[Introduction]: In June, 2014, the Digital Rural Futures Conference, an initiative of the Regional Universities Network (RUN), was held at the University of Southern Queensland’s Toowoomba campus. RUN, a network of six universities with headquarters in regional Australia, was established in October 2011. The foundation members are CQUniversity, Southern Cross University, Federation University Australia, University of New England, University of Southern Queensland and University of the Sunshine Coast. The RUN member universities play an important and distinctive role in advancing Australia’s national prosperity, productivity and identity through their educational and research contributions to regional economic, social, cultural and environmental development.
[Introduction]: In June, 2014, the Digital Rural Futures Conference, an initiative of the Regional Universities Network (RUN), was held at the University of Southern Queensland’s Toowoomba campus. RUN, a network of six universities with headquarters in regional Australia, was established in October 2011. The foundation members are CQUniversity, Southern Cross University, Federation University Australia, University of New England, University of Southern Queensland and University of the Sunshine Coast. The RUN member universities play an important and distinctive role in advancing Australia’s national prosperity, productivity and identity through their educational and research contributions to regional economic, social, cultural and environmental development.
This research investigates the use of digital information, primarily through computers and the internet, by small and medium beef cattle producers to see how access, acquisition, interaction, generation and use of information takes place within their enterprises. From qualitative data, cost and learning effects for uptake of digital technology are isolated from age and gender influences. This research uses cost and learning theory to point to the means of growing producer capabilities to implement digital technology as part of a production system, and to explain why, in many cases, implementation of digital technologies has resulted only in use as communication or storage devices rather than tools for analysis of production.
A persistent and increasing governance challenge has appeared in the last several decades in mature democracies at all levels from national to local that stems from declining trust levels in government by citizens. This lack of trust leads to multiple policy implementation problems for governments, city and regional local governments alike, especially those facing complex sustainability issues - wicked problemsA process known as deliberative collaborative governance that enables more meaningful public participation in issues that matter, with greater decision-making transparency, accountability and perceived legitimacy, has been demonstrably effective in helping to redress the governance gap.National and international examples of deliberative collaborative governance over the last two decades illustrate the potential of this method to close the governance gap. A four year action research case study in a regional town in Western Australia is used to illustrate how deliberative collaborative governance has positively affected the implementation of local government policy and operations including their responses to wicked problems, and reduced the governance gap.
This doctoral research investigates Australian cultural policy in relation to the community arts. The study demonstrates how 'art' and 'culture' are terms that are applied as interchangeable, disguising aesthetic values, social ideals and economic objectives. An understanding of what is meant by 'community' is also revealed to be contested and polemic. Cultural policy managers and creative practitioners are interviewed and consensus emerges that culture does not require to be mandated. Local government is viewed as most proximate and therefore representative of community arts and cultural aspirations. As a result, local government is increasingly expected to voluntarily commit resources to community cultural development that also demonstrates expanded understanding of 'culture' as an integration of social and economic objectives. However, state and federal funding authorities nevertheless shape arts and cultural programs with incentive funding tied to local and regional investment in the cultural and creative industries. Voluntary cultural policy planning, widely viewed as complementary to local government mandatory social policy management, has led to prevalence of the creative industries model, tending towards global homogenizing production. Storytelling emerges as a culture-making practice where cultural activists in particular, facilitate collective creativity with stories that tell identities in relation to the specificity of place. A scholar-practitioner model is identified where the narrative arts are applied as a method of production and analysis of creative works. The intellect is triggered to reflect on knowledge and meaning transmitted in the sensory with stories told in painting, music, dance and performance, and where feeling is a catalyst for thinking.
The use of technology in Australian agriculture is rapidly advancing, with precision agriculture becoming a major focus of research and practical application. This move requires an appropriately qualified workforce in all aspects of agriculture and presents substantial social and educational challenges. This paper describes the steps being taken at a regional university to address two related needs in the Australian rural context: the lack of tertiary qualified graduates in the Australian agriculture industry and the deficit of qualified science and mathematics teachers in rural locations. In an attempt to address these challenges, a number of engagement strategies targeting high school teachers and students have been developed centered on the university SMART (sustainable, management, and accessible rural technologies) Farm that highlight the role of mathematics, science and technology to improve productivity. The initiatives include student outreach programs in science and agriculture and the development of an interactive digital classroom to engage junior secondary mathematics and science students. These initiatives are often the first time students come into contact with the term 'precision agriculture' and the underlying mathematics, science and information technology involved. The success of the program is evidenced by an increase in enrolments in agriculture based courses at the university of 10-15 per cent per year in the three years since the initiative was commenced.
