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Demographic and social changes in Australia

By Asa Wahlquist - posted Monday, 15 November 1999


Life in Australia is changing. None of us can avoid it, whether we live in the inner city, remote Australia, in the suburbs or a regional town.

The challenge is to make that change equitable, to grasp the opportunities it offers. Change is coming from a number of sources, from globalisation, from government, from business, and changed social expectations. Our ability to respond to these pressures varies. Sometimes all we can control is our attitude. And that is not to be dismissed.

Against globalisation, things like world prices for wheat, wool and coal, our choices are limited mainly to producing as efficiently as possible, and to smart marketing.

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We can, within some parameters, change government, and its policies. And here we are seeing some interesting changes in rural Australia. Over the last decade, country Australians have made it clear their vote cannot be taken for granted. I'm not just talking about the passing phase of Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party, but about the rise of well-respected rural independents, who have been significant players in the NSW, Tasmanian, Queensland, South Australian and now Victorian state parliaments.

Some commentators are surprised at the anger from the bush. Let me list a number of reasons.

Rural and regional Australians are, by every significant measure, disadvantaged. Country people die younger, and receive less medical attention. They have lower levels of education and higher unemployment. They have more accidents, suffer worse health, and rural youth has a shockingly high suicide rate.

Country people are also likely to be poorer. Of the 40 poorest federal electorates, 36 are rural or provincial, while only two of the 40 wealthiest electorates, Kalgoorlie and Bowral, are in the country.

In the decade ending in 1996, at least 30,000 jobs were cut in country NSW: jobs that put over one billion dollars into the regional economy. Over 19,500 of those jobs had been cut by State Governments, coalition and Labor.

Between 1996 and 1998 I estimate over 28,500 country jobs were lost nationally, in areas like banking, abattoirs, Telstra, mining and manufacturing.

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The question is, what can we realistically expect government to do?

Country people are telling me there are two things government can, indeed must, do. The first is to provide access to data quality telephony, at costs that reflect the current technology, not the historic model which severely disadvantages country people.

High quality telephony is important because, as services are withdrawn from country areas, people can turn to the internet for provision of educational, banking, counselling and even some medical services. Through the internet country people can be part of larger communities.

It would give country businesses the ability to access the global market, and it would also enable city-based businesses to move to the country, bringing high income earners to country towns.

The second thing government must do is to provide, or facilitate the provision of, transport services.

According to the 1996 census, six and half million Australians, 30 per cent of us, live in non metropolitan Australia, where there are basically three population movements.

First, there is the decline in the dryland wheat belt, and the contraction of smaller towns: in the 21 years to 1997, 205 rural communities lost population, with 70 of them losing a devastating 20 per cent.

Then there are the sponge cities, like Dubbo in NSW, Horsham in Victoria and Narrogin in Western Australia, which are growing often at the expense of outlying towns as services become concentrated in those regional centres.

The third movement is what Bernard Salt from KPMG calls the clamour for the coast. Bernard points out that Australians have always moved around this continent in response to economic imperatives.

He says that in the last two decades, 1.3 million people have moved to the area bounded by Coffs Harbour, Toowoomba and Hervey Bay. 1.3 million: that's equivalent to the entire state of South Australia.

Now, this represents a significant change. Those 1.3 million people were not moving because of economic imperatives: they were moving because of amenity and life-style.

I think this presents great opportunities for rural Australia. But first we must ask the right questions, like how do we build vibrant rural and regional communities in a nation where we are still migrating, still colonising the country?

There is a huge movement of young people out of regional Australia.

Country people often ask, how can we keep our young people in our town?

Now I think it is to be expected that young people want to move away and explore the world. I think the real question should be how do we attract young people, be they the sons and daughters of the town, or young people from elsewhere? And that is a rather different challenge. Certainly a University really helps. James Cook University in Townsville found over 65 per cent of their graduates enter the local workforce.

But small towns can make a difference too. Hyden, an area of just 600 people in Western Australia, asked young people what sort of accommodation they wanted.

The answer was not with Mum and Dad on the farm, nor in a rented house with the landlord hassling them to mow the lawn, but in low maintenance, single person units.

And so they built them, occupied them and have a waiting list.

Now this is not rocket science, but it is hard work. It is about inviting young people to be a valued part of the community, asking what they want and attempting to provide it. It sounds simple, but it is a very different mindset from writing letters in the local paper complaining about the behaviour of the town's youth.

I feel that one of the sources of great pain in rural Australia is the sense of cultural exclusion.

This happens on a practical level, with the refusal of workers to cross the very aptly named Great Dividing Range. Earlier this year I visited Narrabri in northern NSW. It is a very pretty town of 7,000 with an air of modest prosperity. It has a diversified agricultural base, several research institutes, a good hospital and twice daily flights to Sydney.

