Monday Forum - How do we preserve civility and cooperation in a polarised world?

I suppose that this Monday Forum owes its existence to drinks I had last Thursday with Harry Creamer and his friend Andrew Waterworth. Both were in Sydney for a reunion of their old college. It was fun.

I regard Harry as a thoroughly good thing.  We really met when I was chair of Tourism Armidale and he was deputy chair.

I was trying to get people to see Armidale and tourism promotion in a new way. Forget the focus on just what Armidale and the immediate environs had. Think of Armidale as a base to explore a much greater area. It was a good base because of its attractions and life style, but there was so much more to be found beyond Armidale.

I was also suggesting that we should promote Armidale as the place that would have been capital of the New England New State. The existence of the separatist movement was a story in its own right, while Armidale as capital was to New England as  Edinburgh was the Scotland. I had some difficulties in getting both ideas across, but Harry was a supporter.

At the time, Harry was working for NSW National Parks. I did not know until later the work that he was doing on documenting Aboriginal languages and history across the broader New England.. His photos are now being digitised by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS.). I look forward to seeing them.

Harry has retired to Port Macquarie. There has campaigned for recognition of climate change through the North Coast press. He has also been involved in efforts to continue the work of Ned Iceton. Most recently, he has become a campaign volunteer for Rob Oakeshott, one of now 500.

Andrew Waterworth was also fun. A film maker and journalist, he moved to Dunedin and is now living in Central Otago. This is Pullar country, part of the New ZealandBbelshaws. so we had a lot to talk about.

I relaxed and enjoyed myself but, relaxed, I made some very rude comments about the Greens. Now I should have known better. A year or so back I did the same in Armidale, adding insult to injury with some positive comments about the Nationals. A long standing friend left the party to avoid getting into a fight.

Now this Forum was going to be about some of the inanities of certain parts of the environmental movement and especially the vegans, a follow up to this post,That Aussie Farms' map - a vacuous gesture that poses some individual dangers but has no meaning beyond.  But since I started writing, my thoughts have gone in a different direction. How do we preserve civility and cooperation in a polarised world?

I an mot sure that this is really a sensible topic for a forum, it's too amorphous.  But I think it's important. My friends span opinions. I like them personally and want to retain links. I also want to be able to pull people together to campaign on common issues where divides would otherwise prevent real cooperation. But how do we do that?

Over to you. As always, feel free to go in whatever direction you want. . 
  

Monday Forum - rebuilding community cohesion

Today's Monday Forum focuses on one current issue in Australia life: declining community cohesion. As always, feel free to go in whatever direction you want.

Yesterday's post was a parochial one dealing with the proposed redevelopment of Astrolabe Park. This has energised the small Daceyville community. This is another shot of of the Bayside Council information session. The woman on the left is the Council GM, beside her in the jeans stands the project manager for the Sydney Water, UNSW, Cricket NSW and AFL consortium In that post I mentioned that in the few weeks since the protest  started I had met more people in Daceyville than in the previous three years.

On 30 January 2017, Australian social analyst Hugh Mackay delivered the Gandhi Oration on the topic the state of the nation starts in your street. In April 2018 he returned to the the broad topic in a new book, Australia Reimagined. On 17 May 2018 he explored his ideas in an ABC Radio National Program, Conversations with Richard Fidler. This one is on-line so you can listen to his views.

On objective measures, he suggests, Australia has done very well. And yet Australians have become more insecure, edgier: :"We are a society in the grip of epidemics of anxiety, obesity and depression."

"How did this happen? Where did this edgy, anxious, too-violent society come from? This uneasy blend of arrogance and timidity?"

Noting that the problem is not unique to Australia but can be found in other Western countries, Mackay provides various explanations including:

• growing social inequity that affects those involved but also Australians' perceptions of themselves with a growing disconnect between those perceptions and external reality
• rise of individualism creating a me first mentality, a decline in real social connection, a focus on the pursuit of happiness
• a decline in respect for our social institutions
• a growing feeling of powerlessness accentuated by the growing rumble of the three big threats – climate change, international terrorism and the threat of a major global economic disruption.

These things interconnect and feed each other. To Mackay's mind and recognising how little influence we have over broader matters, the solution begins by focusing on repairing and rebuilding those things that we can influence and that starts with our neigbourhood and local community.

What do you think of all this?

Saturday Morning Musings - the importance of the small

The changing patterns of Australian life always interest me.

Down in Canberra, the Canberra Time's Amelia Mills reports on local use of crowd funding techniques to help fund start up businesses. I have been watching the growth of crowd funding for a number of years now. It's a useful technique in that it provides an alternative flexible funding mechanism. However, I have often mused on just how you make it work. Intuitively, just putting it out there and hoping that the world (or at least that tiny slice you need) would come seemed highly fraught.

Amelia's piece makes the point that successful crowd funding is actually hard work. Yes, I know that there are cases of apparent instant success, but you generally find that these are play to an already established base. Otherwise, you have to work at getting to those who might contribute.

This one comes from the Meanwhile in Australia Facebook page. I had to laugh. Mind you, Roos are no laughing matter on country roads. They are actually a reasonably common cause of accidents.

Returning to Canberra, Lucy Bladen reports on commercial revitalisation at the University of Canberra where new shops and facilities are revitalising parts of the campus. In an apparently unrelated story, Joseph Hinchliffe in the Sydney Morning Herald reports on the opening of a barber shop in Moree by Lloyd Munro jnr. Munro is a very well known Moree Aboriginal name.

The link between the two stories lies in community revitalisation, actions that will improve the fabric of life in particular areas. It's a long time since I have been on the University of Canberra campus, so I can't present a current picture, but the University appears to be following a clever strategy. Mr Munro's case is more an example of individual endeavour.

Today, we live in a mega world. Everything has to be big. It shapes Australia's cities while ignoring Australia's country. The cranes that dot particular areas of Sydney are big. The redevelopment projects are big. In many cases you need to be big just to meet compliance and regulatory costs.

In all this, it's important to recognise the importance of the small, the individual, for this is where character and texture comes from. Even in very large developments, the final success or failure comes from the new residents, from those who open cafes or shops. .

There is a meme here that I would like to extend. For the moment, crowd funding is important because it offers a new vehicle for the small.

The importance of a Town like Alice

Nevil Shute Norway was a fascinating man whose writing reflected his deep involvement in engineering and aviation. His vivid depictions of the early days of aviation were vivid in part because he was there.

In writing, Schute chose to drop the Norway to avoid conflict with his engineering career. He was Norway as an engineer, Schute as a writer.

I loved nearly all of Schute’s books as a child, I still do, but of them all A Town Like Alice was my favourite. It is also a book that has had a significant influence on my life.

A Town like Alice breaks into two parts. The first part is set in Malaya and tells the story of a group of women and children captured by the Japanese. The second part centres on Willstown, a small town in the Queensland outback. Linking the two is the love story of Jean Paget, a young English women who is part of the group of captured women, and Sergeant Joe Harman, an Australian POW.   

The book was immensely popular. In 1956, it provided the source for a very popular feature film, A Town like Alice, with Virginia McKenna and Peter Finch in the leading roles. Now, through the miracles of YouTube, you can watch it at your leisure.

I first watched the film in the school assembly hall during the Saturday screenings put on for the boarders. I was a dayboy, but it was a good night out, so I would walk across from home to join the other boys.

The film focuses on the first part of the story, the Malayan experience. It ends with Joe and Jean meeting at the Alice Springs Airport. However, it was the second part of the story that really influenced me.

