From 1976 to 2019, around 4000-9000, South Australians (departures minus arrivals) left the state each year. Many were professional couples in their 20’s and 30’s and university graduates.

It’s a rite of passage to leave home in search of new challenges, or to escape unemployment. I did and I was better for it. But how has this ongoing exodus of young people effected Adelaide’s socio-political and economic culture? What happens to innovation and organisational capability?

Expatriates are partly to blame for some of Adelaide’s economic misfortunes. Through no fault of their own, they took with them 40 years of earnings and spending power. Billions of dollars left the state by train, plane and automobile.

The city could have tolerated the flight of human capital for three or four years but not 40.

Back in 2000 the University of Adelaide’s, ‘Bringing Them Back Home’ report summed up the dilemma.

“The proportion of persons with degree and diploma qualifications in the migration stream leaving South Australia is considerably higher than the proportions in the South Australian population. In terms of migrant income, more persons with relatively high income leave the State than arrive.”

Twenty years later, nothing has changed. Youth flight and the ageing of the population have become a self-fulfilling downward spiral. As the local economy contracts, more young people leave and take with them solutions to counter the spiral.

There’s also a qualitative problem as many who left – and who are still leaving – were future innovators, academics, scientists, business men and women and of course, employers.

As a child in the 1960s, I remember playing at the feet of Geoffrey Dutton, Brian Medlin and the Quinn-Youngs. Their passion and intellectual drive have not been replaced.

The reason Adelaide is no longer at the forefront of social justice and anti-discrimination initiatives, is because the best brains started to migrate just as the war generation retired.

The entrepreneurial and professional leadership class has left. From the vacuum arose a raft of public policy problems such as only building one lane of the Southern Expressway, the failed Skills for All initiative, the Child Protection fiasco, the University City project failure, the catastrophe of SA Health, sky rocketing power prices, to name just a few.

Adelaide has snuggled up to the lowest common denominator and called it a standard. This problem has festered for almost two generations.

The movement of brains out of Adelaide has created a congenital and systematic lack of capability at the executive levels of state and local government.

One of the reasons the state is stuck in a predominantly agricultural and manufacturing economy, is that it doesn’t have the critical mass of brain power, expertise and risk takers to carve out a niche.

When expatriates say Adelaide is ‘different’, they are not only talking about the down-at-heel CBD, Port Adelaide or the northern suburbs. They point to how nepotism and parochialism have thrived while recruiting and promoting senior staff with less nous and emotional intelligence than a whippet.

When young people leave, the population ages. Older people spend less cash on goods and services, so spending slows and with recessionary forces at play, they spend even less. The young also shoulder the burden of caring for their aged folks.

This is the way Adelaide will end, not with a bang but with a whimper.