Last year, the local paper, the Narrabri Courier conducted a survey and found there was a shortage of 118 skilled people, ranging from truck drivers to hydraulic engineers. The Courier itself, after advertising Australia-wide for a printer, finally recruited one from South Africa.

What is happening here? Why are 1.3 million people willing to migrate to the coast where there is higher unemployment, and not to a town as attractive as Narrabri?

I think former Narrabri resident, Dave Anthony put his finger on it. He is deeply frustrated by what he calls the lacklustre, even patronising view of rural Australia from the city, that there has been a failure to talk about the prosperity in the bush, to focus on the country's vibrant communities.

I believe we are seeing a major cultural change in much of rural Australia.

It began with deregulation of the major commodities, the end of government support, and guaranteed minimum prices. Then drought became a business risk farmers must plan for, not an occasion to put their hand out.

Earlier this year then-Deputy Prime Minister, Tim Fischer told farmers to stop whingeing, things were pretty good on the land. He admitted it was a courageous thing for a National Party politician to say, but it was long overdue.

In March at the Outlook conference a production-weighted analysis gave a much more realistic view. For example, the top 25 per cent of graingrowers, over most of this decade, have had a rate of return of 9.9 per cent. If you go to Western Australia you get figures around 15 per cent.

Mid-year Ian McLachlan told woolgrowers there were no magic puddings: they could choose to get up with the profitable top 20 per cent of woolgrowers, or get out.

Imagine saying that in 1991 when the floor price ended.

One of the most important changes country people need to embrace is, to paraphrase Peter Kenyon, to stop waiting for the cavalry to arrive from Canberra or the capital city.

Now I’m not going to be so bold as to forecast the death of the whingeing cocky, but there are communities where he has been abandoned. In the boom towns, there has been a palpable change, the "we'll be rooned" stories in the newspapers have been replaced by articles about local successes.

So how do we get this image across?

This is critically important. Remember, this is a nation in which virtually entire states of people are prepared to move to a better life.

I think there is a lot of grief in rural Australia, because country people feel they are excluded; that multicultural Australia does not include them.

Most city people have little contact with the country and most have little notion of what rural Australia is like, beyond Macca’s Australia All Over, or that whingeing cocky. Neither does it justice.

Think back to the imagery of the fifties: women were housewives, migrants were like those portrayed in Nino Cullutto’s They’re a Weird Mob, Aborigines were invisible and farmers were men who talked slowly and wore battered hats. Now think of the current images. Women work in a wide range of professions. It is the same with immigrant Australians. Aborigines are everything from artists to activists who visit the Queen. But farmers are still men talking slowly wearing big hats.

Now this image is a long way from the truth.

For a start, one third of farmers are women. One third belong to Landcare, view themselves not as rugged individualists but as members of a community, and do more for the environment than many city people who call themselves conservationists. Farmers have a greater uptake of the internet than their city counterparts. They are more likely to be aware of globalisation than city folks. Farming is also a highly technical profession, and I suggest a lot of the fear city people are expressing about genetically modified foods springs from an ignorance about modern farming systems and food production.

Rural Australia is still a vital part of the Australian imagination. Our best poet Les Murray is an ardent advocate for country Australia. A good number of recent novels have all been set in the bush. But they tend to an old-fashioned view of rural Australia. And as for the film industry, it just sees the bush as a source of fabulous scenery and weird characters.

It has been left to the food industry, to Stefano de Pieri, in his ABC TV series "A Gondola on the Murray", to portray the country as home to interesting, vibrant individuals, and new experiences.

Through Stefano’s programs alone nearly one million Australians saw that country Australia does not consist of the stereotypes; rather it is a stimulating place, peopled with interesting characters.

My own personal suggestion to effect cultural change is to relocate Sea Change’s Laura Gibson.

I’d move her to a town like Mudgee, where I can assure her the Lawson Park Hotel has a selection of red wine much more to her liking. She might even find herself drinking it next to the winemaker. Max could move there and abandon his pretensions to a novel on foreign correspondents and write the real Australian novel.

Laura could befriend members of the local arts community, or the foodies. Perhaps there would be an idiosyncratic book-reading cook who’d challenge Max’s place in her affections.

Sea Change tapped that part of the Australian psyche that longs for space, for more time, for down to earth people. That’s all out there in rural Australia too, but city people will not know what country Australia has to offer us, unless we tell them.

There is no doubt there is a great divide today between metropolitan and non-metropolitan Australia: it is reflected in the statistics, in the anecdotes, and in how people from both the city and country feel. Bringing us together is a political challenge, it is a challenge to business, and it is a cultural challenge.

The alternative, to continue on the current path and to effectively abandon much of rural Australia, would greatly diminish us as a nation.

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This is an edited transcript of her presentation to the Regional Australia Summit.



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About the Author

Asa Wahlquist is the Rural Business Writer for The Australian newspaper.

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