After a slow start the Prime Minister has established and funded a National Bushfire Recovery Task Force. That's a welcome thing. But rural Australia faces much more than a "recovery" challenge.
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Recovery suggests the goal is merely to lift us back to where we were, as if everything was just fine before the terrible fires ravaged our communities and business enterprises. If only that were true.
Prior to the fires, rural Australia was in the grip of the worst drought in our history. It still is. Now in its seventh year on the Treasury benches, the Government is still without a comprehensive and strategic national drought plan.
Indeed, there is no plan for regional Australia at all.
We desperately need not just a recovery plan, but an economic reconstruction plan with an emphasis on the infrastructure and skills needed to build drought resilience and to leverage economic opportunity.
Our capital cities and larger towns enjoy all the benefits of economic scale and diversity. In many rural and regional towns, the picture is much different. These towns have narrow, and increasingly fragile, economic foundations.
Many of our regional economies depend largely on one or two industries. More often than not, industries which have been both around for a long time and are now under pressure of some kind.
The coal, petroleum, forestry, fishing, farming and food manufacturing sectors are the beating heart of rural and regional Australia and in the absence of significant technological advances, capital city residents can't live without them. They provide the food, energy and construction materials we all rely upon. So, we're all in this together.
It's not just drought, fire and flood. Many rural industries are big producers of greenhouse gas emissions, the coal, gas and agriculture sectors among them.
The drought and the fires have caused the anti-fossil fuel campaign drums to beat louder. High gas prices driven by the supply constraints imposed by anti-gas activism are challenging another big regional employer, our manufacturers.
Given rural Australia is home to the industries most under pressure and given the scale of the changes and challenges confronting us, one would expect our Government might have a plan; a strategy to adapt to, and to capitalise on, all of this pressure and change. Sadly, it has no such plan.
Australia's capital cities already house two-thirds of our population. Add the bigger non-capital cities like the Gold Coast and Newcastle and you'll easily reach 80 percent. Australia is one of the most urbanised countries in the world.
Our capital cities are bursting at the seams with people. Congestion grows worse, not better. Housing affordability is shifting further out of reach.
There is no room left at the city inn for a large influx of rural Australians.
The good news is, we're happy right where we are but for rural Australians, it can't be all take and no give. We need a Prime Minister who understands the enormity of our challenges and a Government with a plan to overcome them.
It will be expensive and hard decisions will have to be made. That's why we need some common-sense bipartisanship on regional Australia's future - not just in our political institutions, but in civil society too.