In 1977 Melbourne's then urban planning authority, the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works (MMBW) issued two reports on the city's inner area. The first, a Position Statement on the current state and future prospects of the region noted the on-going decline in blue collar employment in inner Melbourne and warned of the potential for 'serious problems of chronic unemployment' to develop among unskilled workers and others unless efforts were made to generate alternative employment strategies for people displaced by economic restructuring. (MMBW 1977 p. 1) The second report, Socio-economic implications of urban development by Frank Little of Urban Economic Consultants, also voiced concerns about the effects of economic change on inner Melbourne, but was much more alarmist in tone, declaring that the region was experiencing a 'crisis' in manufacturing which was rapidly leading to de-industrialisation, economic stagnation and rising unemployment. (Urban Economic Consultants 1977 pp. 6/7). The report went on to intimate that if these trends were left unchecked there existed the real possibility of the emergence in inner Melbourne of British or American-style urban decay and social disorder. (pp. 6/7) The Little report drew on the work of US sociologist Daniel Bell and others to suggest that, as in many cities across the Western world, the industrial era was coming to end in Melbourne and that in order to ensure economic success in the 1980s and beyond, planners, politicians and business people should immediately institute policies that would facilitate 'the transfer from an industrial to a post-industrial economy'. 'Trying to put off the change', the report warned, 'will only lead to ultimate collapse of that activity (manufacturing) as its structure becomes increasingly outmoded and uncompetitive'. 

Little's was one of a number of voices in the 1970s and early 1980s forecasting the deindustrialisation of the Australian economy and the coming of a post-industrial economic future based on knowledge industries, consumption and the service sector.