Quarterly Essay 42 Fair Share

Country and City in Australia

Judith Brett

• Publisher: Quarterly Essay
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781921870323
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Rural Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Once the country believed itself to be the true face of Australia: sunburnt men and capable women raising crops and children, enduring isolation and a fickle environment, carrying the nation on their sturdy backs. For almost 200 years after white settlement began, city Australia needed the country: to feed it, to earn its export income, to fill the empty land, to provide it with distinctive images of the nation being built in the great south land. But Australia no longer rides on the sheep's back, and since the 1980s, when "economic rationalism" became the new creed, the country has felt abandoned, its contribution to the nation dismissed, its historic purpose forgotten.In Fair Share, Judith Brett argues that our federation was built on the idea of a big country and a fair share, no matter where one lived. We also looked to the bush for our legends and we still look to it for our food. These are not things we can just abandon. In late 2010, with the country independents deciding who would form federal government, it seemed that rural and regional Australia's time had come again. But, as Murray-Darling water reform shows, the politics of dependence are complicated. The question remains: what will be the fate of the country in an era of user-pays, water cutbacks, climate change, droughts and flooding rains? What are the prospects for a new compact between country and city in Australia in the twenty-first century? Once the problems of the country were problems for the country as a whole. But then government stepped back … The problems of the country were seen as unfortunate for those affected but not likely to have much impact on the rest of Australia. The agents of neoliberalism cut the country loose from the city and left it to fend for itself. —Judith Brett, Fair Share 'Brett is one of our most experienced and sober commentators on currents in the conservative/rural stream, and always deserves a hearing. Fair Share gives a clear and solid account on how we have come to focus on the Big Country as a problem.' — Canberra Times 'A clear and compelling account of how the country went from being a key source of the nation's economy, pride and sense of self, to a problem that needs to be addressed.' —the Week 'An unalloyed expose of the plight of those who live in the countryside.' —Ross Fitzgerald, the Australian Judith Brett is professor of politics at La Trobe University and one of Australia's leading political thinkers. She is a former editor of Meanjin and columnist for the Age. She is the author of the award-winning Robert Menzies' Forgotten People and Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class: From Alfred Deakin to John Howard (2003), which was shortlisted for the Queensland premier's prize for non-fiction.

Fair Share

Country and City in Australia

Judith Brett

“We live in a big country and should all share the cost.”—Bruce Evans, ABC Country Viewpoint, 11 February 2002

In the days after the 2010 election, as both Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott courted the votes of the independents in the hope of winning the crucial one or two seats that would deliver them government, the voice of the Australian country re-asserted itself. Three of the four independents were from rural Australia: Tony Windsor, who has held the seat of New England in New South Wales since 2001; Bob Katter, member for the huge, far north Queensland seat of Kennedy since 1993; and Rob Oakeshott, who first won the NSW coastal seat of Lyne at a by-election in 2008. All had once been members of the National Party.

The styles were different: Tony Windsor in his short-sleeved, open-necked shirt was thoughtful and courteous; Bob Katter aggressively flamboyant with his wide-brimmed Stetson worn indoors and out; and Rob Oakeshott didn’t know when to stop talking. But they all articulated arguments and claims which had a long history in Australian political life and had been scarcely heard in an election campaign centred on the marginal seats of the capital cities.

In August last year, as we waited to see whether Labor or the Coalition would form the government, Tony Windsor and Bob Katter talked to Leigh Sales on the ABC’s Lateline. Rob Oakeshott couldn’t join the conversation because of the poor state of telecommunications outside the capital cities. Sales asked her guests about the population debate.

Tony Windsor: It’s been a debate that’s been politically marketed into Western Sydney because that’s where both of them think that the balance of power will be actually determined, the winner will be determined in those western suburbs. And that’s a nonsense to have that debate when there’s massive regional areas that haven’t been developed, could be developed … there’s unused infrastructure in many of these communities and the population could expand and grow in some of these areas, but not in Sydney anymore. We’ve done too much of that. But government policy has driven that.

The centralist policies that we’ve had in the past have all been about driving people into a feedlot, and that feedlot’s Sydney and suddenly the feedlot is full. And now we’re talking about closing down the rest of Australia because we can’t fit any more people in the feedlot.

