Australian Rural Development: multiple problems, bespoke solutions, the abdication of central governments and the ghost of Friedrich Nietzsche

Abstract

This article focuses on the problem of regional development in rural (non-metropolitan) Australia, home to about 30% of the Australian population (or about 7 million people) living in area approximately the size of the US, south of the 49th parallel. It reports, inter alia, on the nature of the problem; rural regions' political, economic, and environmental contexts; changing regional policy approaches; and the ad hoc, unprogrammed and bespoke responses occurring in a cross section of rural Australia. It draws on Australian Research Council funded research1 conducted in recent years, which explored contemporary approaches to local economic development in non-metropolitan Australia. That study focused on how regional development strategy occurs in reality rather than in the imaginations of central or provincial government politicians and bureaucrats. Apart from the textual analysis of policy documents and reports of parliamentary committees, the project involved interviewing (via structured surveys) 60 leading regional development actors in a 400 km E-W transect of rural NSW from the Mid-North coast to the inland plains shown in Figure 1. The region in question brings together statistical divisions 25 (Mid-North Coast) and 30 (Northern), whose total population is in the order of 460,000 people in an area of about 160,000 sq km, yielding a population density of about 2.9 persons per sq km - dense by Australian standards but low by European.