In 1981, Bryan Brown and Helen Morse starred in an Australian mini-series based on the book. This time, it included the second part of the story. Here is the first part of the miniseries. You can see the next two parts by following the YouTube links shown with the first part.

What can a girl to do? You follow a man halfway round the world to find that he lives in a fly-struck hole.  Well, you change the town, As Jean says to the local bank manager, get of your bum and stop scratching.

To turn Willstown into a Town like Alice, she starts with a basic fact. There are 50 young blokes in the district, but only two eligible women. The women leave because there are no jobs. No women, and the young blokes leave. So Jean uses some of her inheritance to start a shoe factory based on crocodile skin. Then she starts adding other businesses especially addressing women’s needs. The girls in the factory pick up men, babies are born, and so it goes on. By the end of the book, the shoe factory is no longer economic, but it doesn’t matter. It has done its job.

Yes, I know that there are al sorts of ideologically unsound things in the books and films. In Malaya, Jean is Mrs Boong. In the mini-series, there are references to Abos, although it shows working Aborigines in a positive light, with Aborigines invited to the wedding. And the idea of effectively creating a baby factory? Heaven forbid!

Still, in the middle of all these ideologically unsound things, it was the idea of community development that grabbed me. How might one grow a  Town like Alice? That is what has stayed with me all these years. And yes, I still cry at aspects of the book, film and TV series. Sooky, aren’t I?    

Towards a new approach to economic and community development 2 - Man proposes, governments and markets dispose

It will be clear that I am having a little trouble posting at the moment. Just three posts last week. This led Winton Bates to write in a comments on Towards a new approach to economic and community development 1 Introduction

Jim,
I have been looking forward to the follow up articles.
Is this just a story of exceptional individuals who happen to live in particular regions? Or is there a story about particular regions being supportive of the efforts of innovators?

In apology to Winton, it’s partly that I have been busy overall, more that I have been focused on some elements in my main history project, including especially the rise and fall of civil aviation in New England.

This photo shows an East-West Airlines DC3 landing at Port Macquarie on the inaugural flight to that town. Note the crowd and the rather rough landing ground.

The rise of New England’s aviation sector including New England Airways (Lismore 1931), East-West Airlines (Tamworth 1947), Tamworth Air Taxis later Eastern Australia Airlines (Tamworth 1949), Aeropelican (Newcastle 1971), Oxley Airlines (Port Macquarie 1974) and Impulse Airlines (Sydney and then Newcastle 1992) is partly due to individual entrepreneurs.  However, the particular and continuing concentration of aviation activities in Tamworth is due to a supportive local climate, Winton’s second question.

The collapse of the New England aviation sector as a distinct entity reflects another set of factors, the way governments and markets dispose. At national level in Australia, the Menzie’s Government passed the Civil Aviation Agreement Act in 1952 establishing the two airline policy. The aim was to created a stable operating environment that would ensure services. In 1957, this policy was further strengthened. The aim, the Government said, was to ensure that there were two and not more than two operators on trunk line services.

To East-West,  Australia’s third largest carrier by the 1970s, the two airline policy was a commercial impediment. After fighting off a Government directed takeover from Ansett in 1961, the airline maintained a campaign that would finally break the policy in the 1980s. That success came at a cost.

East-West’s attempts to expand by, among other things, growing the Northern Territory leisure market, came at a cost. The board became worried at the losses, opening the door in 1982 for Duke Minks and Brian Grey to acquire the airline with the assistance of a $7.5 million loan from the Nauru Phosphate Trust. Minks Under Minks and Grey, the airline continued its campaign Three years later, East-West was sold for between $20 and $30 million to Rick Stowe’s Skywest who also continued the campaign. Meantime, the profits from the sale helped fund the creation of Compass Airlines, the first and ultimately unsuccessful large scale attempt to create a new national carrier to challenge the incumbent two.

From a national or broader state perspective, Governments actually work the percentages, although they never express it in those terms. Free markets and restructuring bring losses. Those losses are expected to be offset by new commercial activities. At a national level, this may be true, but the loses are always localised. Winners and losers differ.

By the nature of my work, I have a local or regional focus.

In July 1987, East-West was sold for a reported $150 million to a company controlled by Peter Abeles' TNT and Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, the owners of Ansett. The $7.5 million from Nauru had gown twenty-fold in just five years. Four years later, on 18 September 1991, the Ansett controlled East-West announced that it was closing its Tamworth maintenance facility with the loss of 220 jobs and terminating all connections with Tamworth and the North. Two years later, the name East-West vanished from the skies, removed as a consequence of further corporate change. An era had finally ended.

Governments may be able to play the percentages at national level, but at local level the capacity to respond is far more limited. I think of this in terms of resilience. A resilient community can respond to losses because it already has things in place that it can turn too. However, strip too much and the capacity to respond vanishes. Strip too much across a broader area such as a region and its resilience vanishes. Strip too much from a nation and the same thing happens.  

In my next post in this series I will look a little more at the way that changing government policies play out on the ground to set the broader scene.  

Shop locally - save your town

There has been a conference here in Australia talking about how to save small towns. This shot from Mark of the general store at Bundarra, a small town between Armidale and Inverell, captures one message rather well, Shop (and act) locally and save your town.

Sunday Essay - the importance of the individual

Going into Saturday's Queensland elections, the opinion polls suggested that the ALP Government faced electoral disaster. Even so, the scale of the disaster still came as a surprise.

As I write, the latest electoral figures are:

• Liberal National Party 49.7% with a predicted 78 seats
• ALP 26.6% with a predicted 7 seats
• Katter's Australian Party 11.6% with a predicted 2 seats
• The Greens 7.6% with no predicted seats.

A defeat on this scale creates obvious difficulties for Labor in both being an effective opposition and in rebuilding. It also increases pressure on the ALP Federal Government.

Over on the Lowy Institute blog, Sam Roggeveen's Is there an Australian blogosphere? is, as the title says, a short muse on the existence or otherwise of an Australian blogosphere. The post begins: 

'Europeans can't blog', reads the headline from a newly created blog by the Brussel-based think tank Bruegel. One phrase in particular stuck out at me from this lament about the poor state of European blogging: 'Europe has bloggers, but no blogosphere'.

It seems to me this might be true of Australia also, at least in the political sphere in which this site operates. The distinction between blogs and the blogosphere is that, on its own, a blog is a platform to push out ideas, information and links to other sources. That's a powerful thing in and of itself, but it's when many blogs form a blogosphere that you get, in Bruegel's words, 'a living ecosystem to exchange and debate'.

We have some outstanding political blogs in this country, but from my observation, the 'ecosystem' is a bit barren.

For their own reasons, the Lowy Institute has a somewhat clunky comment system. You have to email your comment and then wait for it to be moderated. While I understand the reasons for this, it does work against interactivity. For that reason, I thought that I should reproduce my comment here: 

Hi Sam. I think it true to say that the Australian blogosphere is fragmented. It’s also true to say that Australian bloggers don’t cross-link as much as they might or indeed should. But it’s not quite as clear-cut as this.

Back in 2010, Dr Alex Bruns released some initial mapping results on the Australian blogosphere. I dealt with it in a post at the time - http://belshaw.blogspot.com.au/2010/10/mapping-australian-blogosphere.html.

If we look at political blogs, you find a clustering effect around main nodes. You also find outriders – the independents – who also link. The patterns change with time, but they are there.