Higher education is a powerful tool for reducing social and economic disadvantage. But access to higher education can be difficult, particularly for Indigenous Australians who face multiple levels of social, economic, cultural and geographical isolation. While enabling programs can support Indigenous students to gain university entry, the experience at Central Queensland University (CQUniversity) suggests that their past success has been limited. In this paper, the authors describe the enabling program available to Indigenous students at CQUniversity. They suggest that the newly developed, flexible, online version of the program is helping to address geographical and social isolation and improve successful outcomes for Indigenous Australians.
Regional cities are an important element of the national settlement system, and supporting their growth is a policy objective for different governments across Australia. The aim of this paper is to examine how Regional Development Victoria has assembled and applied an evidence-base to support decision making about how to accelerate the growth of Victoria's regional cities. The paper begins by outlining the policy context in Victoria and the Government's objective to achieve more balanced growth across the State. This objective has been articulated through the Government's land use and infrastructure planning documents. The first component of the evidence-base was a literature review to identify existing research about regional city growth and factors important to their development. The second component involved testing these factors empirically through a comparative analysis of regional city growth and all non-metropolitan local government areas in Victoria. This analysis indicates the importance of local competitiveness factors to explaining differences in regional city economic performance. These include measures of human capital such as tertiary attainment and skilled labour supply, industry mix, and the quality of local infrastructure. The third component of the work involved more detailed regional city profiling to further understand these factors. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of this analysis for future policy development and investment to accelerate the growth of Victoria's regional cities.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tertiary students in remote communities are separated by physical distance from their institution and fellow students. The author's current PhD research focusses on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander pre-service teachers in remote communities studying Initial Teacher Education through Community Based Programs. Many of these pre-service teachers participate in digital communities by means of mobile devices. Congruencies between constructs of mobile learning and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural philosophies are proposed as an explanation for membership of digital communities. Policy implications regarding use of mobile devices in Community Based Programs may increase numbers of graduates.
Regional entities in pursuit of prosperity have unique elements that can strategically come together to penetrate business innovation in micro and small businesses. This paper summarises the evolution of the Innovation Centre Sunshine Coast (ICSC) as a vehicle that has proven successful in addressing the interface between a regional university and high growth firms within a knowledge-based economy. It includes primary research into the opinions and priorities of its incumbent tenants. The paper construes, based on both literature and the experience of the ICSC, that there are some fundamental principles and guidelines that can maximise the chances of success for comparable ventures elsewhere.
Uncertainty and shortages of surface water supplies, as a result of global climate change and flow regulation and harvesting regimes, necessitate development of groundwater in many irrigation management areas. Groundwater can be expensive to pump, but provides a reliable supply if managed sustainably. Groundwater can be used optimally in conjunction with surface water supplies. The use of such conjunctive systems can significantly decrease the risk associated with a stochastic availability of surface water supply.We propose an innovative nonlinear programing model for the optimisation of profitability and productivity in an irrigation command area with conjunctive water use options. The model, rather than using exogenous yields and gross margins, uses crop water production and profit functions to endogenously determine yields and water use, and associated gross margins, respectively, for various conjunctive water use options. The model allows the estimation of the potential economic benefits of conjunctive water use and derives an optimal use of regional level land and water resources by maximising the net benefits and water productivity under various physical and economic constraints.The proposed model is applied to the Coleambally Irrigation Area (CIA) in south eastern Australia to explore potential economic benefit of conjunctive water use. The results show that optimal conjunctive water use can offer significant economic benefit, especially at low levels of surface water allocation and pumping cost. At lower levels of surface water allocation the results show that conjunctive water use potentially generate additional AUD 57.3 million. On the other hand, at higher levels of surface water allocation, additional benefit of conjunctive water use is AUD 9.4 million. The model could be applied to analyse the impact of escalating energy prices for groundwater dependent irrigation systems, and other irrigation systems, to maximise the potential of conjunctive water use.
Climate variability represents a significant risk to farming enterprises. Effective extension of climate information may improve climate risk decision making and adaptive management responses to climate variability on farms. This paper briefly reviews current agricultural extension approaches and reports stakeholder responses to new web-based virtual world 'discussion-support' tools developed for the Australian sugar cane farming industry. These tools incorporate current climate science and sugar industry better management practices, while leveraging the social-learning aspects of farming, to provide a stimulus for discussion and climate risk decision making. Responses suggest that such virtual world tools may provide effective support for climate risk decision making on Australian sugar cane farms. Increasing capacity to deliver such tools online also suggests potential to engage large numbers of farmers globally.
