Behind closed doors at City Hall, Geelong’s eccentric mayor sits searching for an analogy to put into perspective the punishing job losses battering his city.
Darryn Lyons runs his fingers through his blonde mohawk - the man leading this Australian manufacturing hub was once a paparazzo and reality TV star in Britain - before settling on a way to describe how the departure of companies such as Alcoa and Ford will hurt.
“I relate it a little bit to the prehistoric age, really. The dinosaurs have been going throughout the world for the last seven or eight years,” he said, referring to the struggle to adapt in the face of growing competition from Asia and then the global financial crisis.
Geelong, 75 kilometres south of Melbourne, is a microcosm of the economic crossroads at which Australia stands. The steps authorities and industry leaders take here - securing next-generation defence contracts or incubating carbon fibre production - will be closely watched to see if the city becomes Australia’s Silicon Valley or its Detroit.
Australia largely avoided the turmoil of the global financial crisis by leveraging Chinese demand for its abundant natural resources. The mining boom, however, is slowing and a high Australian dollar has helped drive its manufacturing base overseas.
The announcement last month by US aluminium producer Alcoa that it would close its Point Henry smelter, putting 600 people out of work, was just the latest in what Mr Lyons has called a “tsunami” of manufacturing job losses across the country.
Geelong, home to nearly 180,000 people, is now wrestling with the question facing much of Australia: what happens when there is neither a resources boom nor a substantial manufacturing sector.
Alcoa’s hulking Point Henry smelter, located on a desolate promontory crisscrossed by humming high-voltage cables, feels haunted by the ghosts of manufacturing past.
Behind the plant lies the empty Moolap salt works. Across the bay sits Avalon Airport, where national carrier Qantas in November announced the closure of a maintenance facility, shedding 300 jobs.
The decision last year by Ford to cease manufacturing in Australia by 2016 will take 600 jobs from Geelong and, together with similar moves by Toyota and General Motors in other parts of the country, signalled the end of Australia’s rich history of car manufacturing.
Alcoa’s decision to shut the 50-year-old smelter was taken after a two-year review found no prospect of it becoming financially viable. Australia was once one of the world’s biggest aluminium producers, but has slipped to fifth place as production costs climbed and prices dropped.
By some estimates, more than 10 per cent of Geelong’s population will be affected by the job losses, a fact made evident by the empty shopfronts dotting the city and the “For Sale” signs sprouting across its suburbs.
Adam Oates, 42, has worked at Point Henry for nearly his entire adult life. His father and father-in-law worked for Ford, and he always assumed he would have the sort of job security they enjoyed.
Lately, he said, more and more locals have been comparing Geelong to Detroit, the American city famous for the blight and urban decay brought on by the crisis in its automobile industry.
“The community in Geelong is shattered,” Oates said. “Nobody’s got an idea where we’re going, what we’re gonna do next … the comparison to Detroit has been brought up a lot.”
“I reckon it’s gonna be a ghost town.”
