Month: May 2022

Sadly, ‘regional’ policies are the enemy of rural areas

Led by Barnaby Joyce the National Party is again missing the opportunity to invest in serious reform and improvement of rural health services. Instead it is pursuing a national resource agenda in just 9 of Australia’s 47 rural electorates. This provides manna for large multinationals but leaves people in the other 38 rural electorates with poor prospects for improved health and health services.

Sports clubs are happy to play the game

In the 2022 election campaign Barnaby Joyce has had his chequebook out to pay for some relatively small local gifts along The Wombat Trail. Recent mentions have included $25 million for an upgrade of the Shepparton Sports Stadium; $600,000 to improve amenities at the Armidale Rams Rugby League Club; and $3.3 million to the Burdekin Shire Council to expand the Ayr Industrial Estate.

One of the trickiest things about such proposals is whether, should the Coalition be returned, they will be supported by the Liberal Party and so become real commitments in the context of a Budget.

But we need to look elsewhere for the real news on what the National Party is doing. The serious money promised by the Nationals for ‘the regions’ is for major infrastructure work in a small number of mining areas, their railheads and associated infrastructure.

Better health is expected to trickle down –

Despite its claims, the National Party has no appetite for direct investment in better rural health services across the whole of rural Australia. Instead, it is happy to rely on the trickle-down health benefits from resource industries, many of which are run by large multinational corporations. The exception is $146 million for the bottomless pit that is the program to try to improve the distribution of GPs.

The narrow focus of the National Party becomes less of a concern when one identifies the proportion of truly rural electorates it holds. Right now it holds just 10 of 47 electorates that are properly ‘rural’. The Liberal Party holds 13 and the ALP 12. The Liberal National Party (LNP) has nine – all of them in Queensland – meaning that the Coalition as a whole (Liberal plus LNP pus Nationals) has 32 of 47, or 68 per cent. Three rural seats are held by Independents.

(Note: members of the LNP who are elected can choose to join the National Party’s caucus rather than the Liberals’. This adds further confusion to what is already a bizarre parliamentary arrangement.)

‘Rural Electorates’ 2019-2022: as defined by AEC classification plus area

PartyAEC ProvincialAEC RuralAEC Outer Metro.Total ‘Rural electorates’ %
Liberal2 1011328
LNP3 6   919
Nationals1 9 1021
ALP4 711226
Independents0 3   3  6
Adjusted total10 35247 100

These numbers are based on two criteria. The first is the Australian Electoral Commission’s (AEC’s) categorisation of each of the 151 federal divisions (electorates) to one of four ‘demographic ratings’ on the basis of the location of enrolled voters. The third and fourth categories are Provincial and Rural. Those deemed Provincial are “outside capital cities, but with a majority of enrolment in major provincial cities”. The AEC’s Rural electorates are those “outside capital cities and without majority of their enrolment in major provincial cities”.

The second criterion for inclusion in the list is spatial size (area). Whatever their AEC classification, electorates of less than  1,913km² are excluded. (This is the size of the of the ACT electorate of Bean contested for the first time in 2019. Although it is part of the Bush Capital, no-one would dare suggest that it is ‘rural’! By way of comparison, Eden-Monaro has an area of 41,617 km² and Durack in WA 1,383,954km2.)

The AEC classifies 61 electorates as Provincial or Rural

Of the 151 federal electorates, the AEC classifies 23 as Provincial and 38 as Rural. Thirteen AEC-Provincials and three AEC-Rurals are excluded on the basis of small size. They include Geelong, Gosford, three seats in Newcastle, Townsville, the Blue Mountains and the Gold Coast. Eight of the 16 excluded are held by the ALP.

The AEC’s 61 less 16, plus two AEC-Outer Metros (included on the basis of large area) makes 47. A list of the 47 rural electorates as defined by these criteria is at the foot of this article.

Rural electorates by Party, 2019-2022

Rural health v. regional infrastructure

The National Party refers to rural and remote areas as ‘the regions’. To the extent that they treat rural affairs as a priority at all, it is through a focus on mineral-rich regions that underpin Australia’s export income, GDP and affluence.

