Regional Australia - Power and Politics

17 February 2000

Featuring

• Margo Kingston, author of Off the Rails: the Pauline Hanson Trip
• Hon Joan Kirner, AM, former Premier of Victoria
• Karlene Maywald, Leader of the National Party in South Australia and Member for Chaffey
• Chaired by Professor Kym Adey
• Questions

With an introduction by Ms Elizabeth Ho, Director, the Hawke Centre. Seminar presented by the Hawke Centre in association with the 2000 UTLC Summer School and Imprints Booksellers.

Introduction by Ms Elizabeth Ho

Welcome to the proceedings and in particular I would like to acknowledge those members of Parliament who are attending, the patron of the Hawke Centre, Dr Lowijta. O'Donoghue - pleased to see you here this evening. I welcome Senior Representatives of the UTLC, Rhonda Baker and Dale Perkins from the South Australian Farmers Federation, representatives from the South Australian Country Women's Association and University staff - University of South Australia staff - particularly those who have journeyed here from the Whyalla campus this evening.

Apologies have been received from His Excellency, the Governor Sir Eric Neal, the Chair of the Hawke Centre, Dr Basil Hetzel, the Premier, Mr John Olsen, and Deputy Premier, Mr Rob Kerin, Mr Alexander Downer and Senator Robert Hill, the Vice Chancellor Denise Bradley is in China at the moment who would otherwise have liked to have been here and sends her regrets and similar the Chancellor, David Klingberg also sends his apologies.

The seminar tonight is presented by the Hawke Centre at the University of South Australia in association with the UTLC Summer School and Imprints Booksellers. This seminar is an opportunity to understand more about the expression of political power by Regional Australia and the influence of the country vote on political outcomes. The Hawke Centre at the University of South Australia strongly supports political involvement in this area and obviously supports discussion about issues we face in the community.

It is a very topical issue and one that is demonstratively important to us all. The impact of regional opinion on political outcomes is of interest and clearly of importance to all Australians. Tonight we will hear from three prominent Australian women with outstanding credentials and they will give their individual views here this evening. The first speaker will be Margo Kingston, a Canberra based journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald and author of Off The Rails: the Pauline Hanson trip. 

The second speaker will be Karlene Maywald, leader of the National Party in South Australia, and member for Chaffey, to give a South Australian perspective; and our final speaker is the Honourable Joan Kirner, former Premier of Victoria and she will speak about the Victorian experience. Each will speak for around about 20 minutes and afterwards there will be an opportunity for members of the audience to ask questions of all of the speakers. Without more ado, I would now like to invite the first of our speakers, Margo Kingston to address us. Thank you.

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Margo Kingston

I would just like to show you the page 1 of the Daily Telegraph on Monday, headline, "Two Nations, Sydney Growth Booming While Country Towns Face Extinction". There's about four pages of coverage inside and the series ran for about three days of reporters going out to the bush and the regions and reporting back on the great city-country divide. Regional politics is now on the front page of the Telegraph. Fascinating two words, "Two Nations". Of course when that is read, you think One Nation and this amounts to an enormous admission about the part of the core central truths in the One Nation phenomenon.

I think that we can say fairly confidently that the Pauline Hanson phenomenon created this, proof that city people are now trying to really understand what is happening in the bush and trying to breach the Two Nations divide. Hansonism I think will - it will take us probably 10 years to work out what the effects of it were but to me, having been in politics, politically reporting, maybe for about 12 years, it is by far the most important thing that has happened in my time reporting politics and as city people we really have to understand that it is not going to go away and that for all our strategies in whatever area we are interested in of social policy, Aboriginal policy, economic policy, we have to understand what is happening in the bush and we have to adjust to it.

When you think back to 1996 when Pauline Hanson was elected, it is very significant, I think, that she was elected by Labor voters in the seat of Oxley. I think it was Labor's safest seat. This is the way I sort of read the thing. In 1996 Labor battlers were sick of Keating. They believed they had been left behind. The bush had been whinging for, you know, years and no one thought of them because they didn't have any power but country people and most Australians thought, right, we are sick of Keating, we are going to go to the man who will look after us, the man who will look after the battlers, John Howard.

If you are in hard core Labor seat - if you are in a hard core Labor seat, you are just not going to be able to face the prospect of swinging to the conservatives. You are just not, so they went for this fascination in Pauline Hanson, but as the phenomenon gained momentum, it became very clear that it was bush politics and regional politics which - the greatest effect was going to be in. The reason for that is that people had thought that John Howard would care for the little people who were being savaged by reform and they came to the conclusion that he didn't care.

So there's still a very recent memory of Keating. Their saviour had not delivered the goods, so where do they go. In the country they went for a cargo cult figure, sort of I found the whole Hanson phenomenon very cargo cultish. It was sort of erotic, especially to over 40s working class men. She spoke the language - I mean, I've seen it. I mean, it is just amazing, you know. Western Australia had this fantastic trend when I was following her in the '98 election where these big burly guys come and say: Pauline, could you autograph my upper arm and I'm going to get a tattoo around it. Thank you, Pauline.

She really played on that too. She was very into that sort of thing. Just let me get back on track here. The other thing she really had going for her was that she spoke the language, the political language was at a stage where it was simply incomprehensible to many, if not most, ordinary people and here she was asking the questions they wanted to ask. I mean, here we were in our grass houses when, you know, on 60 Minutes - I think it was Tracy or one of those 60 Minutes people - asked Pauline: "are you xenophobic?" 

She said: "please explain", and we all said: well, it’s just that she does not know. She does not know anything but the public went: we want to know too what that means and irony of ironies it became her rallying call, "Please explain". Very, very significant. Of course, in the end luckily I think because she was such an amateur and the party was formed with grass roots people without a clue about politics, the alarm bells resulted in - we beat them. She was finished on the night of October 3 1998 but I think one of the most important effects of Hansonism is that it radicalised the bush and regional vote.