Bob Katter: We don’t want them to go to the cities. We want to take some of the people out of Sydney and Melbourne and put them where they can have a civilised lifestyle, which we can provide for them in Australia … if you drop a series of hydrogen bombs from the back of Cairns, the other side of Mareeba, 30 kilometres from Cairns, all the way across to Broome, you won’t kill anybody. There’s nobody living there … there’s about 95 per cent of the surface area of Australia – just cut out the little coastal strip and a little dot around Perth: the population’s not much different than when Captain Cook arrived. There’s only 670,000 people living on 95 per cent of the surface area of the country. And, I mean, we’re talking about overpopulation! … Everyone is just moving away from rural Australia, where we’ve got miles of infrastructure that’s not being used, and cramming into the cities. I mean, and there’s not the slightest word in all of this election campaign about that problem or repopulating the people into these demographic centres where we can absorb huge amounts of population.

Not only do both men believe in a big Australia and the need to fill the empty land; both also reveal deep-seated assumptions that country life is better. Katter is frank: get people out of Sydney and Melbourne to where they can have a civilised life; Windsor’s image of the city as a feedlot is rich with unsavoury associations of passivity, overcrowding and the smell of shit.

The country and the city are cultural as well as geographic locations. The brilliant cultural critic Raymond Williams has described the long history of the rivalry between the Country and the City in Western thought. Since the Romans, clusters of moral and cultural meanings have formed round these complex words and there have been continuing arguments about which is the best place for people to live: the country with its sturdy independence, nearness to nature and friendly people; or the sophisticated city with its cultural richness and the freedom of anonymity. That’s the upside. But each also has a downside: the city as overcrowded, dirty, full of sin and temptation, a place of alienation and lonely people; the countryside as backward and oppressively conservative, peopled by hayseeds and rural idiots. And so on. The interplay of the virtues and vices of the country and the city is different in different times and places. Sometimes the country will have the upper hand, sometimes the city. But always there will be grievances, as claims about respective virtues and vices are marshalled in political struggles over the allocation of symbolic and material resources.

Since at least the 1970s in Australia the city has had the upper hand and the country has been pushed aside. In fact, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, the word “country” had all but disappeared from Australia’s political vocabulary as a word for the settled countryside, replaced by “regional” for major non-metropolitan centres and “rural” for areas of sparse population, although regional often does for both. Even country Australia’s very own political party has abandoned the word: in 1982 the Australian Country Party changed its name to the National Party of Australia in a vain attempt to turn itself from a sectional party of farmers and rural small business into a broad-based conservative party. It is only in country music that the word is common, and even there it is shadowed by the Aboriginal meaning of country to evoke spiritual belonging to one’s traditional land.

It wasn’t always thus. Once the country believed itself to be the true face of Australia: sunburnt men and capable women raising crops and children, enduring isolation, hardship and a fickle environment, carrying the nation on their sturdy backs. There were reasons for this, as this essay will show. For almost 200 years after white settlement began, city Australia needed the country: to feed it, to earn its export income, to fill the empty land, to provide it with distinctive images of the nation being built in the great south land. This gave the country strong claims for resources and it pushed them hard. In August last year, with the fate of the government again in the hands of country Australians, we heard these claims again, and so too the grievance that the contribution and potential of the country were easily forgotten by politicians chasing city votes.

As Katter told Leigh Sales:

the position of rural Australia will be taken into consideration, which has not been the case over the last twelve years under the LNP and over the last three years under the ALP and the ALP previous to that. We were just not taken into consideration at all. The party system has served the big city interests, the big corporate interests, but it has not served the interests of ordinary people, 30 per cent of us, which live outside of the major capital cities.

Windsor hoped a hung parliament “might be a wake-up call for the parties that running these Western Sydney-type campaigns leaves a lot of people out of the debate and country people are sick of being left out.”

After seventeen tense days of negotiation and speculation, the three country independents announced their decisions: Katter would back the Opposition and Windsor and Oakeshott would support the previous government. Reportedly, Windsor and Oakeshott sat down in Windsor’s office with an A4 sheet of paper divided into two columns, one headed Labor and the other Coalition. They lined up the generous offers each side had made of support for the regions. The clincher was Labor’s commitment to broadband, described by Windsor as the most important piece of infrastructure for rural Australia.

Labor drew up a post-election agreement with Windsor and Oakeshott, which contained an appendix titled “Commitment to Regional Australia”. It began with a preamble that justified the special treatment the agreement promised:

One out of every three Australians lives in a community that is part of regional Australia. These are the Australians who are chiefly responsible for the fresh food that every day is on the table of Australian families in cities, suburbs and across the nation.

They are the Australians who generate wealth from our natural resources, who play a leading role in sectors like tourism and manufacturing, and who often battle the adversities of drought, floods, fire and cyclones.