But the majority of Australia’s rural and remote people are not in such regions. They are in rural or regional centres or small country towns with mixed economies based on agriculture, service sectors (especially health and education), retail, tourism and transportation.

Beardy Street in Armidale

The most important thing about Barnaby Joyce’s return to leadership of the National Party was not the impact of renewed leadership but the opportunity to re-negotiate the secret deal with the Prime Minister. Joyce seems to have demanded a high price for Nationals’ support for – or at least acquiescence to – a policy of net zero emissions by 2050. It remains to be seen whether this was a core promise or whether it is “all over bar the shouting”.

Given its secrecy, the precise dollar figure extracted by Barnaby Joyce this time is unknown. The AFR has reported that, in addition to the one extra seat in Cabinet, the cost will be $17-34 billion over the coming decade. Budget documents show $17 billion in extra spending for road and rail projects, $6.9 billion for water infrastructure projects (dams) in regional communities, and $2 billion for a “regional accelerator program to drive transformative economic growth and productivity in regional areas”.

Armed with this treasure chest, since his return to leadership of the Party, Joyce has made massive budgetary promises to four regions: the Pilbara, the Northern Territory (including Darwin), the Hunter, and North and Central Queensland. These are critical for Australia’s economic wellbeing. And no-one should begrudge them the support they will need to maintain their enormous economic contributions while the economy as a whole is transitioning to lower dependence on carbon.

But these four regions are contained within just nine of the 47 rural electorates. The Pilbara and associated infrastructure are in Durack, and the Northern Territory comprises two electorates. The chief mineral resource operations of North and Central Queensland are in five electorates: Leichhardt, Kennedy, Dawson, Flynn and Capricornia. (Herbert is less than 100 km² in size and provincial.) Many of the mineral resources currently being exploited in New South Wales are in the seat of Hunter, with three seats in Newcastle also heavily engaged.

Most rural towns are not dependent on mineral exports –

What about the people of the other 38 rural electorates?

It is not a matter of investment in mining infrastructure being a  waste. The nation is very heavily dependent on mineral exports. But following his success in taking the Prime Minister to the cleaners in their secret agreement, Barnaby Joyce has so far failed to recognise the importance of reform of the rural health sector and the integration of improvements in the social determinants across all parts of the country.

Trickle-down or crumbs from the table is no way to treat the people of 38 rural electorates covering places like Uralla and Eucumbene, Kojonup and Kempsey, Port Augusta, Port Arthur and Port Fairy. It will do nothing in the short term for people in these areas who are unemployed, living with a disability, hoping to age in place, find it difficult to access education, or experience significant disease risk factors.

National Party Royalty: Doug Anthony, Jack McEwen, Peter Nixon and Ian Sinclair, 1969.

Australia’s 47 Rural Electorates

  AEC RuralHeld byState
DawsonLNPQueensland
FlynnLNPQueensland
LeichhardtLNPQueensland
MaranoaLNPQueensland
Wide BayLNPQueensland
WrightLNPQueensland
FarrerLiberalNew South Wales
BarkerLiberalSouth Australia
GreyLiberalSouth Australia
BraddonLiberalTasmania
CaseyLiberalVictoria
MonashLiberalVictoria
WannonLiberalVictoria
DurackLiberalWA
ForrestLiberalWA
O’ConnorLiberalWA
LyonsALPTasmania
McEwenALPVictoria
Eden-MonaroALPNew South Wales
GilmoreALPNew South Wales
HunterALPNew South Wales
RichmondALPNew South Wales
LingiariALPNorthern Territory
GippslandNationalsVictoria
MalleeNationalsVictoria
NichollsNationalsVictoria
CalareNationalsNew South Wales
LyneNationalsNew South Wales
New EnglandNationalsNew South Wales
PageNationalsNew South Wales
ParkesNationalsNew South Wales
RiverinaNationalsNew South Wales
IndiIndependentVictoria
KennedyIndependentQueensland
MayoIndependentSouth Australia
AEC ProvincialsHeld byState
BassLiberalTasmania
CapricorniaLNPQueensland
GroomLNPQueensland
HinklerLNPQueensland
CowperNationalsNew South Wales
HumeLiberalNew South Wales
BallaratALPVictoria
BendigoALPVictoria
CorangamiteALPVictoria
BlairALPQueensland
AEC Outer Metro.  
CanningLiberalWA
FranklinALPTasmania
These are the 47 true rural electorates (as at 2022).

