Government has some bigger roles in the Bush

It is widely accepted that rural Australia faces serious problems. Economic and social difficulties have serious impacts on the quality of life across rural Australia. Eventually, they permeate the whole community. Obviously, there is a responsibility for government to address these problems. Attempts have been made but unfortunately, they’ve failed.

I don’t have the qualifications to deliver comprehensive plans, but with the benefit of suggestions of experienced people and drawing from some of the material recently published by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission, I make the following comments on two rather diverse areas. One is a symptom of the problems in rural Australia – health care. The other is an available solution to a significant number of difficulties in rural Australia - the adoption of new information technology.

Health Care

It is no secret that rural health care is perennially in crisis. Famously, there is an under-supply of medical practitioners. For whatever reason, doctors are not, for the most part, attracted to the idea of long-term careers in the bush.

Less famously, there is a crisis in the supply of mental health services. According to a 1993 report, mental health services are almost non-existent in rural areas.

When you think about it, it is incredible. A sector of the community that has the highest unemployment rates, massive rates of youth suicide, fracturing communities and desertion by essential commercial institutions is almost ignored in terms of mental health care.

Those of us in metropolitan areas are also largely unaware of the major substance abuse problems that dog rural communities. The impression we have of drugs is one shaped by television, the movies and other media of popular culture to the effect that hard drugs are a city thing. We think of crack houses in New York, junkies in dark alleys and cocaine being snorted by stockbrokers at expensive parties. For most of the more metropolitan of us, drugs are just part of that urban decadence thing that, to some at least, seems slightly chic.

The reality is quite different. Drug abuse and alcohol abuse are serious problems for rural Australia.

The symptoms will always be manifested in human beings and a large part of that manifestation will be emotional distress and mental illness. It is, therefore, essential that we make major improvements to rural mental health infrastructure – and soon.

Rural Australians need a commitment from government to find ways of providing services to support family structures, to deal with depression, to deal with substance abuse and to deal with the terrible rate of youth suicide in non-metropolitan areas.

Technology

At the other end of the scale are the economic problems that face rural Australia. Economics in the last twenty years of the century have been about improving efficiency. At the farm level, this has been an absolute necessity as they cope with long-term drought and the deprivation that brings. Accordingly, popular wisdom suggests that Australian farmers, in the absence of the protection afforded to major competitors, are amongst the most efficient in the world.

However, one area of efficiency that remains significantly ignored in terms of rural Australia is investment in technology. The problem ranges from investment in technology for rural manufacturing and processing businesses like abattoirs to electronic service delivery by government to fast, reliable access to the Internet.

We are often told, because it is true, that information technology is the way of the future. One way of categorizing people in the new millennium will be the information rich and the information poor. That divide will be one whose threshold is access to information technology.

In a country whose population is so widely dispersed, information technology ought to be a Godsend for government. The capacity to deliver myriad services to people in remote locations is enhanced exponentially by technology available today. It is a method for ensuring that people don’t have to leave rural Australia to have access to those services.

What we need is vision.

Earlier in this century, the public sector embarked on a major enterprise – the Snowy River. People talk about a railway line linking Adelaide to Darwin as a major project worthy of our pursuit. These are small fry compared with what we could do. At the turn of the next century, the greatest, most significant investment we could make is to make sure that every Australian has access to the Internet.

As people begin to conduct more of their business on the Internet, and they will, other avenues of doing business will become obsolete and disappear. If there is more Internet trading in goods, there will be fewer shops from which to purchase goods. If professionals such as lawyers, accountants and engineers realize that they can deliver their services more cheaply over the Internet rather than paying for overheads, such services still provided on a traditional basis will significantly increase in cost. When companies realize that many workers could work from home thus reducing the expenses associated with office accommodation, those not able to work from home will be significantly disadvantaged.

Those who don’t have access to the Internet will be profoundly isolated. Those most at risk of isolation in this regard are those already isolated by distance – rural Australians.

The former Coalition Government in Queensland pursued some important strategies towards avoiding this problem. The Connect.Ed program pursued by Education Queensland had the effect of introducing necessary infrastructure to more remote locations.

The way forward now is to make sure that we continue to maximize the opportunities for people in the bush to gain access to the online world. We need to make sure that there are good training institutions nearby to get people from regional communities into the technical side of the online world. We need to make sure that more companies start to make use of the fact that technology now removes the need of sizeable chunks of commerce to be located in major cities. With the correct infrastructure, many business units can be operated highly successfully in regional areas. The classic example of this is the call centre. Enterprises such as this also benefit the local communities by providing employment in both low and high skill areas.

The Federal Government has played a part through the institution of the Regional Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund.

It comes back to the fact that bush people need access. They need it to get the services that city people take for granted. They deserve it to get a standard of communication, education and living that every person in Australia deserves.

Both of these issues are about essential human rights in a modern nation such as ours.

Human rights evolve over time as a community has the capacity to deliver them. There are certain rights that are inalienable and timeless such as freedom of thought and speech, but in Australia in 1999, people also have the right to be healthy and the right to be informed. They might seem like two divergent areas, but I think that for the bush, they are closely tied together.