Regional Australia in spotlight

Conference to explore rural policy this week at USQ

A MAJOR rethink in rural and regional policy areas is needed to secure the future of areas like the Darling Downs.

Those were the comments from a University of Southern Queensland Academic ahead of a Resilient Regions Week conference this week which will explore how regional areas can become more resilient.

USQ’s Institute for Resilient Regions executive director Professor Geoff Cockfield said sometimes the issues facing regional Australia could all seem a bit too much.

“It becomes too easy for governments to think problems are too hard, but they won’t say that,” he said.

“It’s easy for people who live in rural communities to think it’s all too hard as there are so many big problems to deal with.

“We build a very big wall to climb over in our minds and it’s so easy to just put rural development in the too hard basket.”

Professor Cockfield said the biggest political issues facing

‘‘ IT BECOMES TO EASY FOR GOVERNMENTS TO THINK PROBLEMS ARE TOO HARD

PROFESSOR GEOFF COCKFIELD

regional and rural Australia were all related to health policy, communication policy, business support policy and transport policy.

“The thing we’re looking at is a special subset of those relating to rural people and there are a whole lot of issues with geographic and isolation disadvantage,” he said.

“We need to be talking about it as we currently are as regional issues as a whole, but as health policy and how that relates to rural areas. Communications, transport and how that relates to rural areas. That can be quite difficult to do.”

He said energy was also a massive problem for regional areas.

“It’s about getting ready for low carbon futures and how we’re going to generate and use energy in regions into the future,” he said.

“There is a lot of prospects for rural tourism that we are yet to fully realise,” he said.

“There are a lot of people travelling out into western and remote areas and it would make a big difference if we got people to stay a day instead of an hour or two days instead of one.

“It would make a huge to

some small some communities.”