Election coverage 2022: ridiculous questions, irrelevant answers

In this year’s federal election campaign there has been justified criticism of journalists’ fondness for gotcha questions. But there is a  broader and more costly crisis in the way that election campaigns are structured and covered by media.

For very good reason there has been much said recently about the role of the media in the election campaign. Special criticism has been directed at the propensity of too many journalists to ask so-called ‘gotcha’ questions. This trivialises discussion of the stance of the parties on policy issues.

However, there is another approach to media coverage of the election campaign that is equally facile and useless, albeit less toxic. This is the construction, through interviews with selected members of the public, of what is believed to be a policy agenda against which the political parties can be judged.

This process is premised on erroneous beliefs about how and when individual voters make decisions about who they will vote for. It provides much of the basis for a mistaken belief that promises made during the campaign play a major role in determining the election result.

Among other things, this process provides a rationale for the supposed existence of a cohort of swinging voters large enough to determine the result, and who will decide in the last days of the campaign who they will support.

The true situation is that the result of the election is determined by the cumulative perception of the majority of voters of events over three years. For the vast bulk of electors this perception is fixed before the circus of the campaign begins and intersects with their normal voting behaviour. In just a small proportion of cases the intersection of habitual voting practice and perception of a party’s performance over three years leads to a change in voting

behaviour. The net result of these changes in two directions – to and from the major parties – determines the outcome.

The stupidity of this system of election coverage and the beliefs that underpin it is illustrated by the ubiquitous use of ‘vox pops’ from ‘interesting electorates’. The commonest question posed in such high street encounters is along the lines of “What do you think are the important issues for voters in this electorate?” In effect this is asking a random individual voter to summarise the policy landscape as if they will cast their vote on the basis of a Party’s performance on each of its elements. Policy issues selected will be based on what has happened over the previous three years, shaped largely by the media into an agenda that is characterised by almost universal agreement on what is on it, even though the position of individual media entities on each element may be different.

Thus it is that the currently accepted policy agenda comprises the cost of living (for which a proxy is the cost of energy in the home), the relationship with China, trust in government processes (and how they might be improved), climate change, job availability and the security of work, the establishment’s treatment of women, and the ongoing impact of Covid 19. Also on the list are issues that no reasonable person, when stopped in the street by a reporter with a microphone, would deny: health, education, the cost of childcare and the war in Europe.

 We are expected to believe that the Coalition’s and the ALP’s position on these “current priorities” will soon determine the vote of the person being interviewed on the street and that they are representative of voters in this key (marginal) electorate. The trouble is that they and everyone else has only one  vote, and in most cases it is rusted on to one of the major political groupings: Liberal, Labor, Green or National.

If the interviewee is an unemployed homeowner or tenant, electricity prices will be important. But so might be management of climate change, continuity of government, the Ukraine, secure borders and the pay of aged care workers. Which to choose as the determinant of their vote?

If the vox pop is for television, the producer of the segment will select for broadcast according to the value of the talent (an interesting face; a bizarre response) and with an eye to political balance for the piece, the program and the media entity.

Not part of the currently accepted policy agenda are reform of the taxation system, improving productivity, social and economic inequality, the Uluru statement, reform of aged care, funding of the NDIS, the concentration of media ownership, the more esoteric matters relating to faith, culture and gender, and ‘national security’.

Just about the only useful question to be put to someone in the street is: “Do you intend to change your vote from the last time?”

If the answer is yes, the reasons are worth identifying. It is probably caused by accumulated feelings of frustration and alienation with their usual preference, a view of the party leaders, or by a change in the personalities in the local contest. It is almost certainly not due to one party’s decision on one of the so-called key issues.

Given these views about the use and purpose of much of the way an election campaign is covered by the media, one obvious conclusion is that it is a poor use of scarce parliamentary resources. It is useful every three years to raise the profile of safe, democratic political processes. But too much of the content of election campaigns is meaningless and too much of the apparent excitement is bogus.