What’s Wrong with North Fitzroy?

Most of the Victorian terraces and workers’ cottages in inner Melbourne (and Sydney/Brisbane) have been thoroughly renovated by affluent professional couples and are valued in seven figures. And the pensioners, post-war migrants and even many of the university students have largely drifted away. This change has been driven by structural economic forces – the rapid increase in white collar professional work concentrated in the CBD and inner city and the growth of two-income professional families. In his recently released novel Comeback, former Labor minister The Hon Lindsay Tanner confronts some of the issues that have arisen around such changing demographics. On Thursday 21 March 2019, Lindsay Tanner addressed The Sydney Institute to discuss the problems of inner-city suburbs like North Fitzroy.

 WHAT’S WRONG WITH NORTH FITZROY?

LINDSAY TANNER

 My latest novel Comeback is about the other inner city: struggling low income people leading a precarious existence. They live in the various high-rise public housing estates, decrepit blocks of private flats thrown up in the 1960s and 1970s, and in some cases on the streets. They are largely invisible to the rest of the Australian population, which now equates inner-city Melbourne with affluent latte-sipping professionals who vote Green and moralise at lesser mortals who are not quite as enlightened as they are.

There is a secondary character in Comeback who epitomises this latter group: local community activist Angela Wright, who runs Residents Action North Carlton. Angela is a snobbish, self-important member of the upper middle class who opposes all development in her suburb, wants to obtain heritage listing for the whole of Carlton, and is selling her expensive house because the traffic has got so bad she wants to move closer to her son’s exclusive private school.

Angela is admittedly something of a caricature – but only just.

As was the case with my first novel, Comfort Zone, Comeback is in part an exploration of the extraordinary structural changes in the socio-economic landscape of the inner city since I first moved to Melbourne from East Gippsland in 1974. While both novels are primarily adventure-crime stories laced with a liberal sprinkling of satire and farce, they each carry a serious underlying message. That message is about the growing separation of the progressive upper middle classes from the world of ordinary working people, and their failure to understand how alien and offensive their extravagant moralising has become to many ordinary Australians. While, in broad terms, I remain a supporter of the key concerns that preoccupy this segment of the population, I have become increasingly concerned by the way they are pursued – and by the casual hypocrisy that so often accompanies the absolutist preaching that is directed at the rest of the community.

When I first moved to Melbourne’s inner suburbs – living variously in North Melbourne, Brunswick, North Fitzroy, North Carlton, Carlton and Clifton Hill – the process of gentrification was in its early stages. The political orientation of the electorate of Melbourne covering these areas was not notably different from other nearby safe Labor seats. Local councils were still largely dominated by Old Labor machines that placed a high emphasis on delivering jobs to family and friends and took little interest in some of the emerging issues such as environmentalism and multiculturalism. The population was an interesting mix of public housing tenants, Greek and Italian migrants, university students and lecturers, pensioners and a growing cohort of professionals.

How things have changed. Most of the Victorian terraces and workers’ cottages in inner Melbourne have been thoroughly renovated by affluent professional couples and are valued in seven figures. And the pensioners, post-war migrants and even many of the university students have largely drifted away. This change has been driven by structural economic forces – the rapid increase in white collar professional work, concentrated in the CBD and inner city, and the growth of two-income professional families.

The ensuing change in the political and social character of the area has been profound.

In the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, the eclectic demographic mix in the inner city proved a fertile breeding ground for the Labor Movement, both in personnel and ideas. A generation of activists – mostly university-educated but typically heavily involved in various labour and social justice movements – emerged to play a central role in a period of great Labor Movement achievement.

Beginning with a group of ALP Socialist Left figures clustered around Bob and Caroline Hogg and Henry and Solange Shapiro – dubbed the “Gold Street Gang” by its internal opponents in the Left, a range of important figures emerged from the late 1970s on, including Jenny and Eddie Beacham, Peter Batchelor, Barry Pullen, Brian Howe, Andrew McCutcheon, Graeme Russell, Candy Broad, Julia Gillard and Demetri Dollis. They became Ministers, mayors and State Secretaries. This group was a major source of leading female ALP figures at a time when the party was just beginning to shed the legacy of its almost entirely male-dominated history. It was also closely linked to several former leading figures from the Communist Party of Australia, most notably former CPA National Secretary Bernie Taft.

As the 1980s unfolded, another group of inner city Socialist Left figures began to emerge – also largely university educated but typically more radical: this group included Leigh Hubbard, Ros Eason, Neil Cole, Frans Timmerman, Lesley Podesta and David Spratt. While this group did not produce as many senior office holders in the Labor Movement, it still exercised significant influence in internal Labor debates and acted as a vital link between the Labor Party and a range of social movements and campaigns.

Each of these people reflected a wider network of other inner-city residents, some Labor Party members and some not, and in doing so connected a rapidly growing hinterland of progressive professionals to the wider Labor Movement and in particular to an overwhelmingly working-class trade union leadership and membership. The creative political tension this unleashed was an important element in Labor’s success in that period. Most importantly, the idealism and expertise of the inner-city professionals was grounded in a wider socio-economic context.

In 2001, many of those in the wider network these people represented voted Green. As I fought an increasingly challenging campaign to hold my seat, I became conscious of just how isolated many inner-city professionals had become. The problem was not their substantive view of the Tampa-related issues – which broadly reflected mine – but their apparent inability to accept that this was a decidedly minority view across the Australian community.