Where it was the cities that had been, you know, playing around and they don't know whether they are Labor or Liberal and swinging around for quite a while, the country had still basically stuck to their traditional voting patterns which were conservative. The country is a very conservative place. With the rise of Hanson and the excitement she generated in the bush, you know, I sort of see Hansonism as basically a scream, a scream for recognition. That traditional loyalty went and country and regional people realised that after all they had power.

So although they have rejected Hanson and her, you know, ridiculous ideas, they are on the lookout and their vote is for sale. Now, after 1998 we move to the New South Wales election which was very significant because it showed the rise of the rural and regional Independent. Very rich regional city, Dubbo, went Independent. It was the National's safest seat in New South Wales. Richard Torbay and I think Tamworth or Armadale also won. So the difference between these candidates and Hanson candidates were they were very well respected mayors, ex mayors, etc and it was the regional towns going: we are going Independent.

Now, people, you know, say to me, you know, often - not as much these days but, you know, at the beginning of all the Hanson drama: "gee, these country people, they are so stupid. They, you know, don't realise that if we go back to isolationism, you know, they will be stuffed as well as us and gee, you know, they haven't got a brain". Rubbish. Country and regional people have got lots of brains and when the major political parties started jumping when they started voting for Hanson, they knew what they had to do and that has put their vote on the auction block.

If you were a New South Wales regional voter, why would you vote for the major parties? Far better off voting for an Independent. An Independent will have no - they formed a coalition of regional independence - Labor is going to look after those seats because it is a seat off their main opponent and presumably they would like to win it one day. If it is a conservative Government, they want to get it back, they want to - they are going to look after them and, of course, the high hope here is that you will get balance of power in which case you have got it.

Move on to Victoria where, you know, again all us city people were very shocked. The Victorian regions have never been fans of Pauline Hanson. They have been most concerned about her social policy, particularly Aborigines, but again I would argue seeing the results of Hansonism, they took the next step and went to Labor. We now have a Labor Government in Victoria, propped up by regional Independents. Very rich regional city in Mildura went Independent. Now, there are local factors about moving water to the Snowy and all the rest of it but they thought their best way of getting what they wanted was to be Independent and they are now in the process of getting what they want.

So I now see the National Party literally fighting for its life. I mean, if One Nation had done any good in 1998, I think the Nationals would have been finished. They have got out of gaol free and they are now fighting to re-establish their credibility in the bush and, you know, one of the many ironies of Hansonism of course is that they now have the power to deliver for their voters. In 1996, the Nationals fought to retain the Department of Regional Development and they got rolled in Cabinet by the city slickers.

They know what is going on in the bush. They were fighting in Cabinet the whole way. The only problem is they never got their way and John Anderson tells this wonderful story of, you know, there he is in Cabinet and he would say, you know, some policy would come up and he would say: "look, you know, the bush it won't like that" and Alexander Downer - I'm glad he is not here because I can tell this story now - took to, you know, opening the Cabinet meeting with: "well, John, is the bush burning today"? Of course, after the Queensland election, Alexander Downer said to John Anderson: well, "it actually burnt down, didn't it"?

The Nationals now have enormous clout in cabinet. One of the Nationals, the member of Inkler, Paul Neville, said to me recently. I said: "when did, sort of, John Howard, sort of, see the light that he had to really, you know, get into this stuff" and he said: "well, I think it was at Wandi". Remember that Queensland election, that shock result, all those seats falling to One Nation, John Howard the next week flew up to Queensland and visited Wide Bay which is a National Party seat north of Brisbane and he held a town meeting in each of the three state seats within the electorate, all of which had fallen to One Nation.

I went up with him, you know, you are sort of so used to this sort of country likeness and that was all gone. It was angry, it was seething, it was frightening and the first meeting he went to was at Wandi, which is this little place, where they were worried about pigs and they, you know, dressed up as pigs and made oinking noises when he walked in and so on. After the meeting, he was wandering around with Paul Neville who is a member in an adjoining seat and Paul said that is when he realised that something had to be done and the reason was that he sensed the poverty in the room.

Everyone went on that trip did. I mean, they were poor, really poor. It is something - it is when I first started to sort of think about my attitude to Hansonism which was always, you know, very, you know, ignore the stupid woman and, you know, what is this alien in the Citadel but there was actually a lot more to it than that and since Wandi, John Howard has done a lot of things to try and restore his credibility in the bush. People who say that the recent trip round country Australia is tokenistic are either stupid or they are making comments for self serving party political reasons.

John Howard immediately after the 1998 election appointed John Anderson, the Minister for Regional Services, to put all this in so that they could come up with a grand plan, gave the go ahead for the rural summit October last year which was a very interesting symbolic meeting where Anderson deliberately chose to bring grass roots bush people to the centre of power, Canberra, sort of to reverse the usual thing of we will go out to the bush. It worked extremely well and I think you will find this year that there will be enormous money spent in the bush, especially in infrastructure.

We saw with Dairy Deregulation last year the biggest ever compensation package for dairy farmers who will be hurt by it and let me tell you that everyone in this room will be paying for it. We will all be paying 11 cents a litre so we can compensate the farmers. With the employment job network providers, the latest tender massive disproportionately in the contracts given, much more given to the bush and the regional areas. With National Textiles which, as we know, Howard has got into all sorts of trouble about, the start of affirmative action policy, he made it quite clear that he will give 20 grand to, you know, these poor sods that lose their job and the directors have run off with their money.

