Yes. A few of the comments attached to the article in the OP point out that shipping a bunch of people to the Bush would stress the water supply. And the infrastructure; yes, cities aren’t the only places with infrastructures! At least one of the fine country folk posting indicates they don’t want any foreigners diluting the purity of Real Australians out beyond the cities. (Hey, they have rednecks in Australia, too!)
Perhaps developing the Bush is a good idea–but just sending new immigrants out there doesn’t seem very smart. Also–there aren’t many jobs. Why did the “real” Australians move into the cities in the first place?
In fact, there’s a shortage of fresh water in the Sydney metro area, and it’s likely to get worse. About 75% of Australia is arid or semi-arid – looking something like this or like this. However, there are areas away from the big cities, and generally close to the coasts, which could support more people than they do, particularly on the north coast of New South Wales and on the coast of Queensland away from Brisbane. People like living in those areas – they spend their holidays there, and they often retire there – but there aren’t enough jobs to support significant migration to those areas.
My sister and her husband live on the north coast of New South Wales (just north of Coffs Harbour). They moved there from the outer suburbs of Sydney about 6 years ago, and they love it. Their house is a five-minute walk to the beach, and she says that it feels like their whole life is one big vacation.
But there’s no way they could have moved there if her husband hadn’t had a transfer offer from his company to take over the company’s work in that region. Simply moving and then looking for a job would have been out of the question, because there were no jobs to be had. The unemployment rate in these coastal towns is often twice the national average, and even worse in the younger age groups, from late teens to early twenties.
That is just silly of him to say. How does putting people in places there there is inferior or virtually no infrastructure help anything? It is far easier and cheaper to settle people in the cities where there is existing infrastructure which can be more easily, quickly and cheaply extended when required. States are already stretched financially as it is, how and they going to fund that?
Not to mention that in a free society you simply cannot dictate where people live.
Sydney gets plenty of fresh water, our average annual rainfall is 48" - compared to London 28", Berlin 23", NY 47", Shanghai 45" and LA 15". Our problem is that almost all the rain that falls on Sydney we throw into the ocean, get it good and salty, then we use a huge desal plant to suck it back onshore again and remove that salt. This seems to be out of some preciousness we have (or at least our politicians think we have) about drinking rainwater or treated sewerage. Adelaide and Perth may well run so low on water as to have to be abandoned within 50 years, IMO, but the east coast cities are or will be fine once that kind of stupidity is undone.
Chicken and egg
People move to facilities and infastructure, facilities and infastructure will move to people. When you are talking about regional centres like Bathurst, Orange, Shepparton, Albury etc I don’t see the insurmountable problem. They aren’t being asked to go to Booligal, Marble Bar and
And the track record in the past few decades for “easily, quickly and cheaply extending” existing infrastructure into western Sydney is what?
As others have said, it’s not about mandates, it’s about economic incentives. How do people think the United States was settled? The feds gave away hundreds of acres to farmers willing to stick it out in some remote corner of nowhere for a minimum of five years.
Of course, that was in territorial days, before all the land was privately owned. I imagine for an established nation, with lots of private ownership, you’d need other incentives.
Well naturally, getting social workers who are prepared to travel 2 hours is a critical factor when formulating immigration policy.
The fact that you think Albury is one of those “places that far out” indicates precisely why the regionisation policy is valid. They aren’t contemplating a days commute to Cunnumalla. Albury has an airport and is in the middle of Australia’s principal road and rail corridor. It’s a lot closer to Melbourne than Canberra is. It’s #12 in Australia’s largest regional centres, and as a deal clincher you can get a quite drinkable soy latte there, if that were your poison.
Then, of course, is the possibility the locals might be able to handle these administrative issues themselves without the necessity of calling in pelicans.
Given a choice, for some professions you prefer to live somewhere where changing jobs wont seriously risk having to do a 4 hour round trip instead of a 1 hour round trip. Again, this can be an issue for these jobs even within regional Melbourne, let alone in smaller regional centres.
Heck, thats why the GP immigration thing came into being.
There are various migration related services that can save a lot of trouble if they’re available in reasonable distances. There are specialist aspects to some of those roles. It should be a part of immigration policy to consider whether you can provide those services practically when making policy decisions on issues like this.
If your main concern is ‘how those places are viewed’ then really your goals probably arent about immigration as such, and you’re just looking at this as a magic bullet for issues that probably need other interventions.
One thing I should probably clarify for our American friends is that Australia is very centralised, population- wise. Each State has a capital city which usually has a couple of million people in it*, and maybe a handful of major “Regional” centres with perhaps 80,000-200,000 people in there (Say, Townsville or Bendigo).
Also, most places are a long way from anywhere- it’s not like the US where (unless you’re in Nevada or Wyoming or Montana or somewhere like that) there are towns everywhere.
The state capital cities are often huge, though- it takes longer to drive across Sydney than it does to fly from Sydney to Brisbane (1000kms away). And because everyone wants to live where the action is, they’re getting bigger and house prices are skyrocketing. A house in an average part of town in many places, for example, is around $400,000.
So, with that in mind, I think there is a lot to be said for encouraging people (not just new immigrants, but also the long-term unemployed) to move to regional areas provided the infrastructure to support them is in place. What we can’t have is the current system where everyone lives in the State capital and pretends their food comes from the planet Farmland, which is a mythical land guarded by dragons and lakes of fire.