One of the difficulties in the clustering is that, not unexpectedly, the major nodes attract people of common views. A second problem is that there is sometimes very little cross-linking on the major nodes. Yet that said, there are underlying currents that are not always apparent.

The very partisan blogs including those attached to some media outlets tend to attract only the like minded. However, there is a broader and different stream that, while sometimes still partisan, actually focuses on issues. Most of the bloggers in this group either know or know of each other. I call this the village. There are links and interlinks that are not always apparent on the surface.

I was trying to think of the best way of illustrating this. Perhaps one way is to say that I have some ten bloggers who are Facebook friends, another overlapping but different group who follow me on twitter. Then there are those who email me or come through in comments.

I am not an A list blogger, although I have reasonable traffic on my main blogs. My point is that there are a whole series of interactions that have a cumulative impact over time.

There are particular issues that attract major bogging attention. However, a lot of the real work is simply the on-going discussion.

Most mainstream bloggers don’t just blog. They reach out through a variety of channels. We do influence each other, but we also influence the broader debate. The effects here cannot be easily measured, but they seem to be significant over time.

I guess that’s my real point in this comment. Don’t focus on the headline, the grand impact on public discourse. Focus instead on the cumulative effect.  

Regular readers will know that the type of issue raised by Sam have been of interest to me for a long time. I blog a fair bit, so its only natural that I should be interested.

I do think that the Australian blogosphere has declined measured by interactivity and cross-fertilisation. I have suggested that this is in part due to Twitter. Twitter is an aid to interactivity, but it also distracts.

There is only so much time. Some of my fellow bloggers put so much time into tweeting that they greatly reduce the time available for other writing or, indeed, responding. Twitterdom has become a community or series of communities in its own right, but it is a very different community.

Turning to other matters, at his place Neil Whitfield's Trundling into the 21st century talks about a new ABC documentary series Country Town Rescue. The series is described in this way: 

Produced by Zapruder’s other films, Country Town Rescue is the compelling story of how ordinary Australians come together to save a small rural town whose falling population threatens its very existence.

Filmed over twelve months, this series follows five families who ‘up sticks’ with their kids and move to Trundle, a small town in central western NSW. They are welcomed by a passionate group of locals determined to see the small town not only survive but prosper.

Now in what will seem like an unrelated segue, this photo shows the old mining settlement of Silverton outside Broken Hill.

Once much bigger than Broken Hill, Silverton now is a scattering of picturesque buildings in the middle of the desert.

At school, I was fascinated by Nevil Shute's book A Town Like Alice. This tells the story of Jean Paget,  spanning her experiences as young Englishwoman and prisoner of war in Malaya during World War II, then in London and finally in outback Australia. There she sets out to turn a small outback community into a town like Alice.

It wasn't so much the first part of the book that interested me, but the last part, the re-birth of the community. It created an interest in community regeneration that has stayed with me until today.

A Town Like Alice was very popular, generating a film and a TV mini-series. The second was part filmed in Silverton, hence the photo.

The interest created in my mind by the book has really had a profound impact on my life.

Decentralisation and community development was one of the planks I ran on when seeking Country Party pre-selection. It influenced my approach as a policy adviser. It was a factor in the creation of Aymever as a national business headquartered in regional Australia. It influences me today in my writing and in some of my professional work.

I guess that one of my continuing personal frustrations lies in my inability to make some of my ideas stick in a practical sense. I have put my heart, my time and indeed my personal cash into community redevelopment at local and regional level and beyond. There have been successes, but there have been far more failures.

One of the things that I have tried to do in my writing is to get across the importance of the individual. When I look at my own work or the results of my historical research, what comes through time and time again is the importance of individual effort.

If you look at national level, individuals start to blur in the face of broad trends, of the need to summarise and to consolidate. As you drill down, localise, individuals start to stand out. Broad based history, indeed everything that happens, actually comes back to the combination of generally unseen individual effort.

In Queensland, the ALP won't be rebuilt by Party wide election studies, by national or state efforts, although these are necessary. Rebirth will come from the electoral workers who hold the faith and provide the base required to mount future efforts. Individually, each has miniscule impact. Collectively, they are the future. Lose them, and the Party is lost.

I spent a fairly large slab of my life campaigning against the ALP. Yet I never lost sight of the value, indeed the necessity, of those ALP people that I saw on the booths. Often, I had more in common with them than I had with my own party machine. You see, we disagreed but we also cared. As we shared tea and cake and talked, we talked about things that jointly mattered.       

In blogging, I talk about the village. It's the same thing.

Sam Roggeveen is concerned with what we might call macro failure, the big picture stuff. My perspective makes me focus on the small, the cumulative. Real change, the best change, generally happens there. It happens because people strive, hold the faith, even though things sometimes seem hopeless.

I went to Parkes (Musings on a visit to inland NSW) for a workshop. There I talked to an Aboriginal woman who had spent much of the last seven years working to improve housing for her community. She was tired as indeed I am tired, yet she kept on going.

As I listened to her, I thought how marvelous she was. Her impact is not easily measurable on the grand scale, nor in our obsession with macro performance indicators. However, to the families that have better housing as a result of her efforts she is far more important than all the big picture stuff. I think that's kind of important.     

Beards, mud & a bit of community

in retaliation to eldest for her comment on my hair and bald spot (A bearded Belshaw) this photo from cousin Jamie shows H. (far right) at Wagga Wagga in 1997.

I don't think that H has quite adjusted to the mud of inland swimming. Mind you, they all went into the deepest mud they could find.

In a comment on a bearded Belshaw, Neil pointed to the body fitting shirt. Indeed, that does date me! It's all very different from the clean cut picture that graces my blog.

Just finished my weekly Express column. This one is a follow up from a post I did on my New England Australia blog, Bob Neville & Tingha Community Regeneration win new award. At a time when there is just so much negativity around, it is nice to do a positive story.

Community regeneration has been an interest of mine for a very long time. Bob's story is quite inspirational, so you can expect more from time to time.

In case you hadn't worked it out already, my references to our blogging village are a dead give away, I really am a community person. It's one of my problems in Sydney that I don't have that feeling of connect with the people around me. The village isn't there.

Much of my historical writing is connected with community. I just like it, but I also think that it's important.

You see, at a time when so many think that they are powerless, much of my work shows the power of individuals. Not power in the grand sense, but power in the way that individual acts have long term effects beyond the imagination and knowledge of those involved.

History is in part the story of accidents and incidents. Say you introduce two friends and they marry. Then all subsequent generations actually owe their existence to you! That may be an incident, it may seem trivial, but you have put your own small mark on the future, and on the history that is the future in retrospect.

I think that that's kind of nice! 

Regional, rural & the whole damned policy mess

Last night, the ABC's Q&A program was broadcast from Albury and has a specific focus on regional development and regional policy. Those who are interested can find the program details here; the transcript should be up this afternoon.

I tweeted two questions, both of which reflect my interests. They were not good questions for that audience and were not picked up, but I asked them quite deliberately.    

For tonight's Q&A panel. Why is so little attention paid to the history of regional policy? We constantly re-invent the wheel #qanda

Follow up question for Q&A panelists. Do you support new states such as self government for New England? #qanda

In this post, I want to look the issues raised by the program and the reasons I asked those questions. I do not want this to be an especially long post. I just want to make a few points.

Global Perspective

The problem of drift to the bigger cities and the continuing depopulation of certain areas is a global phenomenon. However, Australia has some relatively unique features.

