Demographic and social changes in Australia

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 In the boom towns, there has been a palpable change, the "we'll be rooned" stories in the newspapers have been replaced by articles about local successes.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.