In regional and rural areas where there is no other prospect of employment, he will seriously consider giving them their full entitlements. This year is the year of the regions. They have got what they want. They are going to get money. They are going to get empowered all over the place. There's a great sort of psychological job going on, like the rural summit basically was all about psychology, it was all about remember you used to be the pioneers and did it from the ground up.

It is local leadership that is important now. You have got to find a way to survive in the new era, very much like the, you know, the John Travolta speech in Primary Colours to those sacked workers. So there's all sorts of changes happening around regional politics. I think the media is getting there but is still way behind the eight ball in this. I mean, one of the media's really important social roles is to maintain a sense of coherence, a national coherence and there's no doubt that we dropped the ball in sorts of ways, not only in the country but in the city, that we talked a language and spoke in abstract terms without any understanding about what was happening on the ground and how to deal with that and ease the pain for people.

Early this year John Anderson was acting PM and did a trip around Australia. In South Australia, he went to Whyalla and I was the only person, the only reporter on the plane. Just incredible that no one in the press gallery saw fit to get out there and experience what was happening in the country. It has now started and the reason it has started is because our city readers now know that they have got to understand this stuff, to deal with it and try and influence it, especially on social policy. I mean, we cannot allow the tendencies of this new movement to racism to capture the agenda.

We can't afford to do it. How do we stop it? There's got to be interaction between city and country. One of the best things I, you know, reported on that John Anderson trip was for the first time a National Party seeking to be seriously involved in Aboriginal affairs, in the actual policy not the knee jerk stuff, of starting to want to sit down with that - work out some stuff that works on the ground. So looking ahead, I think, you know, the great thing about Australia - in a way it is the worst thing, you know, that we are so apathetic and things just seem to happen and we have a reform and then we move on to the next one.

You know, we are not like America, we are fighting over the same thing for 50 years, is that Australia I think is very good at adjusting to these challenges. My big hope after 1998, sure Hanson was dead and Hansonism was dead but the problems were still there. Would we move to address them? Would we move to again try and bring in the country into our conception of national identity? I thought we would because it is in our self interest to do so and Australia is pretty good and managing radical challenges.

If we didn't adapt, if we didn't think again, then we would have an unstable society where everyone would lose, a One Nation balance of power, everyone in this room would lose and our children would lose. So we have to fix this problem. I would just like to end with Tim Fischer's latest idea to combat One Nation. He has announced his retirement from the New South Wales seat of Farrah early. He will stay till the next election and he is running what he calls a people's pre-selection to elect his successor.

What that will involve is the National Party calling for nominations, say there's six to eight nominations, those six to eight people will go on a road show throughout every single town in that electorate for the next three to six months, give their five minute spiel and take questions from the public. At the end of that process, the delegates will pick their candidate. Now, Fisher was quite open, you know, when I asked the obvious question, "why are you doing this"? Is it because of Hanson? Yes, of course it is. One of the big lessons of Hansonism is people really want to be grass roots, they really want to feel that they are being listened to and that they are truly being represented.

Now, he has got a couple of advantages in this system. One, you weed out the dogs early. You know by the end of the process that you will get a candidate who can handle him or herself and who is in tune with the electorate. The second thing is of course, because they are facing a bit of a challenge from the Liberals, is that half the campaigning is done by the time the candidate is pre-selected. I think this is a revolutionary idea which the Nationals must seriously consider across Australia to regain some of their power.

It could be something that will move throughout the parties. I mean, how many of us are sick of apparatchiks who we don't know from Adam suddenly purporting to represent us. It is very exciting. I can envisage this sort of thing happening on say a pilot basis by the fledgling National Party here. I can imagine the Labor Party trying it in regional New South Wales. Everything is up for grabs here. Thanks a lot for asking me to speak. I'm not an expert in rural and regional politics. I am just a city slicker who has sort of had the shock of my life following Hanson around and really trying to think about how we can deal with this so that, you know, we maintain what is unique to Australia.

It is all very well this globalisation stuff. Of course it is inevitable, of course it effects everyone but the Australian way still relies, I think, to a fundamental extent on egalitarianism and people working together not winners and losers in an extreme sense. I think we can do it. I think we can show the way and I think Pauline Hanson, you know, may she rest in peace, possibly could end up being, you know, one of the best things that has happened to Australian politics and of course that can only be said after we have slayed the dragon.

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Chair: Professor Kym Adey

Thank you, Margo. May I suggest if you want to see or read more of Margo's insights, that you read the book. It is a good book and the photographs are rather interesting as well. It is now my pleasure to invite Karlene Maywald, the leader of the National Party in South Australia.

Karlene Maywald, MP

Well, that was interesting. It has indeed been a very interesting time in politics. I am actually a product of the phenomenon that created Pauline Hanson also and I am in fact an accidental politician. I had never been a member of a political party prior to being approached by the National Party to stand for the seat of Chaffey. I stood for the seat of Chaffey at the request of the local media who said: "Do you think you could stand for the seat of Chaffey"? And I didn't say no. So they ran a campaign to say: She may stand. Will she go Independent? Will she go National? I chose to go National Party because I believed it was a step that the electorate could take and also I believe in the National Party policies, once I had a look at them.

What we were talking about here was conservatism, at its best and I had voted Liberal all my life and it was the day that I realised that the Liberal Party was not representing the interests of my community that I decided that it was time for me to do something about it. When we talk about 1996 and Pauline Hanson first being elected and Hansonism being created as a result of that, I'd like to take a step back from that to the 1997 election in South Australia. The Liberal Party held 36 seats to 11 seats here in South Australia. They had a whopping majority. They were in for one term. The Labor Party had decimated the State. State Bank disaster, $3.2 billion worth of debt. They had it home and hosed for at least the next two elections, two terms, maybe even three.