The first is the early dominance of the capital cities. From the beginning, there was a large and growing gap between those cities and the hierarchy of towns outside them.

The second and linked phenomenon was urbanisation. At the start of the twentieth century, the proportion of the population living in urban centres was very high, the rural population low, by global standards. Then people began to leave for the capital cities. Official Australian publications over the first decades of the twentieth century such as the Australian Year Books worried about this trend, suggesting that the growing population dominance of the capital cities was unusual by international standards.

Most recently has been something of a rush to the coast more generally. A very high proportion of the Australian population now lives within 50k of the coastline. Inland areas have suffered population stagnation, even actual declines.

For the benefit of international readers who might think of inland areas as places remote on a US or China scale, Australia's climate means that much of the continent is very thinly populated. While more remote areas have lost population, much of the shift has come from areas not all that far from the seaboard by continental standards.

I make these points to set a context.

The Q&A Program

The Q&A program had an inland focus. Many of the questions and subsequent discussion focused on now common issues - differences in health, education and other services between country Australia and the cities; poor communications; the difficulties in attracting population.

The responses by the Panel took fairly familiar patterns.

Simon Crean as responsible Federal Minister argues that local areas needed to adopt a proactive approach in defining their needs so as to force Governments to respond. Independent member for New England Tony Windsor, a man who has begun to acquire a quite remarkable national following, argued that the 30% of the population living in the country must organise and use their balance of power.

I quite enjoyed the exchange here, for Tony neatly pinned another panel member, Sophie Mirabella, the Liberal Member for Indi (once a strong Country Party seat), on the Victorian side of the border.

Sophie is Shadow Minister for Innovation, Industry and Science. She was caught between her role as local member and her broader Party position, making it very hard for her to respond to some of Tony's arguments.

I was also interested to hear Tony's support for the WA National Party - they are not in coalition with the Liberal party - and his apparent intent to visit WA with Federal WA National MP Tony Crook to campaign for the WA Nationals.

The Panel argued for improved infrastructure (the National Broadband Network received a strong push with Sophie dissenting!), more education, better health services coming in to support local activism. Pretty much standard stuff.

Problems with Definitions

Throughout the discussion, people kept referring to regional and rural, then they would shift to country, or to inland Australia.

Now regional and rural is a term I really don't understand. Surely a rural area is also a regional area? You will find a little of the history of the term here. It is actually a pretty meaningless term, but it's also a sign of language fragmentation that absolutely bedevils the creation of any sensible regional policy.

I spoke a little about this in my Armidale paper on Social Change in New England 1950-2000. An excerpt follows. In reading it, bear in mind that integrated policy is almost impossible if there are no common terms.    

The decline in the use of the words New England was not the only semantic change affecting the North. Words are important because they affect and reflect changing perceptions. In 1950, the word country was commonly used to describe NSW outside Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong. While the use of this term divided Newcastle from the rest of New England, a divide that accurately reflected cultural and political differences, country was at least a broad, commonly understood, geographic term.

By the 1970s, country was losing favour, in part because of the growth of urban centres whose residents did not identify with the term. In its place came the word regional. This fragmented in turn. By 2000, there was something of a crazy patchwork quilt of words – country, regional, rural, remote, coastal – that overlapped and were used in different combinations. This growing confusion in terms reflected in part the increasing use of ARIA.

ARIA, the Accessibility/Remoteness Index of Australia, was developed by the Commonwealth Department of Health and Aged Care and the National Key Centre for Social Applications of GIS. ARIA measures remoteness based on the physical road distance between a settlement and four classes of service centre. In 1999 a further revision of ARIA called ARIA+ was developed that incorporated more information on the location of service centres.

While ARIA was a simple geographic descriptor intended to measure remoteness from services, its widespread use by the Commonwealth Government for statistical purposes and to guide service delivery affected the use of words. In 1950, the Australian states still retained a substantial degree of independence. By 2000, the Australian Government was involved in every aspect of policy once the preserve of the states. To the officials in Canberra seeking mechanisms to allow for national uniformity in service delivery while also taking geography into account, the ARIA classifications seemed a useful device; very remote, remote, outer regional, inner regional and major city were now firmly added to the semantic mix.

The difficulty from a New England perspective lay in the way that these various terms cut across the area’s natural geography, further fragmenting the sense of New England or Northern identity, while creating problems for integrated service delivery based on geography. We can see this if we look at New England’s Kamilaroi or Gamilaraay Aboriginal language group who occupied the Western Slopes and Plains. Their traditional territory was variously classified from very remote to inner regional, a classification that affected the services provided. People with a common culture sharing common problems received different benefits depending on just where they lived.

Problems with history

If problems with terminology don't create enough problems, we have a problem with history. More precisely, we have a problem with loss of memory of history.

If you look back at my brief remarks under Global Perspective, you can see why decentralisation and regional development has been such an enduring Australian issue.

In the first period after Federation, new states (the creation of new self-governing bodies from existing states) were seen as a natural answer because they would give more local power to address local problems. I remain a new state supporter on grounds of practicality and sentimentality, although they are not a panacea.

Opposition to new sovereign states led to the idea of regional councils. Part of the push here came from the Labor Party which had adopted a unification policy with the National Government delegating powers to regional governments. Part, too, came from state governments looking to head off new state agitation.

The 1924 NSW Cohen Royal Commission into new states concluded that the country had been disadvantaged in the past, but that was no longer true. Remaining country grievances and development needs were best met by the creation of regional councils within NSW.

By the late 1940s, it was clear that neither regional councils nor existing general decentralisation policies were likely to have any real impact. On one side this led to a resurgence of new state agitation, on the other to the development of the idea of selective decentralisation, concentration of resources to build specific regional centres.

New state agitation largely collapsed after the narrow defeat of the 1967 New England New State Plebiscite, while the idea of selective decentralisation was apparently discredited by the failures of the Whitlam Government. In their place came a patchwork and varying quilt of policies whose existence and longevity depended on the political circumstances of the time.

Those policies did not work, nor could they work because they suffered from fundamental weaknesses. They:

• ignored history and experience
• were often ideologically rather than practically based.
• rarely survived for long enough too have any meaningful impact
• lacked any meaningful integration
• could not overcome existing power structures.

Conclusion

I have no faith that anything has changed.

In asking the question about history, I knew that neither the Q&A team nor indeed the panel knew enough to respond to the question. I may have been able to phrase it better, to make it more relevant, if I had had time. I did not.

I am not necessarily a great supporter of Spanish philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist George Santayana's comment that "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". In this case, I think that it's relevant.    

Saturday Morning Musings - managing population decline

A tweet by Mathew Ingram drew my attention to a fascinating statistic from the Boston Globe: eight of the 10 largest cities in the United States in 1950, including Boston, have since lost at least 20 percent of their population. In the case of Detroit, more than half the city's population has gone over the last fifty years, leaving vacant city buildings and entire boarded up blocks.

The photo shows Detroit's main train station, opened in 1913 but not used since 1988.

We live in a world in which part is experiencing, rapid population growth, part facing actual population decline. In Belarus for example, the total population has fallen from 10,045,000 in 1999 to 9,500,000 in 2009. This decline is likely to continue. Not only is the population aging, but there is also a growing gender imbalance - there are now 1150 women for every 1,000 men, an imbalance part linked to population aging.

Belarus is not alone. A number of other countries are already experiencing or will soon face population decline.

We live in an urbanised world. Countries like Australia have been urban for many years, other countries like China are urbanising now at a very rapid rate.