They may choose to live in regional communities because of the lifestyle and the benefits to family life that it offers. Their labours drive our nation’s prosperity, particularly through the small businesses they run, but too often they have not been given their fair share of Australia’s successes.

The quality of healthcare, education, broadband, transport and infrastructure has been allowed to fall behind that of other parts of the nation, leading to continued urbanisation and discontent in regional areas.

There followed a promised cornucopia of government-delivered services and benefits. Country Australia was to be given its own cabinet-level minister, a new dedicated department, a cabinet sub-committee, a new House of Representatives committee, a coordinating unit in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, and a Regional Development Policy Centre. Spending on the country was to be made more transparent in budget reporting at all levels, and there was to be lots of it: a National Broadband Network, investment in regional health, education, infrastructure, agriculture and water management.

The undertaking was that regional Australia will get its “fair share.” The term “fair share” is used three times in the “Commitment”, along with “fair hearing,” “fair return,” “equitable” distribution of funds, and commitment to “the equity principle” in the formulae governments use to distribute funds. In the case of broadband, “fair and equal access” was to be achieved by government putting in place a subsidy to create a uniform wholesale price so that regional users can pay the same prices as people in the city. In a big country, this is a very expensive commitment! Sometimes regional Australia was to have priority; for example, it was to be “the first to receive funding under key education initiatives and reforms.” Why? Presumably because it had fallen so far behind, though no evidence was provided to support this. Or did the idea of a “fair share” speak for itself?

“Fair share” is a companion term in the Australian political lexicon to the more familiar “fair go,” the shorthand used to sum up Australia’s historic egalitarian ethos. “Fair share” is not quite so common in everyday speech, but it evokes the same tradition and its reliance on the umpire of the state to settle competing claims.

According to the historian John Hirst, “fair go” is an Australian invention, deriving from the English “fair play,” and it means keeping to the rules, treating people equally and giving someone a decent chance. It was a cardinal principle of the labour movement and its struggle for fair and decent wages and state assistance to individuals through the benefits of the welfare state. More recently John Howard also evoked it in his projection of himself as an ordinary Australian bloke who believed that, along with practical mateship, the fair go was one of the “uniquely Australian concepts” which underpinned our society. He linked it firmly to individual wellbeing and basic welfare entitlements.

What of “fair share”? Most often when Australians think about their country’s egalitarian traditions, they think of the informality of manners and absence of relations of deference – such as sitting in the front of taxis and an aversion to tipping – and of conditions in the workplace – high minimum wages and reasonable working conditions. They think, that is, about class relations. But there is another historically important strand of Australian egalitarianism that is focused on regional or spatial equity. Since federation, part of the Australian commitment to fairness has been a commitment to regional equality, to keeping living standards relatively equal across the continent so that Australia would not have very poor and very rich regions, such as the sort of differences which have long held between the north and south of Italy. The Tasmanian premier, Lara Giddings, appeals to this idea as she fights off accusations from other premiers that Tasmania has become a mendicant, bludging off the more productive and better managed states: “It’s all about Aussie mateship and a fair go. I have great faith in the values of equity and fairness in Australia … We are a regional economy and we will not survive without the bigger states helping to cross-subsidise our regional economy.” Built into the notion of what it is to be an Australian is an idea of certain social entitlements, shared access to basic services, a shared minimum standard of living wherever one lives, whether in a poor state like Tasmania, a small country town or the remote outback.

Of course, this has not always been achieved, but it has been an aim, an ideal, part of what it means to be an Australian which can be invoked by groups arguing for their just deserts. Appeals to fairness imply the presence of an adjudicator, a person or an institution to decide what is fair and to implement it. And for Australians this has been the government. Country people might have been fiercely anti-labour and opposed to the socialism of the union movement, but when it came to the belief that the government’s main responsibility was to provide the resources necessary to sustain individual and collective life in the country, they were as socialist as anyone. “Country Party socialism,” it was called. Although at political odds over the role of unionised labour, workers and country people were united in the belief that the state should ensure that they all received their fair share of the country’s wealth.

Fissures in the Federation

Two months after the independents made their call, rural problems were again centre-stage, with angry farmers in Griffith and Deniliquin burning copies of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority’s draft plan to restore environmental flows to the sprawling inland river system. Scientists argue that the ecosystem is on the point of collapse. In 2009, Australia had watched as water levels in the Coorong dropped so low that wetlands at the Murray’s mouth risked permanent acidification; Adelaide’s water was barely drinkable. The draft plan recommended that to maintain the health of key environmental features, much less water be diverted for other purposes, irrig...