Reach out, show you care

I TAKE an optimistic view about the future of North Queensland.

I think communities here will succeed despite the lack of coherent governance from a thousand miles away and, unfortunately, also among some of our leaders here.

This week I have been talking to some of the local government leaders and business people who represent and have interests in our hinterland from Townsville out to Mount Isa.

You can’t help but be impressed with the potential of the proposals they have in mind to generate wealth and jobs.

Just about all of the communities, from Charters Towers, to Hughenden, to Richmond and Cloncurry, have relatively low- cost schemes to store water and open up large scale irrigated cropping, if only our State and Federal governments could get their act together and provide the support and business environment needed for them to be realised.

At Mount Isa and Cloncurry, new mines are opening and being planned.

It is only a matter of when, not if, another large- scale Mount Isa basemetals resource is identified.

Yesterday an innovative project was opened at Lawn Hill, north of Mount Isa, where the tailings of the former Century zinc mine will be reworked to produce zinc and other metals on a world- leading scale.

While differing groups from Townsville to Yabulu and Greenvale are working on separate plans to either extract the metals for emerging vehicle, household and industrial battery markets, or actually intend producing the batteries here, further west at Julia Creek private companies, in partnership with interests in the US, look to be more advanced in plans to extract vanadium as a feedstock to produce batteries at a plant, also in Townsville.

And then there’s Adani, which this week backtracked on its rail plan to instead link with Aurizon’s existing coal network for its Carmichael mine.

As always, the ingredient needed to further some of these schemes is local control of government decisionmaking. What is also needed is recognition that Townsville’s success rests, as it always has, with the strength and vitality of its hinterland. ARE you lonely? You are not alone … in more ways than one

Forgive me, dear reader, I usually use this page to rage about politics, but this week I’d like to think out loud about something far more important — loneliness.

It was R U OK? Day on Thursday and sure, many mouthed the words about reaching out to mates and taking care of each other, but how much do people actually do it?

A couple of weeks ago, Lifeline released a survey of 3000 Australians that showed 60 per cent of people are lonely and 82.5 per cent think it’s increasing all over society.

I don’t know why, but surely the fact people don’t seem to care when they hear a statistic like that is part of the problem. Maybe we are all too busy to care, but if you take out all the distractions we pretend are the important things we “have to do” today, loneliness isn’t that strange a concept to understand.

Perhaps so many people told Lifeline the problem was getting bigger is because it feels like society is aimed at the individual, rarely the collective. You may have lived in the same city, town or suburb for a while, but do you feel part of the ‘ community’?

I’m always in awe of how many Australians are volunteers. Volunteering Australia says more than six million people give their time to causes, clubs and organisations they hold dear. So what do the other 19 million people do?

For 2.7 million people there’s no time to volunteer because they are caring for someone in their family in need. According to Carers Australia the average age of a carer is 55 and their main role is to take care of their parents; 856,000 are primary carers for family members due to disability, illness or age. Stunningly, one in 10 carers are under the age of 25.

In money terms, if someone was getting paid to do what they do, it would cost more than $ 60 billion.

Then there’s a number that’s getting bigger by the year. More than a quarter of all homes in Australia have just one person living in them. The average age of women living alone is 64, for men it’s 54. The biggest reason for men living alone in their middle age is family separation.

All these statistics aren’t intended to be depressing reading, but they are some of the many parts that lead to the overall problem of loneliness.

It’s a problem we can’t simply ignore and hope our lives will somehow escape the many factors that pull us away from each other.

In the UK the government has a minister for loneliness, and while I’m not advocating for anything like that, we clearly need to do a whole lot more to reach out to the people that our fast moving, and largely imageobsessed culture, leave behind.

A small step is to think of the people in your own circle who are being left behind. Pick up the phone and call them for no reason other than to say hi.

Take a moment to talk to the person behind the counter at the shops and try to ask them a real question about their day. Invite a mate you haven’t seen in a while to watch the footy at the pub, or maybe take the two hours you wanted to spend watching a movie and talk to the oldest member of your family.

These won’t cure the problem, but we need to take the time to let everyone know someone knows they are here and we need them around for a lot longer.

If you or a loved one need extra support, Lifeline Australia provides free 24/ 7 telephone crisis support on 13 11 14. Other services and tools can be found at www. ruok. org. au/ findhelp.

Paul Murray is a broadcaster with Sky News. His show Paul Murray LIVE can be seen 9- 11pm SUNDAY — THURSDAY on Foxtel Channel 103 and 600 and Sky News on WIN.