The next photo shows Detroit's spectacular Spanish Gothic United Artists Theater. This was built in 1928, closed in the 1970s

Those of us from regional Australia have experienced population decline at first hand. Schools, stores, banks, civic facilities all close.

Small scale decline can be ignored,especially when the rest of the country is growing. But what do you do when major urban centres, metropolitan cities, go into population decline?

As populations fall, so do rate bases, civic services and urban developments. Vast patches of desolation emerge. It becomes harder to maintain things, not just because costs have to to be spread over smaller populations, but also because large slabs of infrastructure designed for specific populations have to be maintained to meet diminishing needs.

You see, the pattern of decline is not uniform. Some areas suffer more than others. So some areas are still okay, other's bear costs that cannot be related to population. People fight to maintain areas and services, but ultimately they go. 

The photo shows Detroit's Wilbur Wright public school closed in 2005.

Now all this may seem a long way from Australia. After all, we are presently worried about the size of the population increase, not issues associated with population decline. Yet we do need to think about it.

For the present, our problems lie not in the overall size of the population, but in its structure and distribution. This, by the way, is not an argument for more decentralisation, although that may be important. Rather, I am trying to tease out a few broader issues.

We have an aging population. This means that we have to invest more in aged care. We have a population in which the number of households is rising faster than the population, reflecting both changing social patterns and underlying demographic trends. So we need to build more housing of one type or another to match this faster growth.

The Australian population is not uniformly distributed. A self-evident statement I know, but I am thinking not just in raw numbers, but of the varying structure of of the population across space. Retirement areas, for example, have very different population structures from outer metropolitan areas. Then there is internal migration, the progressive shifts of population across space and time.

We have already seen examples of the impact of this type of shift. In Canberra, for example, the city's rapid growth required shops and schools in certain areas to meet rapid population growth. Just thirty years later, maturation meant declining needs for those shops and schools. This created significant adjustment problems.

When I look at Australia just at present, I see the Canberra example writ large. If you just crunch numbers for some areas popular with retirees or simply aging because the young are leaving but ignoring future internal migration, the numbers show fast population declines within a not so distant time horizon. In this event, it's not just the aged care facilities that will become redundant, but large slabs of the commercial and civic infrastructure as well.

Just at present, we tend to respond to this type of challenge in two ways. Either, we say the market will work it out or, alternatively, we go all prescriptive. I am not sure that either is very sensible.

When I read the Boston Globe analysis, I think that the think that interested me most was the differential nature of the responses. As part of this, the idea of using contraction as a device to improve overall life style and livability attracted me. I don't know that I have very clear or sensible ideas here. I just found it interesting as an alternative way of thinking.  

The importance of community activism

We community activists are stubborn folk. We know that the chances of success are often slim. We know that Governments in the name of efficiency and effectiveness will over-ride us or, worse, destroy the things that we have worked for. Yet we go on.

Up in Bellingen, the community is still fighting for its hospital. I haven't written on this for a while, but the campaign continues. The Facebook page now has 3,515 supporters. I think that the Government simply hopes that it will all go away, that the system can outlast the campaign.

Down south in Wollombi, Peter Firminger is using the intenet to unite the Wollombi community. After 36 months, Wollombi Valley Online has over 380 members and attracts over 50,000 visits per month (currently averaging around 1,633 visitors per day viewing 3,552 pages per day). This is just one of a number of community sites that Peter has developed.

At our Hunter Valley new state lunch I asked Peter why he did it. After all, he has yet to make any money from it. The reverse, in fact; he has to subsidise the sites from his own business earnings. Not only that, he is on the committee of many if not most local organisations. He does so because he considers it to be important.

We community activists are not always right. Sometimes we support causes that are very local, very specific, very much nimby (not in my back yard). Sometimes we win when, arguably, we shouldn't. Yet these failures, if failures they are, are more than offset by the long term gains to community and country.

Our very democratic processes depend upon the activists. Not so much the career activists like Tony Abbott or Julia Gillard who go from University politics through the union and/or party machines to parliament, but to the thousands who turn out each election to pass out the how to vote cards or to scrutineer. Without them, our system would collapse.

Then there are the tens of thousands of volunteers who man our fire brigades, our emergency services, who provide meals on wheals, who run the fund raising BBQs and stalls for a variety of local causes. As we go to vote at the schools and halls around Australia, we collect our how to votes and then pass the BBQs and cake stalls raising funds for the local P&C.

The contribution of any single person may be small. But, in total, these activists are in fact absolutely central to Australian life. Without them, our community would be impoverished. They mark the difference between a successful and failed society.

The thing that stands out to me when I look at the warp and woof of life at a local level is not so much the successes of party and politics in meeting needs, although this can be important in individual cases such as Henry Parkes and public education in NSW, but the way in which community activism provides the base for later developments.

Today we live in a measurement world. Yet when I look at the huge variety of performance indicators, and I spend a lot of time doing this, most don't matter a damn in a long term sense. The most that they can do, and most don't do this, is to improve performance at the margin. To my mind, the real changes to Australia in twenty years will actually be determined by what community activists are doing now.                 

Saturday Morning Musings - the importance of the small

When I first studied history, it was generally all big picture stuff: wars, revolutions, movements, causes and effects.

I also did an awful lot of history. At school, I did six full year courses in modern history plus Australian history honours, three full year courses in ancient history, again plus honours. Then at university there were five full year units plus a full honours year. As I said, that's a lot of history. By the end it also spanned a long time period, from prehistory to the present day, if with a bias towards the history of Britain and Empire, Australia,  Europe and the Mediterranean.

This bias wasn't universal. Asian history, for example, was included, if mainly with a twentieth century focus. In addition, my geography honours course at school was solely on Asia, with a strong focus on economic and human geography and on what would now be called development studies.

I think that my biggest problem at school and then at university was simply getting my mind round what people thought and felt in the various periods I was looking at. I was also puzzled by the how of things. I could write a decent essay on the causes of the First World War, for example, but struggled to understand how those involved could actually let things come to such a pass. This was, of course, a case of wisdom in hindsight, since I knew what was to happen.

One of the things that I found most helpful in giving emotional content to what otherwise might have been cardboard cut-outs were historical novels. Because I was a bookish somewhat introspective child, I read a lot:  Conan Doyle's Sir Nigel and the White Company gave me a feel for the Feudal period; Rafael Sabatini's various books (real favourites of mine) brought in the complicated world of the Italian Peninsula as well as the French Revolution; while Catherine Gaskin's immensely popular popular 1954 novel Sarah Dane helped introduce me to convict Sydney.

The picture that I acquired may have been partial in both senses of the word, but it did bring people and periods alive.

Leaving Armidale for Canberra, I left history for economics. By the time I returned to history, I had run for politics, been actively involved in party and community development development activities and had experience as an economist and policy advisor at reasonably senior levels. The different ideas and experiences gained affected my approach to history in quite profound ways. In particular, it meant that I now looked at historical processes, activities and events from the perspective of a sometimes player. I now knew something about the how.

In this last part of this muse, I want to look at just two elements here: the importance of event chains and what I have come to call the importance of the small.

If you look at the conflagration of the First World War, it was not inevitable. It came about because of a series of decisions made by individuals over time that determined both what it would happen and the form that it would take. Those decisions took place within institutional contexts and were affected by personalities and by previous events.

When we talk about the causes of the First World War, we look at key patterns and call them causes. Naval rivalries between Britain and Germany is one often cited cause, and indeed at one level it was. However, those rivalries in turn depended upon a whole series of interacting previous decisions. The War itself came about because of a whole series of interacting decision trains.