Like I said, there’s no point sending CPAs to Mullumbimby or computer scientists to Birdsville, but there is growth potential in “The Bush” and I’d certainly like to see some economic incentives and development aimed at capitalising on that.
Also, that might mean the house prices in the cities start to come down to something that normal people can afford without spending the rest of their life paying off a mortgage…
I don’t really think the capitals are huge. Sydney and Melbourne are obviously big cities, and Brisee is kind of big, but I wouldn’t call any of them huge. I have not been to any other capitals, but I understand they are smaller.
I doubt changing immigration policy would affect the property values in these cities, I think the cost of housing in the capitals is caused by property investment and shortages.
Labor and the Liberals seem to have this tactic of trying to out do each other with their tough immigration policy. It’s really bunk from both of them.
From my perspective, it’s really nice that you can get to rural parts of Australia without having to travel through 100 K of sprawl.
Both Lib and Labs are spinning like tops to try and avoid ownership of the recent Treasury projection of 36 million population for 2050. Current population is 21.3mil
That’s 70% in just 40 years and it isn’t going to happen by natural growth.
They can’t admit that level of immigration will occur, though it’s probable, nor can they see how you can put a further 5mil into Sydney and 4mil into both Melbourne and Brisbane without property bubbles and infastructure bursts. Hence a regionalisation policy is inevitable.
It makes sense and it was done all the time in the past. It’s even done now. Our government will offer incentives in terms of grants, for people setting up businesses in rural areas or inner cities without services.
Why shouldn’t Australia open up the vast areas? Look at Brazil and other countries that moved their capitals to stimulate the opening up of outback areas.
Immigration should be simple. Does a job need to be filled? Where is the greatest need? Then those who are willing to do this, get in. Those who don’t, don’t get in.
These “some professions” I presume are the ones who currently commute 90 minutes each way to their CBD desks.
But we aren’t talking about a daily commute, again presuming the locals can’t do this dministration stuff themselves. Simply a visiting specialist were that to be needed. It’s not a recent phenomenon. Have you noticed that 80% of the specialists practicing in regional Victorian hospitals are Melbourne based and operate on a weekly/fortnightly circuit?
If you look down the second list on that page, you find after Adelaide:
6 Gold Coast-Tweed Heads, Queensland/New South Wales 454,436
– this is practically part of the Brisbane metro area. People commute from here into Brisbane.
7 Canberra-Queanbeyan, Australian Capital Territory/New South Wales 356,120
8 Newcastle, New South Wales 288,732
– this is practically part of the Sydney metro area. For about 18 months I commuted from very close to the Newcastle CBD to very close to the Sydney CBD.
9 Central Coast, New South Wales 282,726
– halfway between Sydney and Newcastle. Almost entirely dormitory suburbs for Sydney
10 Wollongong, New South Wales 234,482
– another part of the greater Sydney metro area, since it’s just over an hour by train from Sydney
11 Sunshine Coast, Queensland 184,662
– just north of Brisbane, and within commuting distance of that city
12 Geelong, Victoria 137,220
– part of the greater Melbourne metro area. About 20 years ago, I knew a woman who commuted from Melbourne to Geelong, but most of the commuting is in the other direction.
13 Townsville-Thuringowa, Queensland 128,808
– the largest city in Australia that’s not part of a capital city’s metro area.
Don’t knock Mullum: it’s the administrative centre of Byron Shire, which has a population of about 30,000. Byron Shire’s best known town is Byron Bay, where (very oddly) both my brother and my wife’s brother live. The area is very popular as a tourist destination, and could support 5 to 10 times as much population, if the will was there – and the jobs. Of course, a lot of the current locals would not like that at all. However, I’m sure there are jobs for CPAs in Mullumbimby, and would be more if the population of Byron Shire increased significantly.
No Im not talking about CBD, Im talking about working in places like Bendigo, Geelong or outer suburbs of Melbourne verging on more rural, eg Mornington, Frankston etc.
I work in the community health area, that does a lot of work with refugees and other migration issues and know that they have recruitment issues in those kinds of areas, for a variety of reasons.
We’re not only talking about admin based jobs. We’re not only talking about hospitals. And some of them are not the kind of jobs where visitting specialists will be a good solution. Service provision for some of these issues is already a problem in places like Melbourne where service concentration is easier, let alone where you start spreading it out. Interpreters alone are just one example and no it cant all be done by phone.
If you think its going to be fine and service provision will be straightforward well thats your opinion I guess, Im not sure theres a lot more to discuss on the issue.
My problem is with your geography, not your vocation.
So Frankston, 37km from the Melbourne GPO, with the Port Phillip Bay yacht clubs on one side and the sandbelt golf courses on the other is “outer suburbs of Melbourne verging on more rural”? I would have thought most of the grass there was mown by the council.
My point is that you dont even have to get particularly far out of the Melbourne CBD to have trouble recruiting with some of these more specialist areas and your rebuttal seems to be ‘thats not far at all’ in regards to some of the areas Im talking about.
How that strengthens your case baffles me, if anything you seem to be agreeing with me.