BOOK: Review: Wayne Swan's Postcodes
Reviewed by Ann Jensen*
Wayne Swan says he is saddened that the prosperity Australia has created over the last 14 years hasn't reached all of our postcodes.
Date: 29 September 2005
Pluto Press RRP $26.95
Postcodes: The Splintering of a Nation
Wayne Swan
Published by Pluto Press Australia
RRP $26.95.
Wayne Swan has written a page-turner, which is no small achievement when the topic is social inequities and the content is grounded in statistics.
Postcode is a clever title and concept. It describes how geography and economy conspire to isolate some communities from both the real and the iconic prosperity of Australia. This book takes a sobering stare down the prospects for vulnerable groups in an age of rationalised economies and diminishing welfare. In a climate of apparent affluence and increasing apathy over the economic destiny of people who are unable to play the money-making game, Swan warns of a nation splintering to almost Dickensian levels, with riots signalling the consequences of social exclusion.
Shadow Treasurer since last year's Federal defeat, and Labor member for Lilley ( Queensland) since 1993, this former university lecturer has an easy-to-read style: I rapidly reached page 56 without pause, allowing an avalanche of statistics and examples to sweep me along, before I recalled that my task was to be critical. Yet in many ways I have been waiting for a Labor voice to sound the trumpet, and to be proactive in the wilderness.
Swan's analysis of vulnerable communities is compelling. The disproportional employment of unskilled people in declining industries is a lethal combination. He describes extremely vulnerable old manufacturing economy-based communities, such as the onetime showpiece city of Elizabeth, where unemployment is double that of Adelaide. The majority of the local working age population is dependent on a handful of manufacturers, including Holden, but half of all workers have no qualifications and one in five local families live in public housing.
Swan describes a second group as the vulnerable manufacturing regions, which are experiencing a decline in regional manufacturing and rural industries. Just as Hurricane Katrina exposed the ugly impoverished underbelly of America, it takes events that capture the public imagination to finger shameful, dysfunctional, social conditions. Swan points to the strange circumstances surrounding the murder of toddler, Jaidyn Leskie, in the poor public housing culture of 'Moccasin City', Moe, in Victoria, as one of those moments of social exposure: unemployment in the Latrobe Valley at that time was 18 per cent, and the abundance of public housing was no longer in demand as the brown coal industries shut down.
Swan takes the covers off some places where the struggle to find shelter compounds nasty social anomalies: caravan parks, boarding houses, inner city shelters for the de-institutionalised people of the streets. He asserts that public housing is better described as welfare housing in many places, while low wage earners get to the back of the housing queue or depart for the postcodes that combine lower housing costs with less employment opportunities.
Housing impacts the vulnerable urban fringes, including places like Bass Coast Shire in Victoria where incomes fell by 9 per cent between 1996 and 2001, and Pearce in Western Australia, where incomes are $50 a week below the Australian median of $937 — and this was written before petrol prices began to climb. Cheaper housing creates a kind of death-wish for some families, who risk the loss of Centrelink benefits if they move away from unaffordable rents to postcodes with fewer employment options. In the haves postcodes, where a third of all residents have incomes in excess of $100,000 a year, many mortgage repayments are $150 above the minimum wage…..a wage that Swan would like some Liberal leaders to join him to try living on for a week.
Swan handles the complexity of welfare dependency with respect, unravelling the web of circumstances that lock so many in a downward spiral. Just short of welfare, there are families with regular pay packets that won't stretch to adequate education and health care costs. He explores so many aspects of the 'spatial nature of poverty': gentrification of the inner city and the battle for that space, indigenous communities where people are robbed of life itself by entrenched lack of health resources, and of course, Australia's multitude of vulnerable agricultural regions.
Swan is no armchair analyst: he has been to many of the postcodes he mentions, including the 'nappy valley' suburbs such as Melbourne's Fountain Gate which has grown so rapidly that without intelligent planning and investment in resources, there is the potential for a cycle of social decline within a decade. Yet surprisingly, Swan concedes that it is in places like Fountain Gate, that the Labor Party must win the hearts and minds of the working families.
Labor's policy trajectory
Postcode is a timely book, and essential reading for those who cannot live comfortably with inflated house prices, punitive welfare and an unprotected labor market. It is also a bothering kind of book, because John Howard has been so well loved for so long. Swan is convinced that anxiety about security and immigration (and interest rates?) has been used to eclipse debate about urgent social issues at home, but that is really just answering one kind of anxiety with another.
If there is anything that concerns me about this book it is the multiplicity of vulnerable communities he describes, and the record of social wrongs at so many levels, when there is so little complaint and protest in the air. Is Rome burning? Does the Emperor wear new clothes? Or was Redfern and Glenquarie just a taste of the future?
The book is remarkable for its restraint: it criticises without berating, and it avoids the self-righteous indignation of the tabloids in dealing with injustice and need. For those who need information about the distribution of wealth in Australia, this is a good reference book. It also provides something of a map of Labor's policy trajectory in a ten point plan that is well thought through. For Swan, a fair-go is still characterised by a minimum wage and the industrial umpire.
For some time the Labor Party has been painfully inept at communicating the kind of values and policies that quicken the pulse, so this book is fresh air. Even in the postcodes of privilege, so many people do not have regular wages and security of work, regardless of qualifications and skills. Young people patchwork an income from a clutch of casual jobs. Fear concerning an impoverished old age seems to dominate the airwaves — the propertied are cash-strapped and the fully employed invest untold unpaid hours to stay in work.
Wayne Swan has managed to state clearly and concisely that wage earners, marginalised, casualised, feminised, globalised and contractualised as they are, still remain central to Labor thinking. He shamelessly argues that the defeat of poverty and inequality are his passion and vocation.
* Ann Jensen is a former journalist who now works as a pastor and teacher. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Western Sydney where she is researching the impact of current economic policy on the Third Sector.
NOTE: This review was first published in the API (Australian Public Intellectual Network) Review of Books: http://www.api-network.com/jasreview/
Postcodes may be purchased through the publisher, Pluto Press: http://www.plutoaustralia.com/p1/default.asp
