What's New about Rural Governance? Australian perspectives and introduction to the special issue

Abstract

In spite of an infamously lacklustre campaign, replete with anodyne slogans, the 2010 Australian federal election was a remarkable political event. It produced one of the most unusual outcomes in living memory: a hung parliament, with the balance of power held by a handful of politicians who, collectively, reflected the broad spectrum of political views elected to the new parliament. Eventually, the deadlock over who could form government fell to three men. Tony Windsor, Rob Oakeshott and Bob Katter represent non-metropolitan electorates that can be seen to occupy different positions along the urban-rural continuum. Oakeshott's electorate of Lyne is located in the rapidly growing and urbanising Mid-North Coast of New South Wales where important infrastructure development and employment generation is perceived to be lagging population growth, particularly of the aged. Windsor's electorate of New England, inland of Lyne, is perhaps an archetypal inland, 'agricultural heartland' region, but nevertheless comprising a heterogeneous mix of robust regional centres and hinterland towns, but where population and services decline as levels of remoteness increase. Katter's sprawling electorate of Kennedy, located in the far north-west of Queensland, incorporates a diverse mix of, inter alia, sugar, beef cattle, fishing and mining communities and a substantial Indigenous population. Collectively, these three electorates have borne the brunt of the multi-faceted 'rural crisis' of the 1980s and 1990s (see Lawrence 1987; Pritchard & McManus 2000; Gray & Lawrence 2001). In a nation that has seen levels of urbanisation steadily increase over the past 50 years, and simultaneously witnessed the declining demographic, economic and political fortunes of rural regions, this was truly an unexpected outcome and, if the op. ed. pages of the major capital city newspapers are any indication of city opinion, an unwelcome one for many city residents.