Future Geelong 2025: How much changes in a quarter of a century
From Y2K scares to a thriving Geelong. Experts share how the city transformed in the past 25 years and the surprising changes yet to come.
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Peter Judd once captured the anxiety of 1999 New Year’s Eve perfectly.
“The world and I held our collective breath, hoping planes would not fall out of the sky,” the former Geelong Advertiser editor said in a column in 2018.
Judd was sipping light beers that night, watching mates down stubbie after stubbie, laughing at the possibility of Armageddon.
“New Year’s Eve 1999 and I was pretty much sober, just in case the fan got covered in, you know, poo,” he wrote.
“The planes couldn’t crash, by the way. They had been grounded globally. As had the ships. At one minute past midnight, not one passenger jet was in the sky. The Y2K computer bug had seen to that, a software butterfly flapping its wings and threatening our emergent digital jungle.”
The fear was real.
A simple coding flaw – computers reading the year 2000 as 1900 – was threatening to bring the world to its knees.
Governments, banks, power stations, hospitals, airlines – every system that relied on computers faced an uncertain fate.
Would the lights go out?
Would ATMs stop dispensing cash?
Would missiles launch by accident?
Doomsday cults gathered on windswept hills.
Gun sales boomed in the US as families stocked fallout shelters, waiting for the apocalypse.
And then … nothing.
The software patches held.
Planes remained grounded, but they had not fallen from the sky.
Banks functioned.
The power stayed on.
Y2K, which was short for Year 2000, was nothing but a $600bn global effort to prevent a catastrophe that, in the end, never happened.
“A legion of programmers slept well that night,” Judd wrote, summarising the anticlimactic relief.
The scare was a wake-up call. A reminder of how quickly the Western world had become reliant on the internet as a means to communicate. Connect. Function.
By 2000, email had become a primary mode of communication.
Websites were providing real-time information and commerce.
The internet was already central to daily life, but fragile.
A Y2K meltdown could have severed that connection, plunging a wired world into an unnerving silence.
Instead, the year 2000 became known not for technological collapse, but for transformation.
A Year of Transition
Beyond Y2K, 2000 was a turning point for global politics, technology, and culture.
Vladimir Putin became Russia’s president, beginning a long tenure that would shape geopolitics for decades.
In the United States, a dramatic Supreme Court decision handed the presidency to George W. Bush, after a razor-thin contest against environmentalist Al Gore.
Air France Flight 4590 crashed shortly after takeoff in Paris, leading to the eventual retirement of the Concorde fleet.
Sydney hosted the Olympics, a defining moment in Australian sports and national identity. Then-IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch declared it “the best ever.”
Telstra was privatised, marking a major shift in Australia’s telecommunications landscape.
More than 250,000 people walked across the Sydney Harbour Bridge in support of reconciliation with Indigenous Australians, a powerful moment in the nation’s history.
Meanwhile, mobile phones were rapidly transforming communication, with Nokia handsets and SMS messaging becoming cultural mainstays.
Geelong in 2000
In Victoria, Jeff Kennett’s departure signalled a shift in the state’s political direction.
Infrastructure projects planned in the 1990s, such as Melbourne’s CityLink tollway, were finally reshaping how people moved through the capital.
Geelong was a city in transition.
Geelong Historical Society recalled some of the most significant differences in how Geelong connected at the start of the millennium.
Their members said the Geelong Ring Road was years away, leaving traffic to crawl along Latrobe Terrace, where trucks and commuters jostled for space on the Melbourne route.
They said suburbs such as Armstrong Creek were still rural land.
The Geelong Waterfront had just undergone major redevelopment, transforming from an industrial foreshore to a leisure destination.
The Carousel was now a landmark, and Eastern Beach had reclaimed its place as a community gathering point.
Public transport was dominated by the Geelong railway station, with V/Line services improving.
But they remained far from the frequency of metropolitan rail networks.
Buses were secondary, often infrequent and limited in reach.
Taxis filled the gap before ride-sharing services would later disrupt the industry.
New restaurants and cafes were popping up, hinting at the coming hospitality boom.
Shopping precincts, such as Westfield Geelong, were expanding as retail became an economic driver.
Westfield Geelong underwent a major expansion in 2007-2008, adding new retail spaces and modernising the centre.
A Geelong Historical Society historian said wireless internet would not be offered in the region for another two years.
A revolution in work was around the corner.
2025’s change of guard
Over the past two decades, the way Geelong connected transformed.
Ford closed its Geelong plant in 2016, and Alcoa shut its Point Henry smelter in 2014, marking the end of an industrial era.
TAC moved its headquarters to Geelong in 2009, followed by NDIA in 2016 and WorkSafe in 2018, reinforcing the city’s shift from industry to professional services.
And rapid technological change positioned the city for a future of innovation.
COVID-19 hit and vast parts of the world went into sudden lockdowns.
And the way people worked changed.
Sue Solly, workplace innovations industry lead at Swinburne University, said that the emergence of hybrid employment had been one of the biggest transformations in how people worked. “We talk about the industrial age and when steam came along with electricity, and then we had the internet come along, and now this is what the next iteration of wholesale change globally,” she said.
Particularly for regional cities such as Geelong, hybrid working opportunities had unlocked a higher quantity and quality of candidates, Ms Solly’s research found.
The population in the City of Greater Geelong boomed from 157,000 to more than 282,000 today.
Looking to 2050
Steve Sammartino, a futurist and commentator on emerging technology, said he also thought hybrid and virtual work was one of the biggest technological changes that would influence regional cities such as Geelong.
“In terms of connectivity and work capacity, that’s already here,” he said.
Mr Sammartino owns a property in Curlewis and studied at Deakin.
He said Geelong was well placed to become a centre for connectivity in Victoria and Australia because of its “unique geography.”
“It’s got its own airport, its own ports, probably one of the best highway infrastructures in Australia … it’s also got potential for ferries that go across to Melbourne,” he said.
It presented a “huge opportunity” to be “Australia’s first smart-mobility centre,” he said.
Judd might have been half-sober that night, watching his mates laugh at the fear of the world collapsing, but his words remain relevant: “Like a horror movie, the demon spawn of Y2K still lives on.”
And if we don’t prepare for what’s next, the real threat may not be a software glitch, but complacency.
Originally published as Future Geelong 2025: How much changes in a quarter of a century
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