George Megalogenis: Three Shocks Reshaping Australian Politics

Australian politics may be lagging well behind the country it is meant to describe. That is the central argument of Three Shocks, the new book from journalist and author George Megalogenis, who joined the John Curtin Research Centre's podcast to explain how three overlapping shifts have changed who Australians are and how they vote.

The three shocks, as Megalogenis frames them, are mass migration, the transformation of the workforce, and a far less dependable international order. On the last point, he highlights the shifting positions of the United States, Australia's largest traditional ally, and China, its largest trading partner.

Megalogenis says the first two shocks were visible to anyone following the trend lines from the turn of the century. Fertility has sat below replacement level since the mid-1970s, and Australia has avoided a deep recession that might have slowed overseas migration. The result was that the country returned to majority migrant status, meaning most people have at least one parent born overseas. By his reckoning, that threshold was crossed around 2018.

Around the same time, greater Melbourne overtook Sydney in population for the first time since Federation. Megalogenis notes that few would have predicted this in the early 2000s, when Melbourne was still carrying the scars of the early-1990s recession.

To make the data accessible, he uses the image of an Australian family tree that leaves nobody out. Position on the tree is determined by time on the land. First Australians, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, form the roots. Those with both parents born in Australia, at least three generations deep, make up the old Australian trunk. Migrants and their children are the new Australian branches.

Working with the Australian Bureau of Statistics to break the figures down to very small areas, Megalogenis found that the identity shock plays out differently depending on where you look. In earlier eras, the migrant story was much the same everywhere. The largest overseas-born group was English, followed by Irish in the 19th century, then Italians after the war, and later New Zealanders in the 1980s and 1990s.

The decade between the global financial crisis and the COVID lockdowns changed that. Pretty much every capital city now has a different migrant group at the top of its family tree.

The more striking finding concerns the gap between capitals and the second cities nearby. In Melbourne and Sydney, about two-thirds of the population sits in the branches, as first or second-generation migrants. An hour down the road in Geelong, or an hour and a half to two hours from Sydney in Newcastle, the tree inverts, and about two-thirds of residents sit in the trunk. Megalogenis says he did not expect that result when he first crunched the numbers.

The hosts, from the research centre and Redbridge, flagged that the conversation would also take in new dividing lines on the electoral map, in the tradition of the Barassi line, the historian Ian Turner's famous description of the football divide between Australia's north and south.