Jacinta Allan’s attempt to troll Adelaide backfired badly | David Penberthy

South Aussies scarcely had to lift a finger when Jacinta Allan trolled them over their latest accolade – Melburnians did it for them, writes David Penberthy.

In the aftermath of the State Bank collapse and the fallow years that followed, it felt like the only growth industry in South Australia was insecurity.

Adelaide was a needy city desperate for affirmation. It was a mindset demonstrated by the time-honoured inquiry to the few visitors who came from here out of town – “What do you think of Adelaide?” – with a response as insipid as “OK” or “all right” being wrongly received as a ringing endorsement.

These days as the city and economy has got its mojo back the rest of the world has finally woken up to what we have known for a long time.

Architectural Digest has joined The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times in hailing Adelaide as a great place to visit, live, work, relax, eat and drink.

The only downside with this continuing cavalcade of praise is that everyone else might finally twig to how good things are and want to move here, making it even harder to get a park at the Central Market.

The sparring between our Premier and his Victorian equivalent paints a positive picture for SA and a bleak one for Victoria in terms of our respective states of mind.

Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan. Picture: NewsWire/Ian Currie

For cruisy and cultured Adelaide and broke and battered Melbourne, our two cities have switched places in terms of neediness.

The fact that Peter Malinauskas merely posts a link to a positive article about Adelaide, making no reference to any other Australian city, and receives unsolicited baseless ridicule from Jacinta Allan about how none of our restaurants are open after 5pm says a lot about the Victorian psyche right now.

I know she was joking but the truest of words are said in jest and Allen’s attempted deflection had the opposite effect.

Indeed it flushed out a torrent of abuse, much of it from Victorians, documenting just how bad people thought Melbourne had become in the aftermath of the world’s longest lockdown amid all the desperate economic measures required to pay for it.

As far as put-downs go, Allan’s was as successful as her predecessor Dan Andrew’s rhetorical quip during lockdown – “why would you want to go to Adelaide?” – one obvious answer being, well Dan, since you asked, you can still go to your local park without being arrested.

The scale of abuse Allan invited on social media from Melburnians themselves paints a picture of a city that’s had enough, with much of the anger being directed at a government which, save for Liberal Party ineptitude, has no trumps left in its deck.

SA Pemier Peter Malinauskas. Picture: Tom Huntley

“People have houses in Adelaide,” wrote Scott McKenzie. “People live on the street in Melbourne.”

From Terri Sari: “Victoria the state of decay. She should be quiet. Victoria is in a very fast state of decline.”

Claire Scotham: “Yep come to Melbourne, after all everyone loves graffiti, crime, grime, no rail service to the airport and union corruption – come to sunny Melbourne!”

And from Davey Dave: “Adelaide is what Melbourne was in the glory days of the 80s/90s, Melbourne was bloody amazing back then, where bands jumped on the back of a truck and rocked out while driving down Swanston St, a far cry from now trading on nothing more than a past reputation. It pains me now to say the CBD is dead.”

Speaking of dining out on former glories, what about the Victorian Premier’s bizarre pre-Olympics boast that the world’s first southern hemisphere Games were held in Melbourne.

“Henry Bolte was Premier in 1956!” wrote Phil Barrett in reply.

And my favourite, from Jason Murrihy: “Way back when Melbourne bidded on games and then hosted them.”

As a South Australian I know what insecurity looks like, and it looks like this.

The reality is that as Melbourne and Sydney have grown bigger – with Melbourne having grown so much it is the bigger of the two – a gulf has emerged between the promise and the reality of life in those two cities.

Unless you’re loaded or lucky enough to inherit property, a couple on a normal income buying a new home in Sydney are likely to live closer to Goulburn than the harbour. In terms of affordability, it’s geographically correct to say you would be closer to that large concrete merino sheep than the Doyle’s fish restaurant.

And as for Melbourne and its vaunted laneway bar culture, you’d better go looking for laneways in Sunshine if you’re trying to buy a place on an average income.

Then there’s toll roads. I only learnt this the other day, but in January this year the NSW Government introduced a new weekly $60 cap on tolls, declaring that the maximum amount any motorist has to pay per week. Sixty bucks! Imagine having to spend $60 a week just for the privilege of leaving your house to go to work and take your kids to school. A cost, it should be added, carried largely by less affluent families living in toll road-reliant outer suburbs.

While it is nice to reflect on the goodness of things here in SA, it should also inform the debate about how we plan our inevitable and necessary growth in the coming decades. Sydney, and Melbourne in particular, look like good examples of how not to do it.

The last thing we want is to wind up back where we were after 1991, a state of despondency, as Victoria finds itself now with a leader who’s taking cheap shots on Facebook and Twitter, when not trying to borrow more money or invent new taxes to pay after setting a world record for locking up the civilian population.