Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

Australian Politics and Policy
regional areas and pushed people into cities. These changes have had profound
impacts on rural, regional and remotely located businesses, communities and people.
Regional policy has the potential to shape economic, social and environmental
outcomes by setting priorities and developing initiatives to achieve outcomes.
Depending on government goals, policy frameworks can facilitate or impede
community and regional development. The implementation of regional policy over
the last 70 years has been haphazard, with many shifts in policy direction.
Consequently, the outcomes have been uneven, often causing considerable angst
and even voter backlash.
This chapter commences by outlining the spatial boundaries of rural and
regional Australia and how data about non-metropolitan Australia is recorded.
Regional policy is then explained, followed by its practical application in Australia,
focusing particularly on the decades since the Second World War. The discussion
of policy highlights the often blurred responsibilities of the different spheres of
government. The following section examines the reorientation of Australian
political and economic policies in the later decades of the 20th century, shifting
from Keynesian influenced initiatives, the hallmark of which is government
intervention and regulation to policies that reoriented Australian industries to
global markets and reduced the role of government as the source of infrastructure
investment and provider of services in rural, regional and remote communities.
Australian regional development policy in the opening decades of the 21st century
is then examined, framed by increasing regional voter dissatisfaction but also by
considerable national wealth from regionally based industries, which saved
Australia from being drawn into the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Concessions
given to the National Party and to regionally based independent politicians by
the major parties have avoided the real threat of hung parliaments and redirected
spending to regional areas. The chapter concludes with an assessment of current
regional policy arrangements.
Defining rural and regional Australia
Unlike other jurisdictions, in Australian political and public policy discourse
‘regions’ and ‘regional’ are often understood as synonyms of ‘rural areas’. 2 In most
other countries, cities are considered discrete regions and regional development
policies usually address their needs in the same way as farming, mining and other
non-metropolitan regions. In Australia, regional policy focuses on nonmetropolitan
places.
RegionalAustraliaisnothomogenous;itincludesalarge,spatiallydiverse
area with considerable economic, climatic, social, environmental, population and
settlement diversity. However, regions are generally assumed to have something
2 Brown and Bellamy 2007; Paül and Haslam McKenzie 2015, 10.
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