Long Distance Commuting (LDC), also referred to as fly-in-fly-out (FIFO), involves a cycle of working for extended periods away from the family home. The experiences of LDC workers were examined through a study of 104 minerals and resources industry workers and partners in South Australia. SA workers comment that LDC is satisfying and has positive personal, lifestyle, career and family benefits. Stressors include shift work, long rosters, separation from friends and family, missing family events, isolation, and fatigue. Feelings of anxiety or reports of depression which commonly feature in other literature were not a feature of this study. Short rosters, a high standard on-site services and amenities coupled with training and career opportunities, local management and peer support, a family friendly organisational culture and regular communication with family, are key factors contributing to sustainability of this workforce model.
Northern Australia has a population of 1.2 million people across nearly half the continental landmass. It is home to many diverse communities of people, including Aboriginal nations, descendants of European, Melanesian and Asian settlers and more recent arrivals. It is an area of globally significant natural beauty with unique ecologies. It also has strategic and economic importance to Australia. A contentious debate over the future of the region can be observed within three themes: Big development, big conservation and policies seeking Indigenous wellbeing. We argue that if the agendas associated with each of these themes and their associated agents are driven forward in isolation, the tensions between the three will compromise the health, wellbeing and economic coherence and vitality of the North. This paper presents an overview of the present governance landscape with a critique of the role of neoliberalism and neoliberal governmentality. It identifies some of the ways in which ‘other’ social values and ways of knowing are either marginalised or rendered invisible in these narratives of governance and development. In highlighting the tensions that result from these exclusions, we argue there is a need to both understand these dynamics, and move towards an explicit commitment to open, genuine dialogue, inclusive of the communities that reside in northern Australia.
JESP Special Issue on Regional MegatrendsThis Special Issue contains six papers, each providing a very different contribution to the stock of research on regional Australia. As has been the case with the previous Special Issue of JESP, these papers were linked with themes and presentations given at the annual Sustainable Economic Growth for Regional Australia (SEGRA) conference; which, in 2014, was convened at Alice Springs.The issue opens with Breda McCarthy's examination of organic food consumption trends in China: this a very timely piece given the current focus on regional Australia's role in helping to provide for the burgeoning food and nutrition needs of Asia. This paper describes how Chinese food consumption and food preference (as a looming 'megatrend') is critically important to regionallybased Australian food producers.The second offering comes in the form of work by Chris McDonald and Vinnie Maharaj, who have studied the decision-making processes in regional Victoria. Questions of policy environment, growth performance and supporting economic infrastructure are considered within the context of the ongoing growth of regional cities as a state-based megatrend. The authors concluded that competitive advantages and endogenous factors are important to regional growth and performance, although the key drivers may be different in different locations. They also demonstrated that both quantitative and qualitative data are important in developing a profile of regional city growth, and should be used to underpin policy development processes at the State level.Thirdly, Robert Weymouth and Janette Hartz-Karp examine the implications of not one, but two megatrends, in creating a 'governance gap' for regional Australia. The authors contend that the rise of wicked problems and declining trust in governance are both megatrends in regional Australia, and that positive feedback loops between these two problems have resulted in an erosion of trust in government's ability to tackle issues of regional development. Here, a model of Deliberative Collaborative Governance is put forward as a possible reform measure to assist in bridging the 'gap' of trust.Continuing on the governance theme, Anne Stephens and her veritable army of colleagues make the fourth contribution to the megatrend edition with their paper on tensions in the Development of Northern Australia: Implications for Governance. This too is timely, given that the focus on development of the North is surely one of the more 'visible' of megatrends in Australian regional development, helped particularly by a Parliamentary Inquiry on that topic. Stephens et al. explore three subset themes within their paper: those of big development, big conservation and Indigenous wellbeing. They conclude that northern development requires not simply an acknowledgement of diversity - of peoples, values and places - but also the introduction of appropriate participatory spaces in governance systems, to allow this diversity to be properly considered. …
The impact of an asbestos-related diagnosis in Australia is multi-faceted and complex. Sufferers and carers face a range of life-limiting physical symptoms as well as the additional anxiety frequently associated with pursuing a claim for legal compensation. The result is that those affected by asbestos-related disease, their carers and families, often experience social isolation and a lack of social support. While traditional, face-to-face support groups can provide geographically proximate members with a valuable opportunity for interaction and support, they are not readily accessible outside major population centres and for people with acute symptoms of mesothelioma where all forms of social interaction, including travelling to and attending a support group meeting is problematic. Digital technologies and in particular online communities have the capacity to provide social support and thereby reduce the social isolation experienced by people affected, both directly and indirectly, by an asbestos-related diagnosis. Online communities have the potential to connect members of this community to experientially similar others. They have a particularly important role to play in Australia, a geographically large but relatively sparsely populated country characterised by a mix of urban, regional, rural and remote communities. This paper presents details and findings from a members' evaluation of a pilot project that involved the creation of the Dusted Community, a peer-to-peer online community for men and women affected by an asbestos-related diagnosis. It was hoped that the Dusted Community, by addressing social support directly, would provide substantial benefits both for individuals with an asbestos diagnosis and for their carers. The members of the Dusted Community expressed strong support for an online community and emphasised the unique nature and challenges associated with an asbestos-related disease and the importance of being able to share their own stories.