In similar vein, the settlement by the British at Botany Bay and then Port Jackson was not inevitable, although it arguably was inevitable that the continent would have been colonised by one or indeed more of the European powers, most probably Britain since she was the dominant sea power. When we talk about the causes of British settlement in 1788, we tend to talk about and combine two very different things: one are the general forces that led to a decision to colonise; the second, those things that led to the particular decision at a point in time.

The second thing that I want to talk about, the importance of the small, is linked to the first.

At a personal level, we all know that small individual decisions can have important longer term outcomes that are unclear, indeed unforeseeable, at the time. Since history is the aggregation of individual decisions and actions, it should not be surprising that history displays the same pattern.

I first really became aware of this one in my studies of local and regional history.

David Drummond is sometimes called the founder of the University of New England. At one sense that's true. Yet, to my mind, the single most important event that allowed for the later establishment of the New England University College in 1938 was the earlier decision of certain grazing families in the 1890s to help fund the establishment of the Armidale School and the New England Girls' School. This consolidated the educational base that later supported the establishment of the Armidale Teachers' College in 1928 and then the University College ten years later.

To take another very local example, Armidale today is a beautiful city marked by its trees. This reinforces the city's place. Yet in 1938 Armidale had very few trees. The decision of local accountant Alwyn Jones to make Armidale beautification his cause in the 1950s played a very important role in the city that we have today.

These are purely local examples, yet I find them replicated time and time again. At a time when there is so much complexity and indeed negativity, I find find it rather inspirational that history shows the importance of individual endeavour for good as well as bad.

Generation One, Andrew Forrest and Aboriginal jobs

Back in August 2008 I reported on a campaign by WA mining mandate Andrew Forrest to create 50,000 new indigenous jobs. The plan was launched just before the start of the global financial crisis, a crisis that at one stage appeared to threaten the very survival of Mr Forrest's business. I have therefore been wondering just what had happened to the original plan.

On 16 February this year, Tony Koch reported that the Australian Employment Covenant was closing in on the half way target, with the Queensland Government committing to 2,800 positions to add to the 17,000 promised by the private sector. Now in today's Australian, Drew Warne-Smith reports on the filming of a new national advertising campaign, GenerationOne, to reinforce the campaign.

Funded by Andrew Forrest, James Packer and Kerry Stokes to the tune of reported $A2 million each with support from other business leaders, the campaign aims to motivate the public to take practical action in helping to end indigenous disparity. The advertisement feature Aboriginal young people and are directed Warwick Thornton, whose debut feature film Samson & Delilah won the Camera d'Or for best first film in Cannes last year.

To be launched by the Prime Minister, the campaign will include an interactive website and a 23-stop national roadshow. The TV commercial itself will go to air on March 20 and is, according to the Drew Warne-Smith report, a stark, pared-back recitation of the facts of indigenous existence in this country.

In considering Mr Forrest's campaign, I think it helpful to remember that Australia's indigenous people occupy a spectrum from successful professionals and business people on one side through to people suffering extreme social deprivation at the other end. As Joe Lane constantly and correctly points out, success in Aboriginal education means that the proportion of Aboriginal with trade and university education is rising all the time.

I make this point because the campaign from Mr Forrest and his colleagues especially targets the most socially disadvantaged group: young people with limited education, limited or no work experience and few opportunities. In social terms, this is critical because it aims to break the recurring cycle of disadvantage. However, this is also the area where the difficulties are greatest.

In February of last year, Mr Forrest complained that the training places weren't available to support young people in the jobs already promised. I quote:  

In his letter, Mr Forrest said Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations officials were not planning to provide training tailored to employers' specifications, as agreed under the covenant.

DEEWR had failed to make any changes to its training methods and was attempting to dilute the AEC to nothing more than a "job finder", he said.

That led to initial action, including $A2.2million in federal funding for James Packer's Crown Limited to train and employ 300 Aborigines at its Melbourne and Perth casinos. Now Mr Forrest has been addressing a new concern, the need for mentoring.

One of the difficulties that employers face is that the socially disadvantaged young, non-Aboriginal as well as Aboriginal, can lack the types of skills, knowledge and work disciplines taken for granted in the broader community. This leads to higher staff turnover and lower returns to the employer. Accepting that some measure of failure is inevitable, individual support such as mentoring can increase the chances of success.

In a comment on my original post, Stephen wrote:

Frankly, given the state of some of the area, even 100 jobs would be good. 10,000 would make a very substantial difference to the areas.

I have to agree with Stephen. Practical help that does at least achieve some results is good. This is the same type of issue that I dealt  with in a January 2007 post,  New England's Aborigines - Moree Success Story describing the work of Dick Estens in Aboriginal job creation.

In another comment on my original post, Aboriginal peoples researcher wrote:

I think the idea may have some merit, but it is still based in a colonial philosophy that aims to train and teach aboriginal peoples a different way of life. To some extent it is another assimilation policy aimed at acculturating the aboriginal people to the point where they will no longer have to be dealt with as a sovereign people.

I responded to this comment as best I could at the time. However, since then my views have shifted.

I had no idea until last year about the pressures that could be placed upon the Aboriginal young (and not so young) as they attempted to improve their position, pressures that rose with success. I have to phrase this very carefully, in part because I am still working all this through in my own mind. Further, my experience is NSW focused. 

Central to these pressures is the need to find a balance between the individual and the community. At one level, this is simply the desire to retain connection to group and locality. At a second, the conflict between contributing to the community and the achievement of personal success.

Most non Aboriginal people think first of career, going where chances of success will be best. An Aboriginal person is more conflicted: do I serve my people first, even though this reduces my career chances? Further, as personal progress is made, the demands of a more collectivist society come into play: how do I tell my people or extended family that to help them conflicts with my personal and professional obligations?

These are not easy issues. I do not have answers. However, I do know that the work of people like Dick Estens or Andrew Forrest is important in giving the Aboriginal young new choices. 

Sources:

• Twiggy's appeal ends training hiatus The Australian, 20 Feb 2009
• Forrest halfway to jobs goal The Australian, 16 Feb 2010
• Packer's passion Herald Sun, 20 Feb 2010
• Andrew Twiggy Forrest plans to keep bright stars shining, The Australian, 12 March 2010

Sunday Snippets - community development, soil sequestration, remote eye care

At the risk of upsetting KVD, I am not going to write my normal Sunday Essay. I am all written out, and have to focus on other things. Instead, a few Sunday Snippets.

At my request, Kanani kindly posted something that she had originally written as a Facebook note. Now in Newcastle, Armidale and the process of community renewal I have written a localised companion post.

The process of community change does fascinate me. Generally this is dealt with in terms of specific communities. I am also interested in the way change in related communities interacts to create new patterns. This, I think, a neglected topic in both urban and country areas.

Both industry and governments necessarily rely on trend analysis for planning purposes. But what happens if the relationships underlying the trends change? To use the community change example, if interaction between communities creates new patterns, then all the statistics such as population trends may change.

The higher the level of aggregation in the statistics, the more muted become this type of effect. At the same time, the less useful the statistics become for specific planning purposes.

To illustrate all this with a very simple, parochial example.

The population of the New England Tablelands has been stagnant for many years, part of the decline in inland NSW. Between 201 and 2006, the population of the Armidale-Dumaresq local government area, the biggest local government unit on the Tablelands (the bigger Tamworth lies on the Western Slopes) actually declined from 23,920 to 23,368 people.