Well, at the end of their first term we saw that majority reduced to a minority and we saw two Independents and a National Party person representing Independents - we are not a coalition here in South Australia - elected to the South Australian Parliament with a balance of power. The extraordinary thing about that is two of the seats that fell were McKillop, the safest Liberal Party seat in the State, and Chaffey, the second safest seat, which was the one that I won. It was the start of the phenomenon that created Hansonism. South Australia is just a little bit too little to be noticed on the east. 

So what happened to create this phenomenon? Let me first start by saying that decline in rural and regional Australia is not a new phenomenon. There is an abundance of reports out there that have dealt with the issues that the bush people are facing at the moment. Back in 1993 the Commonwealth established a task force and the result of that was the Kelty Report and the Kelty Report found that national development and regional development are inextricably linked. Australia will only reach its full potential as a nation if regions can reach theirs. 

South Australian Government established a task force in April 1999 and the Bastion Report was the result. In the Bastion Report you find this following quote: 

People in rural and regional Australia are voicing serious concerns about their capacity to cope with increased stresses placed on their communities. As they see it, they have been disadvantaged by the accelerating pace of change and its associated social and economic dislocation. Their feelings of frustration, isolation and disempowerment are reinforced by their perceptions of government responses to those stresses. 

In May 1999 the Honourable John Anderson, who was then the Minister for Transport and Regional Services and Senator, the Honourable Ian McDonald, who was the Minister for Regional Services at the time launched the Regional Australia Meeting the Challenges initiative. In the overview they say Australia’s future as a cohesive and prosperous nation is critically dependent on the economic, social and environmental well-being of Australia’s regions. 

It is interesting that Margo has brought the Telegraph over, which has that Two Nations on the front page, because John Anderson in that paper, that Ministerial statement, talks about Two Nations and the great Australian divide. Recently, the Australian Local Government Association commissioned the National Institute of Economic and Industry Research to do a report on the state of the regions in 1999. They found that the economic benefits of sustained economic recovery over the 90s were unevenly distributed across Australia.

The winners are the global centres of Sydney and Melbourne and a small group of resource-based regions in northern Australia. The losers are rural regions based on traditional agriculture and industrial areas. It has taken the last 10 years to create the great divide between urban and non-urban Australia and the principle driving forces behind this division has been the macro and micro-economic reform processes that were initiated firstly by the then Treasurer Keating and progressively advanced by the Prime Ministers, Hawke, Keating and now Howard. Commodity prices came under enormous downward pressures and costs escalated.

Wheat prices crashed. Cereal grain prices come under pressure and in global markets where they were forced to compete with supported - and by that I mean subsidised US product. In the National Post last year in May there was a quote that said: 

In the US farms receive an average of $50,000 from a government aid program based on acreage, not income and the European Union has annual subsidies of about $70 billion per year for their farmers.

Our local markets here were also subjected to unfair competition from imports. I mean, the perfect example is the citrus industry and citrus juice, who had to face cheap imported Brazilian juice concentrate as their competitor. Imagine being a citrus grower who pays award wages, WorkCover, annual leave, sick leave, superannuation guarantee, long service leave, leave loading, public holidays, and I hope I haven't missed too many there, but I'm sure there's more, who has to compete against Brazilian orange juice concentrate that is squeezed from oranges picked by exploited labour at 40 cents Australian per case. 

The Federal Government's response to this was: "Well, you see, it's all about level playing fields and globalisation which equals better market access for some and therefore there has to be casualties. Sorry, you're it. Here's a few bucks. I hope it eases the pain". The same thing happened in the pork industry and that's why you had all those porky people all going oink, oink, oink. The same thing is happening in the sugar industry. These people are now poor. They are very poor. They are asset rich but they don't have two cents to rub together. They struggle to send their kids to school.

Country people are now of the view that the social and moral obligations of government have been abandoned in pursuit of these unholy globalisation policies that are forcing Australian commodity producers in general to compete in a field that is not level. We have been expected to lead the world in deregulation and the cost has been just too high. Add to this, when there is drought on the land it equals drought in the town. No farm cash means ancillary service provision and business is not profitable so the businesses close. Families are lost from the farm, families are lost from the towns. Critical mass flow-on effects occur.

We lose teachers because we don't have the numbers. We lose police, we lose health professionals and their families go. It starts to spiral down and down and down. Add to that the recent bank closures - well, not the recent, the continuing bank closures, I should say. Bank managers leave town, bank staff and their families leave town. It is wonderful to say, "we will put an agency in a local business so you can still do your banking", but it is not that that the towns are worried about. It is the reduction once again of the critical mass required to retain services in a country area. 

Population loss results in the slow death of a town, or as Mayor Baluch from Port Augusta puts it, dead and dying town syndrome. Now, we can add to that State policies that continue to focus on the construction of metropolitan icons and this was one of the problems that happened in Victoria. I am going to focus on South Australia, though. We see wine centres, soccer stadiums, $85 million dining rooms at the Convention Centre, Football Park extensions, then add back-flips on utility sales. Emergency Services Levy. Significant increases in general taxation revenue. Everyone's - licence fees, registration, stamp duties and business costs have gone up 14½ % in two years.

I think by now you are starting to get the picture of what has been happening out in the regions and here is where I would love to share with you how we can perhaps introduce some ideas that might fix it, but that is not my charter here tonight. My charter here tonight is to tell you how the country voter has responded. You might invite me back at some stage to talk about those issues, Liz. Dr Dean Jaensch, who is a Professor of Politics at Flinders University, as most of you know, summed up the situation very, very nicely in his column in The Advertiser on 9 December and I can summarise best his article by quoting my election campaign back in October 1997: 

Make it marginal and make it matter.