This paper presents an argument for an integrated approach to attracting and retaining rural and remote teachers. It describes existing government funded research and state government policies in this domain. It builds upon existing sociological models to propose a model of the factors influencing teacher decisions to teach in a rural location and to stay in a location. Based upon this model and the background literature the paper proposes that policy ought to be directed towards addressing both internal and external influences upon teacher behaviours in an integrated way.
For regional producers of organic food, the growth of the 'green food' market in China and the signing of a free trade agreement between Australia and China is critically important. An online survey of 250 Chinese consumers was conducted and it shows that the purchase of organic food is motivated by altruistic concerns (i.e., environment and animal welfare concerns) and self-interest (i.e., personal and familial health concerns, food safety concerns). Individuals who consume 'green food' and organic food are likely to distrust the Chinese food system. Age is an influential factor affecting purchase of certified organic food. Consumers aged 36 and over are more likely to buy certified organic food. The presence of children in the household is also an influential factor. The survey revealed gaps in respondents' knowledge of green food and only half of those surveyed could distinguish between organic and green food. Fruit and vegetables are the most popular type of green food purchased. This study helps fill a gap in the academic literature given that comparatively little is known about the factors that influence organic food consumption in China. Recommendations include the development of a generic branding strategy, appropriate segmentation strategies and consumer education.
In furthering the process of codifying international agreements into a body of international development law and established principles, this article creates an indicator for social scientists, practitioners and the public to use in measuring whether international organisations and governments meet the criteria for development that have been established by various international treaties and that are recognised by experts in the field. Though the concept of human and social development presented in international treaties actually reflects diverse dimensions of humanity offered by psychologists (human development potential), anthropologists (cultural adaptation and diversity along non-linear paths), artists and others (expression, co-existence with nature, ideas of beauty, and intellectual discovery), few, if any, today in the development field appear to pay any attention to these broader views. International development as defined both by its proponents (mostly economists and technicians) and by its critics (often political interest groups in urban societies) is now largely a linear measure along a ladder, applying a single dimensional measure of productivity and the physical (animal) benefits it can provide. This article re-establishes the international community's comprehensive human vision that has been co-opted.
Australia's aquaculture industry is predominantly based in rural coastal regions where it makes a significant contribution to local economies as well as to national food security. Over the past decade changing global economic and trade conditions have resulted in Asia supplying an ever-increasing amount of seafood to Australian consumers. From 2003 to 2007 landings of cheaper imported Asian prawns increased dramatically, seriously impacting the eastern Australian prawn farming industry as graphically illustrated by the collapse of prawn farming in the Northern Rivers region of NSW. In response, the Southern Cross University's National Marine Science Centre researched the feasibility of farming the finfish mulloway or jewfish (Argyrosomus japonicus) as an opportunity for Australian prawn farmers to diversify their production base. In this context, the purpose of this case study was to assess the effect of imported products on the viability of the northern NSW prawn farming industry by reviewing the output and cost structures of a local prawn farm before (2002-2003) and after the influx of competing imports (2006-2007). Secondly, the findings of a two year trial of farming mulloway in ponds on a converted prawn farm are critically evaluated, and possible opportunities are identified. Finally, regional policy implications of the case study are examined and current constraints and limitations to the uptake of mulloway farming in northern NSW are identified.