This type of trend affects Government planning decisions, with resources concentrating in higher growth areas where projected needs are expected to grow. This actually reinforces the existing trend process.

Guyra Shire is 24 miles north of Armidale. Between 2001 and 2006 its population increased marginally. from 4,201 t0 4,220.  Again, this affects allocation of services.

Things change.

In 2005, a major tomato farm opened in Guyra, adding 250 jobs. This created great pressure. The houses weren't there. Now with State Government assistance, the Guyra Council is developing a housing estate to create 50 new blocks intended for mid-price housing. This will free up the pool of lower price existing houses for rental and first home buyers.

In Armidale to the south, the population declines that had been associated with structural change in the city's core industries of education and agriculture bottomed. Job creation began again, if on a smaller scale, Now this and an increase in the birth rate has translated into an an increase in school enrolments. Teachers, one of Armidale's largest occupational groups, had been falling in numbers, adding to stagnation.  More teachers will now be required.

In large part because of its educational base, Armidale did remarkably well out of the Rudd Government's stimulus packages, growing the construction industry and adding to the city's recovery.

Now factor in Guyra. Armidale is the major service centre for Guyra, so a small part of every extra dollar going to Guyra flows on to Armidale, helping growth. In turn, Armidale's growth adds to Guyra's revival, if only because it opens new job opportunities for those living in Guyra.

I accept that these are very micro trends, although in the days when I had money I did pretty well out of Armidale real estate simply because I understood the micro trends. However, my point is that when we come to look at community development the micro and the interactions between the micro is central.

Turning to other matters, the apparent Departmental response from Canberra to Opposition leader Abbot's climate change position struck me as remarkably city-centric. I quote from the Melbourne Age report:        

The Government has moved to torpedo the Coalition's alternative climate change policy, alleging that it would require tens of millions of hectares of trees to be planted, costing taxpayers billions of dollars.

A departmental document estimates 30 million hectares of trees would need to be planted for the Coalition to meet the minimum greenhouse gas reduction target of 5 per cent by 2020.

Trees are city thinking. Trees capture carbon in the wood. Soil sequestration aims to capture carbon in the soil, a very different concept.

The photo shows opposition leader Abbott talking to Liverpool Plains farmer Cam McKellar about soil sequestration. Now, unless I am much mistaken, Cam is very much a blast from my past.

I still don't pretend to any expertise on soil sequestration. However, I note from The Land that an FAO report points to the huge gains to be made from better management of the world's grasslands. Grasslands, not tree lands.

Finally, and still on rural issues, I see from the The Land that the continued decline in rural air services in NSW is placing further strain on the delivery of country services.

However, I was struck by one part of the story. I quote:  

Joanna Barton, the manager of Outback Eye Service, which provides ophthalmology services to remote areas in NSW from Prince of Wales Hospital in Randwick, said her organisation made at least 52 field trips a year and travelling by car had dramatically increased their workload.

The six eye surgeons she managed now had to fly to Dubbo, then drive several hours, work until 9pm, and leave at noon the next day to return to Dubbo for an afternoon flight to Sydney.

Now as it happens, I dealt with this very specific issue  back in July 2007 in Mr Howard, Mr Brough and Australia's Aborigines - 5: Policy and Administrative Issues. I was reasonably discrete in that post. However, I will be a little franker now.

As then CEO of the Royal Australian College of Ophthalmologists, I thought that the idea that we could meet eye care needs in remote Western NSW from Prince of Wales in Sydney  was absurd and unsustainable in the longer term.

My alternative was to build ophthalmic capacity in Dubbo, a major city with very poor ophthalmic services. This never got off the ground. One key argument was that we would never get the specialists to go to Dubbo. Other problems lay in the importance of Dubbo as a marketplace for services from Orange, as well as a proposal from the University of New South Wales to set up a service to supply Western NSW remote needs from Sydney.

I regret that I did not push this one harder at the time, but I was involved in other fights aconnected with the restructuring of College services. Ten years later, Dubbo is to my knowledge still poorly serviced, I stand to be corrected here, while the UNSW service is hitting the problems I expected.

I still think that we could have got the specialists to go to Dubbo so long as we designed an attractive enough package.       

Tingha Community Regeneration Continues

In Tingha - a case study in community regeneration I reported on a new bottom-up initiative to rebuild Tingha, a small community an hour's drive north west of Armidale, 15 minutes drive west of Inverell.

Community facilitator Bob Neville has just sent me the latest newsletter. It's not on line yet. I will provide a link once it's up.

The Tingha story is really quite inspiring. This is the type of work that has a direct impact on people's lives at local level.

I will do some linked stories on the project a little later. For the moment, I just wanted to record the fact that that there has been progress.

And congratulations to all those involved for Tingha's success in winning a special judges' prize and $16,000 in the national $100,000 Me-Change competition.

The competition, run by ABC Rural and ABC Sport in conjunction with the Foundation for Rural and Regional Renewal, will help 10 small communities tackle local problems such as obesity and social isolation.

Update

Webmiz Christine advises me that the link is now up. You will find the latest newsletter here.

Saturday Morning Musings - more on the media

My post More on perceptions, selection and bias in the Australian media drew an informed comment from Michael Gorey, the editor of The Border Watch in Mount Gambier.

Michael's personal web site can be found here, his blog on newspaper matters here. Michael began his career as a journalist in, I think, 1987 and has had extensive experience with the non-metro press.

I plan to use Michael's comments to extend my arguments with a special focus on New England media's newspapers. However, I want to set the scene first, so bear with me while I ask you to do something.

First click here and then on the NSW tab. A window will open up showing all the Rural Press owned newspapers in NSW. A lot, aren't there?

What will be less clear unless you really know your geography, is that with the exception of a few independent community papers, Rural Press owns every New England newspaper in Newcastle and Hunter, the Northern Tablelands, Western Slopes and the Mid North Coast up to Coffs Harbour. This is an almost complete monopoly.

Now click here and you will find the APN papers. APN owns major papers from Coffs Harbour through the Northern Rivers into Southern Queensland. Two companies thus control New England's newspaper press, each with something approaching a monopoly in specific regional areas.

If we compare this with 1968, the comparison point I used in my previous post, the Newcastle daily was owned by John Fairfax and controlled out of Sydney.

The other four Northern dailies (Maitland Mercury, Northern Daily Leader, Grafton Examiner, Northern Star) cooperated as they had done since the 1920s through the Associated Northern Dailies. This provided a joint marketing platform. They and the other generally locally owned New England papers also cooperated through the Country Press Association, an active and influential organisation representing the independence and interests of the country press.

As I said with the previous post, this is not a history post. However,this brief background sets a context for my discussion of Michael's comments.

Michael wrote:

Country papers: Rural Press has cut them to the bone and introduced syndicated content which nobody wants to read. Their niche is local news. Those papers that also own the web space will do well.

Michael's comment here is the tip of a rather large iceberg.

Both Rural Press and APN Regional have been very profitable entities, yielding better returns than the major dailies. This return has been based in part on their local monopolies, in part on their business models.

The New England and country press and, more broadly, the country media have not always been so profitable.

The press operated as a business, but they did not see their key roles in business terms. They had to make money, but the delivery of news and the representation of the local community was the key, not a constant increase in shareholder returns.

All the New England media - press, radio and later TV - faced similar commercial difficulties.