Shortly before the Tampa election, the Greens won their first local council seat in Victoria. This historic victory occurred in a by-election for the ward that covered North Fitzroy in the City of Yarra.

The campaign was dominated by local community resistance to a council proposal to install parking meters around the main North Fitzroy shopping strip and iconic local supermarket Piedimonte’s. The Greens campaigned against the proposal and the Labor-controlled council acknowledged the electoral outcome and backed down.

The bottom line was this: the Greens achieved their first electoral success in Victoria on the back of a campaign against an attempt to restrict the car usage of the well-heeled local residents of North Fitzroy. So much for their claims of being the environmentally pure force in Australian politics.

In more recent times there have been numerous instances where Greens representatives in inner city Melbourne have resisted residential development proposals designed to increase urban density in established areas and reduce urban sprawl on Melbourne’s outer fringe. For all of their pretensions to a principled global outlook, in practice they have operated as the political voice of a very fortunate class of affluent inner-city dwellers who have been happy to pocket the benefits of soaring property values but vigorously resist the urban consolidation and development that accompanies them.

Inner-city resistance to development is hardly new: the Cain Government had to fight hard in the 1980s to ensure that some of a substantial strip of vacant former railway land at the top end of North Carlton would be used for low income housing and not entirely for parkland as many locals demanded. The Greens have been happy to absorb and propagate such sentiments, even though they directly contradict their professed concern for the less well-off.

In the notorious Tampa election of 2001, I went within a few per cent of losing my previously safe Labor seat to the Greens because of Labor’s refusal to challenge John Howard on asylum seekers. I door knocked extensively throughout the campaign. Shortly after the election, I attended a meeting of the North Fitzroy ALP branch and during my post mortem on the campaign commented that the harshest comments on Labor’s asylum seeker policy typically came from the best houses in the street. A couple of branch members promptly buried their heads in their hands in mock embarrassment.

After the 2004 election, when the pendulum swung back to Labor in my electorate, the Greens did an extensive internal review of their campaign. The hundred-page document that eventuated somehow appeared in my office. It contained some very revealing statements – that defeating the Howard Government wasn’t a strategic priority for the Greens and their primary objective was to take votes from Labor.

When I retired in 2010, the Greens won my seat and have held it since then. More recently, they have also taken the state seat of Melbourne which covers the western half of my old electorate. While their fortunes have ebbed and flowed over that time, they have clearly established themselves as the dominant party in the old inner-city areas I used to represent. Remarkably, they have managed to maintain their image as a party of social justice and protest even though their dominant voter base includes some of the most secure, well-educated and comfortable people in Australia.

In their early days, the Greens relied on two major sources of support in inner Melbourne – alternative lifestylers and the idealistic young. This delivered around 5 to 6 per cent of the vote, generally well short of that required to be a serious threat. The 2001 election triggered a mass defection of older university-educated professionals – typically working in education, health, legal, community services and public service occupations – and the Greens vote more than doubled overnight. Soaring property prices have since entrenched that demographic as the dominant group in the inner-city, and the Greens vote in my old electorate has reached an astonishing 43 per cent.

In my later years in parliament, I became increasingly conscious that the inner-city university-educated cohort which had been such a powerful input into the success of 1980s and 1990s Labor had become a quite distinctive sub-culture in its own right. And I also began to notice that, for all its professed belief in human rights and social justice, such commitments tended to be rather theoretical when it came to their own backyard. Their children attended different primary schools from those attended by kids from the high-rise public housing nearby, and they had little interaction with those who lived in the high-rise. So, the loudest voices in support of human rights and the disadvantaged had little involvement in the lives and struggles of some of Australia’s most disadvantaged people who lived only walking distance away. Naturally there were individual exceptions, but not that many.

My rule of thumb for guesstimating the likely Greens vote anywhere in Victoria when I was in parliament was to check how close it was to North Fitzroy. The pattern is not that precise of course, but there is a clear correlation. And there is a very clear correlation between the levels of Green support and tertiary education. It is not a coincidence that the only federal seat held by the Greens contains two of Australia’s largest and most prestigious universities.

So why does all this matter? It is of obvious concern to the Labor Party, but should anyone else care?

For those who are generally committed to progressive change but understand that this usually happens in a very gradual and uneven fashion, it matters a lot. When the most likely intellectual incubators of new ideas and insights become increasingly detached from the socioeconomic mainstream of society, it is inevitable they will become self-absorbed and lose touch with the critical concerns of ordinary working people.

Immersion in the echo-chamber offered by the Greens may suit their vanity and their prejudices, but it is ultimately a cop-out from the task that is central to achieving any progressive change: building a coalition of forces in the community that delivers majority support, or at least acquiescence, for that change. At its best, the Labor Party has been a vehicle through which that task has been achieved.

The isolation of the tertiary educated socially aware professional classes in a political force that sees Labor as its primary competitor will ultimately prove as damaging to the long-term Labor purpose as the DLP split in the 1950s. When a coalition of forces separates and turns on each other, each is likely to deteriorate over time. It is difficult to see how the Whitlam-Hawke-Keating coalition can be put back together but all active supporters of progressive politics should be seeking to revive a collaboration which, at its peak, has profoundly changed Australia for the better and shaped much of the modern society we are now fortunate to inhabit.