For decades rural South Australians have been almost obsessively loyal to the Liberal Party, or in the eastern States, the Coalition. According to Dr Dean Jaensch, this is the root cause of the problem for country voters. When there is no real hope of change in party support, when the patterns of voting are so stable and entrenched, then it is probable that these electorates can be ignored by both major parties. So it is simple; if you want to effect a change, if you want to be heard you must first grab the attention of those who are in the position to effect that change. At the election in 1997 the Liberal Government here in South Australia was given the first warning, when they lost three of their prized rural seats, including the two safest seats in the State.

I believe this alone should have grabbed their attention. Next, the Pauline Hanson factor at the recent Federal election, and then the Victorian election results sounded the second and third warnings. For good measure, let's just top it off by considering the recent Advertiser opinion polls which saw Liberal Party support in the bush slump to only 26%. All of which are reinforcing the sentiment I am putting forward to you tonight, but not surprisingly the South Australian Government continue to be in a state of denial.

"Surely, this was just a glitch as a result of a couple of local issues in those three electorates out there in the bush. Pauline Hanson has gone, hasn't she? The Victorian voters didn't really mean to oust Mr Kennett, did they"? Any politician who believes that the loyal party vote will miraculously re-appear if only they continue to tell the people what a wonderful job they are doing, is in serious need of therapy. The South Australian country voter continues to be disillusioned with major party representation. 

They are not going to move away from conservatism to Labour, they are going to look for the alternative. They are tired of task forces, committees and regional councils. Country voters have been empowered by the realisation that they now have the power to make a significant impact on election outcomes and that cushy, comfortable pollies do not necessarily produce results. In my view no rural seat can now be considered safe from here on in, and to believe so is folly. At the next elections in South Australia and Federally are due around October in 2001. The empowerment of the Australian country voter has awoken the sleeping rural giant and I anticipate a very interesting outcome in both elections. Thank you.

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Chair: Professor Kym Adey

Thank you, Karlene. Our next speaker probably needs no introduction. Joan Kirner has been part of the Victorian and Australian political scene now for some considerable time, though I shouldn't emphasise that, but it is my pleasure to invite Joan Kirner to address us tonight.

Joan Kirner

Thank you, Kim. Thank you for the invitation to be here and to share the platform with one of Australia's leading political journalists/come groupie, Margo Kingston, and Karlene Maywald, a very impressive, I must say, leader of the National Party here - watch out Pat MacMahon, that is our leader of the National Party, well, he was until the election and then he lost it - and part of the thankfully increasing number of women in Parliament and it is always a pleasure to be in the presence of Lowitja O'Donoghue who has told it for years as it is in the country.

As I sat listening to the other speakers I found myself agreeing with most of their analyses on rural and regional success, though I do have a little difficulty saying that Hanson was actually a bonus. But I also found myself with little snippets of my past, which as Kym just said is a fairly long one now, flashing before my eyes and I thought I would share with you some of those pictures because those pictures have been, as I am sure they are for you with your set of pictures, very important to how I see this debate about the future of rural and regional Victoria. 

I want to take you back to 1973. I'm on one of my regular lobbying trips to Canberra as a State school parent. This was my early days as a parent activist. The same role in which I travelled the length and breadth of country Victoria and much of Australia, staying at local country parents' homes, because we couldn't afford hotels, of course. What a great learning experience. I even learned what an effective full-time equivalent of a sheep was as distinct from a teacher. Now, I am standing in Queen's Hall, that is old Queen's Hall, catching any MP who comes within cooee, to get their support for the Schools Commission legislation, the Whitlam legislation.

All the parents across Australia, particularly country parents, were concentrating on the National Party as country schools and country kids were desperately in need of national funding and national country education programs. Country mums and country school committees had been sending daily telegrams - remember those things, telegrams - to their MPs to argue the cause of country parents and children and to get the National Party to cross the floor and vote for the Schools Commission. 

Cross the floor. Just at that moment, as I was looking around for another victim, Peter Fisher, the then National Party member for the Mallee, who happened to send his kids to State schools, rushed across the hall, like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, saying: Sorry, Joan, can't stop to talk now, have to ring Alwyn Rogers in Mildura and tell her that we are going to cross the floor and vote for national funding for State schools and set up a schools commission and include a State Schools parent rep. I didn't really mind if he didn't stop, as long as they crossed the floor. 

And then he said, I hope that means she'll call those country parents off. Only later did I find out from Alwyn he had received 60 telegrams that day. Now, what did I learn from that experience? Remember, this is long before Hanson. Country parents, especially women, are great political activists, when the purpose is a better education for their children and a better quality of life for their committees. But I also learned that they had a serious expectation that good government was about governments delivering some things to people, like health, like education, like decent roads, and they weren't going to let up on that expectation.

I also learned that country people share many of the same aspirations as city people and that makes me very wary of this Two Nations argument. The Daily Telegraph, to my knowledge, has never cared about the divisions in our community, that there are Two Nations, particularly the nations between the rich and the poor. I wonder why they find it so interesting to focus on two nations as the country and the city. Is it easier to concentrate on the country and city division than it is to concentrate on the rich and poor division? And that exists in both city and country. 

But I also learned that one size doesn't fit all, that if you're serious about doing something about country education you do something about distance, about lack of quality library resources, about retaining good teachers, as Karlene said, and the special challenges that mean country people have to be listened to for what they want for their kids. I also learned that when country and city people, particularly parents, understand that they have a common purpose, but a different experience, they can in fact change the minds of politicians, even of major parties. 

