Local development under uncertainty: Australia's rural experience

Abstract

Rural Australia's well-being is largely reliant on primary industries operating in increasingly uncertain and risky economic, social and physical environments. Unlike much of the world, the primary sector and its dependent rural communities operate on market principles and receive little in the way of government support. Both mining and agriculture are also strongly export oriented, which adds to uncertainty through fluctuating exchange rates and commodity prices - the latter being distorted by widespread producer subsidies. In Australia's case, producers face the added risks of large fluctuations in seasonal conditions and rapid technological expansion in often remote and sparsely settled locations. Such conditions lead to the rapid transformation of rural society in often unexpected and certainly uncontrolled ways, yet for the most part rural regions are innovative and prosperous. The keys to prosperity, and the stable adaptation accompanying it, are four-fold. First, the absence of significant public support for agriculture, mining and rural settlements has encouraged commercial mindsets among rural residents attuned to a market economy. That, secondly, has made a virtue of an innovative culture focused on the rapid transfer among commodity producers of intensive research and development. Market economies also reward individual and self-reliant behaviours which abound in rural Australia. Finally, government policies have sought to reward innovation and investment rather than retain the status quo. The outcome is not only prosperity, but huge adaptive capacity which is beneficially rewriting the geography of rural communities and exposing flaws in Richard Florida's metrocentric views of the creative society.