Book review: City Life, Seamus O’Hanlon (2018)

This is a curious book by an Australian academic that looks at the make-up of cities in the country from the 1960s to the present day, focusing on demographics and especially on employment and housing. I read about 30 percent before giving up at the point where I felt that I had no more to learn. At that point, O’Hanlon was talking about the way the two major cities (Sydney and Melbourne) had become magnets for immigrants from the Middle East and Asia in the early part of this century.

In the earlier parts of the book, the author spends a lot of time on more interesting aspects of the urban story, especially on the way that the economy in the post-war period was altered by deregulation starting in the Whitlam years when import tariffs were cut by 25 percent across the board. The oil shocks of the seventies combined with economic recession in the 1980s to worsen the effects of the widespread unemployment that followed further deregulation under Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, and O’Hanlon spends time later describing the ways that the economy nationwide changed to become more focused on services than on manufacturing.

He also notes that the model for the process of deregulation for which Hawke and Keating are more famous was Scandinavia rather than the UK or the USA, and the pain felt by the working classes in Australia was consequently less acute than that which was felt by workers in those two countries. Here, it was a softer fall, but the end result was the same: manufacturing now accounts for a very small proportion of the wider economy.

Alongside the shift from manufacturing to service jobs was the move of service-industry workers into the inner-city areas of both Melbourne and Sydney. Education, also, has become far more important to the national economy, as have jobs that are dominated by women such as healthcare. Demographic changes and changes in cultural mores have resulted in a very different workforce, now, than the one which was present in the 1970s, the point at which O’Hanlon’s book opens.

The question still has to be asked however whether the removal of cosseted manufacturing industries that were unable to compete against global competitors was a good move. When looked at in the aggregate, you’d have to say that we are better off now than we were in the 1980s when you consider things like the cost of goods and average salaries. To buy consumer goods now it costs a smaller proportion of the average salary. On the other hand, many jobs that are in growing industries now are not unionised, and the increasing number of workers on temporary and casual contracts means that such considerations as job security, and things it such as mortgages that rely on it, is today very much under threat.

Another point that the author makes is that the two big cities are becoming more like other major international entrepots, such as New York or London, than other population centres in Australia, even other capital cities. This is because most immigrants move to these two centres when they arrive in Australia. And our regions are even more dissimilar than Sydney and Melbourne. These differences are likely to lead to a growing sense of alienation in the polis more broadly as the regions react to the slow multiculturalisation of the two big cities where most of the country’s managers also live.

I found the author’s reliance on Latinate words unsurprising but challenging at first, but I persevered with the job of reading the book despite this shortcoming. It’s a common affliction when you read works produced by scholars in the social sciences, they seem to think that words stemming from a Latin root are more respectable than your common-or-garden Germanic noun or adjective.

I have to wonder at the author’s desire to make the book topical, as though no-one would be interested in reading about things that had happened in the immediate post-war period. For me, that period is precisely the most interesting part of the history of the 20th century. But O’Hanlon probably thinks that most people want to read about Chinese migrants buying two-bedroom apartments in Waterloo.