My second picture is June 1985. I had just been elected as a State Minister of Conservation, Forests and Lands. I was pretty nervous. They actually elect you as a Minister but they never tell you how to do it. I didn't even own a pair of gum boots, let alone a pair of walking shoes. I can remember Caroline Hogg, who actually comes from South Australia, saying to me, Which one of us is going to have the flat shoes? But at least I knew country mums from one end of Victoria to the other. I had a network so I decided that the best way to find out what the hell was happening in country areas was to take a bus trip, not a limmo trip, a bus trip, on the Murray Valley Highway, looking at, in this case, the increased problems of salination of the Murray River and the surrounding land.

At each stop along the way, Shepparton, Echuca, Mildura, a different departmental officer came aboard to explain how we could solve the salinity problem by channelling the water of the land, the excess water on the land, back to the river and allowing the salt to disperse, to move downstream to Waikerie and other places. Now as a green, relatively green, and greenie new Minister, I felt my anger rising. I didn't know much about salinity at that stage or about land and water use but I knew enough to know that you don't fix one areas salinity problem by moving the problem downstream to Renmark and beyond.

Later that day I caught up with the local farmers, men and women. The blokes had been calling me Madam Minister all day. The women, who were serving the afternoon tea said, "Joan, how lovely to see you again." The blokes thought "is this a conspiracy?", and it was. It was because as I listened to them I heard quite clearly that they didn't want me or the departmental officers to be bringing our expertise to them to tell them what to do about salinity. They did want our resources, by the way and more of them, but what they wanted was someone to listen to what they thought good land practice was, not only on their farms but on the catchment area.

So I went back to town and I said: "I want a program based on the ownership of the farmers and the local people of the land. Based on conservation principles but where the locals own the problem and the solution". "Oh, Minister", they said, "do you know what you are letting yourself in for?" I smiled sweetly and said, "Yes, but you've got no idea, have you." I had a bit of trouble getting it through the Victorian Cabinet because they said we already had Work Care and that had a pretty good reputation at the time so I didn't - so I shouldn't really muck it up by calling this thing, which was my program, Land Care.

Well, in 1986 we had six Land Care projects in Victoria. In the year 2000 we have over 4500. What I learned from that experience, well, it is my view that if the Land Care principles and processes of community action can start to work to tackle land degradation, then they can work to tackle the other big community problems and that is that they don't need experts and Ministers coming to town to tell them how to do it. They need Ministers and local members to either live there or to come to town to listen to their solutions and resource those solutions. Not in the short term. Not so that a marginal seat is responsive but so that we, as a total community, can do something about that land.

So that in any solution to the challenges facing rural and regional communities, and they are different, it was the regions who swung to Labour in Victoria, regional cities. Not the rural cities, they swung to Independents. If we are going to do that, then the locals have to own the solutions. Country people are really a bit like city people. They don't want you to do things for them. They want you to do things with them. For rural community challenges to be faced and met, there has to be a partnership between all sections of those communities and between rural and regional areas and cities.

The division between rural, regional and city cannot be resolved, in my view, unless the divisions within rural and regional communities are also addressed. How can you have a regenerated country area when the indigenous people, like Dareton for example, near Mildura, where the indigenous people have got a council who will not even put the water on to their community and the same people who are saying they are neglected, who are non indigenous, don't even notice? So it seems to me we are a bit too all embracing to talk about regional communities or rural communities. We have to talk about the differences within those communities as well as the differences between.

My last picture is a very brief one. Again in 1985 - no, 1986 by then, then a Minister a whole year of Conservation Forest and Lands, I had to visit the bushfire lines in the fires of '85-86 and one thing we do know in Victoria is how to have bushfires, just like you do here. Now, I had a real disadvantage as the Minister of Conservation, Forest and Lands. Well, as a Socialist Leftie, I was a feminist and I was a part greenie. I needed desperately to do something to demonstrate my credentials, particularly to those whose main interest was the removal of wild dogs from their properties.

It was very important issue, just that I didn't know it was. Anyway, to do this I figure if I flew behind the fire lines in a helicopter clad in overalls, they had to find a fairly large size but they did find them, and landed behind the fire lines and helped the blokes or appeared to anyway, the blokes and the women, that I might be accepted. As I don't like heights and I don't like being hot, it was a pretty challenging experience. Imagine my surprise when after a day of bushfire hopping, as I called it, as the chopper approached the Mount Buffalo helipad, I saw a big square shouldered beared CFL officer waiting on the ground for me to arrive. He was wearing a dinner suit in the middle of the day.

I didn't say anything to anyone because I thought the smoke and heat might have been getting to me but I did think to myself why would you wear a dinner suit to a bushfire. When we landed I initially avoided any comment because he was clearly waiting for me to say something and I wasn't a teacher for nothing and then I had to ask, didn't I. "Is that special firefighting gear", I said and then trying to appear learned I said, "I suppose the pure wool fabric is good fire protection." He looked at me. He is a very big guy and his reply was slow and deliberate, "No, ma'am," he said showing proper respect, "it is just because I've never met a bloody Minister of the Crown before and I thought I'd better dress up for the occasion."

So I learned another thing, that is if you are up yourself, you don't go down well with country people and that country people can bring you back to earth with their lovely sardonic sense of humour pretty quickly and that is where you should stay if you want to relate well. I tell you those stories because for me there is a sense and we need to inject a sense of the reality of country lives into this debate that there are stacks of people out there in the country with hopes and dreams and who are feeling alienated as well but there are also stacks of those people in urban areas.

I live in the western suburbs of Melbourne. That is like - a bit like Elizabeth and other places here. Our unemployment rate is exactly the same as is Gippsland's. Our heroin rate is higher. Our retention rate is marginally higher. Our domestic violence is about the same and I think we really have to be careful about whether in looking at the country-city divide, we are making it too easy for ourselves to not look at the other divides. However, there do seem to me to be things that apply in solutions to both areas. 

