The drivers of supply and demand in Australia's rural and regional centres

This Paper has reviewed both the literature on regional housing markets and the current and emerging policy environment. It has shown that there have been significant developments in housing policy over the previous two years, with a number of major policy initiatives and substantial public sector investment in housing. The Positioning Paper has suggested that not all new programs and policies are equally accessible to metropolitan and non-metropolitan Australia alike.Andrew Beer, Selina Tually, Steven Rowley, Fiona Haslam McKenzie, Julia Schlapp, Christina Birdsall Jones and Vanessa Corunn

Women's Leadership in Regional Australia

In recent years there has been a growing interest in women's experience of leadership outside of the city, with a now significant range of studies surrounding women in agriculture. A common theme in this research concerns the importance of distinguishing context; that the rural context needs to be seen as distinct from the urban context, and that rural women may face even more barriers in accessing leadership positions than their urban counterparts. In working on a broader project concerning women on regional boards, we observed a tendency for there to be some slippage between notions of 'women in agriculture' and 'women in rural and regional Australia' more generally. With women in agriculture making up less than 10% of women employed in rural and regional Australia, it is the aim of this paper to make visible the varied leadership roles of women in regional Australia. In particular, we review recent data detailing women's representation in a range of regional leadership roles, not just those in agricultural organisations. It seems women have been able to access some leadership roles in their communities, but their representation remains less than their male colleagues. Despite their contribution to their local communities through their diverse roles in paid work and/or their businesses, it seems leadership in regional Australia continues to reinforce the 'naturalness' of men in positions of authority and women in subordinate positions

The limits to public service: rural communities, professional families and work mobility

Australia faces an ongoing challenge recruiting professionals to staff essential human services in rural and remote communities. This paper identifies the private limits to the implicit service contract between professions and such client populations. These become evident in how private solutions to competing priorities within professional families inform their selective mobility and thus create the public problem for such communities. The paper reports on a survey of doctors, nurses, teachers and police with responsibility for school-aged children in Queensland that plumbed the strength of neoliberal values in their educational strategy and their commitment to the public good in career decisions. The quantitative analysis suggested that neoliberal values are not necessarily opposed to a commitment to the public good. However, the qualitative analysis of responses to hypothetical career opportunities in rural and remote communities drew out the multiple intertwined spatial and temporal limits to such public service, highlighting the priority given to educational strategy in these families’ deliberations. This private/public nexus poses a policy problem on multiple institutional fronts

The extended context of career: Families negotiating education and career decisions

In families, decisions about parents’ and children’s education and career require an ongoing negotiation to reconcile the goals of all family members. This paper describes a project which investigates these decisions within families experiencing whole family relocation based on one adult’s work. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with professional workers with school-aged children living in six Australian rural and remote communities. The interview sample included four doctors, 10 teachers, four nurses and nine police. This qualitative phase informed the development of an online survey of a larger sample (n¼278) of the same professional groups, which constituted a second quantitative phase of the research. This paper reports on only one aspect of the survey, that is, the participants’ recording of two previous career location moves they had undertaken and the reasons for these. The data emphasise the family project evident in this decision-making process as the respondents deal with a large range of complex individual, family and broader systems’ influences in reconciling their own careers and their children’s educational opportunities