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

Fly-In/Fly-Out, Flexibility and the Future: Does Becoming a Regional FIFO Source Community Present Opportunity or Burden?

The resources boom in Australia has resulted in considerable competition for labour, particularly in remote mining areas. Shortage of skilled labour has led mining companies to source workers from far afield, while the high incomes created by a tight labour market draw labour from across the country through long-distance commuting arrangements such as fly-in/fly-out (FIFO). While much recent literature has focused on the impacts on receiving communities of these long-distance commuters, less attention has been given to the experience of source communities. This paper compares the situation between two regional towns in which long-distance commuters reside. The first, Busselton in Western Australia, is among several chosen by Rio Tinto to be labour source communities. The second, Stawell in Victoria, is looking to long-distance commuting as a response to the impending closure of their existing gold mine. Hence the case studies offer not only insights into source communities’ experience of longdistance commuting, but also a comparison between the bottom-up approach of Stawell in trying to establish FIFO with the experience of Busselton as an example of top-down labour sourcing. This paper seeks to highlight some of the development challenges encountered by communities and offer solutions as to how these might be addressed for the future

Complex and contradictory: the doing of gender on regional development boards

In this paper we explore the complex, and in many ways contradictory, picture of how gender is enacted and reinforced within regional development boards/commissions in NSW and WA. While the number of women on these regional organisations has increased over the past decade, the overwhelming sense of these organisations is one of homogeneity. Members of the boards/commission are very alike in age and socio-economic circumstances, highlighting that body counting by sex doesn't adequately capture gender, which we take to be a socially constructed facet of identity. Recognising gender as a social construction (West and Zimmerman, 2002), where the doing of masculinity is privileged over femininity takes our analysis to a deeper level. In this context, as Ministerially appointed organisations, the individuals appointed can be seen to be privileged through the social structures. Their roles, while ambiguous, provide status to those involved and benefits through increased networking and knowledge. Their membership positions them within the (masculine) hegemony (Connell, 2005). For women to be appointed to these roles, they have had to perform much like their male counterparts, so they can 'pass' for the elite and their nominations be accepted by the Minister; that is, they are connected, have a high profile and they are able to understand and conform to the 'rules' of the boards/commissions (in terms of being able to make it to meetings, fit in socially with the group, like mindedness...)

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 resource boom's underbelly: Criminological impacts of mining development

Australia is currently in the midst of a major resources boom. Resultant growing demands for labour in regional and remote areas have accelerated the recruitment of non resident workers, mostly contractors, who work extended block rosters of 12-hour shifts and are accommodated in work camps, often adjacent to established mining towns. Serious social impacts of these practices, including violence and crime, have generally escaped industry, government and academic scrutiny. This paper highlights some of these impacts on affected regional communities and workers and argues that post-industrial mining regimes serve to mask and privatize these harms and risks, shifting them on to workers, families and communities

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

Planning regional development in Australia: questions of mobility and borders

Radically changing ideas and practices around mobility and borders have made the question regarding how best to approach and plan regional development in Australia more complex. Using the conceptual tools offered by the 'mobility turn' and 'relational regions', this paper assesses the usefulness of place-based development (PBD) approaches in addressing contemporary planning challenges of mobility and borders. Through a case study of the Latrobe Valley's 'Industry and Employment Roadmap', this paper concludes that PBD approaches to regional planning offer a means of recognising: (1) both mobility and place in processes of regional development; and (2) the fluid nature of borders in these processes