin.com/awards/iremonger_award.asp
