Rich and poor, coronavirus will reshape our lives

It’s not just the poor getting smashed. Some of Australia’s richest postcodes have been chastened and changed by coronavirus.

People are seen queuing outside a Centrelink office in Brunswick, Melbourne.

The social contours of Australia’s biggest cities were laid down more than a century ago.

Sydney’s rich lived on the waterfront in places such as Vaucluse and inland in places such as Woollahra. Melbourne’s well-to-do spilled along the Yarra to places such as South Yarra and Toorak.

Initially, the poor lived in inner suburbs such as Sydney’s Redfern and Melbourne’s Collingwood, not too far from the rich, but from the 1970s onwards they were displaced by incoming knowledge workers (and hipsters) seeking convenient access to the CBD.

Today the disadvantaged, the marginal workers, the recipients of social welfare, including unemployment benefits, tend to cluster in and around public housing estates well removed from the inner city.

Places such as Macquarie Fields in Sydney, Broadmeadows in Melbourne, Inala in Brisbane, Elizabeth in Adelaide, Balga in Perth and even Risdon Vale in Hobart, all tell the same demographic story: it is the story of stubbornly high unemployment rates that persist in specific places across decades.

At the 2016 census, when the national unemployment rate was measured at 7 per cent, it was recorded at 21 per cent in Elizabeth and at 16 per cent in Broadmeadows and Inala. At the same time, the unemployment rate was only 5 per cent in Adelaide’s leafy Belair, and 4 per cent in Toorak and Brisbane’s Pullenvale.

These places of established advantage and disadvantage shaped our biggest cities for decades — or at least this was the case before the coming of the coronavirus.

A dividend of the shutdowns, a now surging tide of unemployment, has spilled across the Australian continent and nowhere is this better evidenced than in our capital cities.

Data released this month by the Department of Social Services shows that between March 20 and May 20 the number of Australians receiving JobSeeker (unemployment) benefits increased by 671,000, or 85 per cent, to 1.5 million.

The percentage increase in JobSeeker payments during the first two months of the lockdown was greatest in the so-called advantaged suburbs. For example, both Broadmeadows and Toorak contain roughly the same population (about 14,000); in March, unemployment in the former (1695) was three times greater than in the latter (455).

However, whereas growth in JobSeeker numbers was 54 per cent during the following two months in Broadmeadows, it was 299 per cent in Toorak.

A shutdown tsunami has washed across metropolitan Australia flattening everything in its path. It is the same story in Sydney.

JobSeeker growth in battler Fairfield during the two months to May was 29 per cent, whereas in beachy Avalon-Palm Beach it was 496 per cent.

The shutdowns are pushing up unemployment rates, as measured by JobSeeker data, in rich areas much faster than in poor areas. Unemployment pain is being equalised (or shared) across the city.

In Hobart, for example, JobSeeker growth in waterfront Sandy Bay is four times greater than in battler Risdon Vale. In Perth, JobSeeker growth in the so-called Golden Triangle’s Cottesloe is six times faster than in less affluent Midland-Guildford.

Generally, there is some distance between a big city’s advantaged and disadvantaged suburbs — public housing’s Elizabeth, for example, is 36km from leafy Belair — but in compact Darwin (pop 140,000) the extremes of the JobSeeker experience are much closer.

The Darwin suburbs of Palmerston South and Moulden are just 2km apart, yet the JobSeeker surge from March to May in the former was six times the latter.

The shutdown’s impact in Darwin, and I suspect this is the case for smaller cities and towns more generally, effectively varies from one street to the next. Programs designed to assist the needy must be finely targeted in regional cities and towns.

We have mapped the JobSeeker surge across Australia. It is evident that Sydney and Melbourne have borne the brunt of the lay-offs. Visually, the impact on Canberra has been more nuanced, perhaps signalling a different experience with the shutdowns than the communities of Sydney and Melbourne.

The evidence suggests that the coming of the coronavirus and the associated shutdowns have caused job losses in literally every Australian community.

The Department of Social Services data is marvellously complete; there is no residential community (of any critical mass) with fewer people unemployed in May than in March. There are no winners. There is no place to hide.

In this sense, we are indeed all in this together. But in another sense, because unemployment was never really the preserve of the well-to-do, the shutdowns are proving to be a mightily levelling experience.

Before the shutdowns, unemployment peaked in far-flung disadvantaged suburbs. But it is now evident that the sons and daughters of Toorak, Palm Beach and Cottesloe are just as likely to be claiming JobSeeker benefits as are those of traditional battler communities.

Perhaps this is because the businesses most affected, our nation’s shops and cafes, are ubiquitous; lay-offs have applied everywhere, affecting all Australians. There are no safe havens. Every Australian household has seen and/or experienced the pain of the shutdowns. There are places where the impact has been less severe, but these tend to be rural and remote communities or comprise battler suburbs with not much more to give, to concede, to the ravaging process.

The question is whether, in recovery mode, the shutdown tsunami will recede first from the advantaged peaks of our biggest cities. Or will the social structure of our cities be permanently rearranged by the JobSeeker floodwaters?

During the lockdown there has been talk of building a better Australia, of creating the businesses and the skills that we will take us forward. But perhaps there is another aspect to be considered about the world that awaits beyond the lockdown.

Perhaps the sharp social divisions that forged our cities across 100 years might be softened by our universal exposure to the coronavirus. After all, the threat of infection and/or unemployment does not recognise any of the old stratifications. Everyone is vulnerable. Or so it would seem.

But it might be that in the post-lockdown world there is also simply less demand for workers in the arts, hospitality and retail as new business models and changed consumer behaviour create a different kind of Australia.

In this world, unemployment sits uncomfortably close to double digits throughout the whole of the 2020s and its wide distribution lessens the gap between the advantaged and the disadvantaged. Toorak and Palm Beach are both chastened and changed by the corona experience.

In this world, finding meaningful work is still important, but so are other activities that build social cohesion. Volunteering, the activities of sporting clubs, service organisations, church groups, schools and the community social responsibility programs of businesses all have a role to play in building a stronger Australia.

I suspect we will be leaving behind reckless mingling in crowds, daily trips to the shops, maybe the idea of daily commuting to CBD workplaces and perhaps also the sharp social stratification of our cities. An event of this scale, with this level of universality, affecting the rich and the poor, could change the trajectory of our careers, our lives and our cities.

Bernard Salt is managing director of The Demographics Group. Research by Hari Hara Priya Kannan. [e-mail]