I entitled my - subtitled - my address when I was writing it: Desperately Seeking Susan, not my friend Susan from political days but Susan Davies who is the Independent member for Gippsland West who was elected in 1998 and started the roll against Kennett because I wanted to highlight the differences in approach and direction between the Hanson-Madonna type solution or Cargo cult, as Margo said, grasped by a large number of Queenslanders in 1996 and the practising partner approach of Susan Davies, the first Independent elected in the Victorian Parliament in 1998.

Pauline Hanson, according to Margo's terrific book, and I'll give her a plug for hers if she gives me a plug for mine, but she hasn't read mine, and Susan Davies have some similarities. Both are seen to stand up for country people though in Hanson's case only some of them, speak often bluntly their mind, emphasise with the locals in schools, shopping centres, farms or pubs, be honest, wear bright colours and short skirts and be hard-working single mums. Both women had the effect of issuing, as Margo has said, a clarion call to the major political parties, and the media, that the patience of country people with being ignored and powerless had run out but their similarity ends there.

Pauline Hanson's star has waned because, in my view, she is not of the community. She and her backdoor men acted on the community. She is divisive in her analysis and solutions. She is exclusive in her solutions and her attitude to people and so are the people behind her. Susan Davies politics are the reverse. She recognises the not only long term solutions that the only long term solutions to rural and regional alienation is to rebuild the connections, rebuild the communities. Communities that have been shattered, as Karlene said, by cuts to services, removal of the small farms, low farm prices, rural youth retreat to the cities and so on.

But she knows it is not simply the issue of change in society that creates rural challenges. It is the felt powerlessness of some people in country communities. They're powerlessness to shape the change that they are all experiencing. A woman said to me the other day down in east Gippsland: "Joan, how can we be expected to value ourselves if we are not valued". When communities lose their health services, schools, etc, etc, etc they can go two ways. They can lash out at those who seem to escape or impose the pain, those who have, the elites and those who don't deserve to have, the welfare recipients, but this way it seems to me they find no solution. Temporary solution, perhaps. Not a long term.

Because, you see, when we are talking about country services we are actually talking about the connecting fibre - Government providing the connecting fibre for communities. So that is why, for me, the solutions to alienation, powerlessness and poverty, dare we mention that word, lie in planning for the future with a renewed sense of community purpose and Governments which actually encourage connection and participation. The Victorian election and the Queensland by-election suggests, to me, that there is - that is the recent Queensland by election where Joanne Miller won, how do you pronounce it, Bundumbera I think, with a 9% swing towards a Labor person in a by-election in the Hanson area getting a 9% swing towards her.

Another Labor bloke, a little while over in the same sort of seat, got a 2% swing against him. What was the difference? The difference was one was a community candidate and one was a machine person. So I think the Victorian election and that Queensland by-election suggests there is an important shift happening in rural communities and regional communities from party dogma to community deliberation, from divisive politics to community politics. Susan Davies put it to me this way: "It's not easy, but as I move from group to group I'm trying to work them in with each other. I'm trying to assist them to rebuild the community. It takes a long time. It is not change which worries people, it is feeling powerless and alone".

And Susan's position is backed up by Hugh McKay's research in The Age last Saturday he wrote: 

The more you dig, the more you realise that whatever the next bright invention might promise, our deepest need is still the need for connection with each other. Connection between rural communities, connection between rural and regional, connection between regional and urban, connection between those who have and those who have not, connection between politicians, business and people, connection between indigenous and non indigenous.

To me successful rural regional revival, like Land Care, Women in Agriculture are all built on strengthening mutual respect and community connections. In the words of Lillian Holt, former head of the Aboriginal Community College in Adelaide, now in Melbourne: 

Community action to combat racism and division is about enhancing humanity for what diminishes me as a black person diminishes all people. As a community activist myself of 30 years I firmly believe that diminished communities die but connected communities grow. The best politics help to make those connections and it is time for all of us rural, regional and urban, to reconnect.

Chair: Prof Kym Adey

Thank you, Joan. I think you would all agree that we have heard three unique perspectives from three unique Australians. It is my pleasure to invite questions from the floor at this stage. If you feel the need to go to a microphone, there is one off to the side here but I would ask you to keep the questions relatively brief, and if you can, direct them to one of the speakers. Would somebody like to start the proceedings?

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First question

Prof Alison Mackinnon, Hawke Institute: Just to start things off, perhaps I'd like to ask - first of all I would like to say thank you very much, all of you, for your wonderful speeches but I would like to ask Margo, you talked about the rise of grass roots power in the country and the fact that we are beginning to get sort of people's voice and people's elections and you said, "but, of course, you know, globalisation has to happen". I just wonder, if what we are seeing happening in rural and regional Australia is also part of what we are seeing in other communities around the world and perhaps in areas such as the talks recently in Seattle and in Davos and that is part of a much broader global grass roots response to globalisation and perhaps some of what we are seeing with globalisation and economic restructuring does not have to happen.

MARGO KINGSTON: Well, I mean, the problems in rural and regional Australia aren't unique. They are around the world - yes, it is a world wide phenomenon. It's a difficult one, whether globalisation can be stopped or not and it is also a difficult one whether overall globalisation is good - a good rather than a bad force. I suppose my views on this are very much shaped by John Ralston Saul this idea that this is actually - we have a system here which is based on the value of the citizen and I love his definition of elites where he talks about how stupid elites are. They get all the advantages. We always need them and yet they destroy themselves and their power by refusing to give anything - by keeping on taking and not giving anything back so that in the end the system becomes unstable and there's a revolution etc. You know, we see that throughout history.