Because of the research I was doing at the time, I read the board papers of the Armidale Express, Broadcast Amalgamated (the Tamworth Higginbotham family controlled company that ran the New England radio network) and the first years of TV New England.

The same issues recurred. How to meet the increasing fixed costs imposed by Government regulations and by changing technology? How to spread maintenance costs? How to find more cost effective ways of accessing city and national advertisers?

A small example to illustrate the point. Changes to NSW industrial legislation in the 1950s required the Armidale Express to install a staff toilet. This may sound a small and very reasonable thing. However, the capital costs involved in modifying the building were substantial and were the subject of considerable Board discussion. The Board worried about their ability to maintain local independence in the face of increasing fixed costs.

They were right to worry.

To improve economics, the Board agreed a little later to merge The Express with the Sommerlad controlled Northern Newspapers, creating an entity with papers in Armidale, Glen Innes and Inverell, plus a 50 per cent share in 2AD Armidale.

Then a little later again, Rural Press made an unsolicited bid. I actually tried to fight this takeover, in part because I thought the price was too low, in part to preserve Northern Newspaper's independence because I saw the move as yet another loss of New England independence. I had enough proxies to force a very long meeting - the cups set out for morning tea went unused as the shareholder meeting dragged on and on - but in the end I lost.

I was in fact right on both counts. However, that is little consolation.

Rural Press greatly improved the economics of the papers it acquired.

It centralised many activities including printing, so the Express as an example came to be printed in Tamworth. It cut news gathering costs. It introduced network supplements, the syndicated content that Michael refers to, that increased advertising and bulk. And, finally, the size of news content in the paper was directly linked to the volume of advertising, not the volume of news. This was not necessarily immediately clear because of all the other stuff included in the papers.

I will not deal with Michael's comment about web space in this post because I want to make it the subject of a full post. For the moment, I would simply note that Rural Press has been very profitable, but this has come at a local cost.

Michael continued:

Reporter opinion: There should be no such thing. Newspapers should report, not commentate. I know there's a trend towards "campaign journalism" especially at APN papers, but I don't agree with it.

Now here I absolutely agree with Michael, while also disagreeing with him at a different level. This second level raises a number of complexities that bear upon my concern about selection, perception and bias in the Australian media.

Reporting is reporting. If a journalist wants to commentate, then (like me) they can start blogging or write opinion columns. If they are dealing with news, then they should just report. This actually requires a fair degree of discipline, something that I feel is lacking today.

The question of newspaper campaigning is more complicated.

The relationship between the country media and their audience is a complicated one that is very different from the city equivalent.

To begin with, there is a very different personal relationship in that country journalists live in the community in a very different way.

Growing up in Armidale, the Express editor (Roy Blake) lived one block up, half a block in the opposite direction lived the main Express journalist (Mr White). A little later on the opposite corner to the Blakes lived the woman in love with a radio station reporter. In two out of three cases, I was friendly with the daughter. One of my nicknames, Chalky, comes from my friendship at primary school with Margaret White.

This is a completely different world, one in which personal relationships have to be taken into account. The type of journalism practiced in Sydney may simply tear a community apart. This means that different set of ethical and professional issues are involved.

Country papers are also journals of record and voices for their communities in ways inconceivable to their metro cousins. This is where issues of campaigning come in.

The Sommerlads were a German family who migrated to Tenterfield. Ernest Sommerlad became a reporter on the Inverell paper and then with assistance from friends purchased the Glen Innes paper. The Sommerlads became one of the major New England press families, one inextricably linked with my own family.

In 1950, Sommerlad published MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD. A Handbook on Journalism, Broadcasting, Propaganda, Public Relations and Advertising (Angus & Robertson). In this, I think the first ever Australian book on journalism, Sommerlad discussed in part the relationships between press and community.

We need to set a context here.

A strong supporter of self-government for the North or New England, Sommerlad campaigned actively for country development and the new state cause, using the editorial columns in his papers as one vehicle. In Mightier than the Sword he explained, simply, that part of the role of a newspaper was to campaign for the interests of its own area. The paper and the people it served were inextricably mixed.

This is a little different from Sydney's Granny Herald where the paper is happy to fulminate on a variety of issues that really have little to do with Sydney's concerns. However, in both cases the same issue arises: how do your make a distinction between the paper's editorial position and reporting? One reflects views, the second is meant to be factual, objective.

I think that the key is to be conscious of the different roles. Once, as has happened recently with some of the SMH's campaigns, reporting and campaign become mixed, then there is a problem.

I want to finish by linking the discussion back to Rural Press and APN.

A few years back I was on the periphery of marketing Country Week to Rural Press.

Developed by Armidale's Peter Bailey, the Country Week concept was simple enough. Given the systemic problems stopping Sydney people moving to country New South Wales, let's get all country areas to combine in a single annual marketing push to sell the country story to Sydney residents. The response from Rural Press illustrated the problems created by current media structures.

In the past, the need to individually approach multiple papers would have been a problem. In theory, concentration of ownership might help. The reality was very different.

To begin with, we had two main owners, Rural and APN. Take one, and you lost the other. This one was fairly clear cut - Rural Press had better NSW coverage, so APN was out even if this meant loss of Northern Rivers coverage.

We then faced two problems. Rural Press explained that they could not direct their papers' editorial content. They were prepared to consider broad sponsorship so long as we could guarantee a cash return from advertising and, as part of this, would let their papers know. After that, it was up to the papers and to the amount of advertising that could be placed with individual papers.

In the 1919 Victor Thompson editor of the Tamworth Observer (now Northern Daily Leader) and with the support of his board began planning a campaign for a new state for Northern New South Wales. This quickly grew into a newspaper campaign involving 120 newspapers.

With modern ownership structures, this type of coordinated campaign is now very difficult.

The fact that the owners leave formal editorial independence to their editors means that you still have to coordinate at local level. However, when push comes to shove, those editors must still meet their revenue targets. Further, broader non-local campaigns that raise corporate issues do end being considered at head office notwithstanding editorial independence, if only because such campaigns involve cost.

For Thompson to do today what he did in the early 1920s he would probably need to get senior management, possibly board, support from Fairfax (Rural Press is now part of Fairfax) and APN. Both companies would need to at least agree to let editors participate. He would then need, as earlier, to sell the idea to individual editors. I don't think that this possible.

I will pause here. I hope that I have at least fleshed out some of the issues involved.

Postscript

Rod Kirkpatrick's history of the NSW country press is entitled Country Conscience. That was what the country press was and, to a degree, still is.

One of the sad side effects of the growth in concentration of ownership of the country media was an inevitable decline in the role and influence of the Country Press Association as the Association struggled with changing economic and ownership conditions.

The Association's history, Serving the Country Press 1900 - 2000 by Lloyd Sommerlad with a chapter by David Sommerlad, charts some of this.

Reading between the lines, the growing influence of Rural Press led to APN's withdrawal, leaving the Association without representation north of the Bellinger Valley. APN rejoined, but seems to have left again because none of its papers are included in the latest membership list.

In a comment on this post, Michael refers to the young age of some of the country journalists and editors. There is, to my mind, a substantial difference between the old country press where editors had a long term commitment to their community and the new world where placement at a paper is one step in a career path within a large organisation.

Has the country press maintained its soul? I'm not sure.

I do know from reading many of the papers that the idea of service to the community is still there. However, there is less continuity and, I feel, cooperation across areas.

From a narrow New England perspective, the changes that have taken place continue New England's fragmentation. Rural Press looks to Sydney, APN to South East Queensland. Neither looks to New England.