My solution to it, which is, you know - I sort of say this to country people and they go, oh, jeez, you know, because country people are so antagonistic to international bodies and to my mind the only way to affect globalisation, which is basically an economic force run by, you know, multinationals and all the rest of it because, you know, I mean Governments now go to business forums to sort of lobby the business leaders to do what they want is to have a - well, like an international control. Globalisation I think will succeed if the international forces moving in the way - in economics, free trade and all that sort of stuff is parallelled by the human rights movement internationally.

So that there are checks and balances as to the rights of the individual, especially the powerless individual in the society. So I think that - you know, for example, I think it was called the Tobin tax that was invited by a professor years and years ago and everyone thought it was stupid and now everyone is saying, well, this might be a good idea, the idea of the taxing the flow of international capital. If world Governments agree, you can actually, just the tiniest amount of tax on the flow of international capital which we now understand can be very destabilising - look what happened, you know, in Asia recently - and that money can then be sent back to the national states to actually deal with the losers in the system.

So I think the way to deal with globalisation so that it remains democratic - I mean, that is the big risk with globalisation, that democracy falls by the wayside. To maintain democratic institutions alongside globalisation, to keep the power in the hands of the people so they can affect change and we get all the benefits of globalisation as well so to my mind the MGO have got it right when they go international on the human rights level and on the level of redistributing the benefits of globalisation back to the people through something like a Tobin tax. 

Now, you know, when you try and talk to country Australians about that they just say, oh, well, you're just one of those internationalists, you know, that are conspiring against us and I just say to them, well, this is the way that you can be empowered. There is this great meeting at Lowood in Cairns, the seat Hanson was going for, the seat of Blair during the election, and they had all the candidates up the front and they answered questions etcetera and the green candidate answered the question and talks about oh, terrible force of globalisation and da-da-da and everyone goes, cor, you know, she sounds like a nash, you know, she sounds like Pauline.

Then she was asked another question about well, you know, how do you stop this and she said, oh, well, you know, we've got to have, you know, a rise in world government and of course, they went, oh, God. I mean, we've got to start talking about this. This stuff, you know, the thing - country people have got to realise that part of - than an essential part of their agenda is joining the left on a lot of this stuff. They are so close to the traditional left on many of these issues on globalisation. You join the conservative right and the radical left, you can make enormous differences internationally, enormous.

I agree with you, that is starting to happen. In Seattle you've got the farmers and Unions side by side, that is serious, that is serious. I wouldn't like to see a retreat into isolationism on human rights or economically. I'd like to see the farmers and the Unionists get together to promote wider and stronger economic and human rights regulation on a world level.

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Second question

Chris White, UTLC. I really did enjoy, you know, the contributions. I think we need to develop the rich and poor and the class issues as well. Also to - I think the South Australian experience is very important, you know, politically. Lucky enough we didn't have One Nation here at one stage and we've got other marginal representatives as well but - I was particularly - thought it was important to notice the rise of democratic action, I suppose, which we are all talking about and I wanted to ask the panel to try to explore this area. I mean, I am in favour of as many protests as possible, rallies against Prime Ministers, area consultative council, marginal seat politics, which I think has already transformed Australian politics but I can't think that unless we challenge some sort of deep serious democratic questions at the end of the day, if I was a politician - most of the votes are in all the cities and still will be and we haven't got - because we've inherited a political structure, federal-state, we can't - you know, that is really bit sort of issue, that people really haven't got a long term, you know, political power. So some how or other this grass roots activism has to go a bit beyond some of the other, you know, phenomenon that we are seeing now otherwise we will just go around in the same circles that we've gone. Would the panel have any sort of ideas on - I mean, I think we should change maybe the whole state-federal relations but it is going to be fairly hard but unless we get to grips with that and give people some real political power and also, you know, in between elections, then we'll never get any where. Would the panel like to comment.

KARLENE MAYWALD: We talk so often about globalisation and the economic benefits of globalisation and our exports and the benefits that that brings back to our country but I think one of the things the country voter in its conservative philosophy is now discovering that the total obsession with the economic bottom line is forgetting that we also live in a society, not just an economy and until we bring the balance back between society and economy, we are not going to move forward. Now, Joan talked very much about the community spirit, not just in regional and rural South Australia but also across the urban sectors and reconnecting to create those links that we need to actually put our communities back together. 

Now, community - society is made up of communities and I think if we are going to start that process that you're talking about a rebuilding and going beyond the politician that happens to be there at the time, is we have to empower the communities to be able to take on that role, to be more masters of their own destiny. I know when working in my electorate and I was interested to hear how Susan Davies operates because it is very similar to what I do in my own electorate. If someone comes in to me with a problem and they want the Government to fix it, I ask them first how we can fix it here and I work backwards from there and connect them with people in the community that are able to help them.

I run workshops, I run forums. I do it all on a very small, local-bases in local groups in local communities and I think that that is where the strength is going to come from and where we are going to able to build because we are going to be able to empower communities to stop thinking that the Government's got to fix it because it's not going to happen any more. I mean, we've got to start - we've got to understand that this country was built on riding on the sheep's back or whatever the saying is and at the moment, that initiative has all been lost. Somewhere along the line we've forgotten to use our own initiative and decide how we can fix the problem before we ask someone to fix it for us. So I think if we're going to move forward beyond the political in the next election, we've really got to empower the communities which I do believe needs a national rethink of regional policy in a big way.

JOAN KIRNER: Can I just add to that, Kym, I think Karlene has summed it up well in terms of community action. The best community action I've been part of for a long time was the waterfront action in which people who had never taken action before in their lives came down to the wharves because they thought that something basically Australian was at risk and that was the right to be a member of a Union. Now, I often use to have this debate with my good friend Jean Blackburn, a famous South Australian, who use to say to me, Joan, your community politics is well and good, not that she knew what it was but anyway, your community politics is well and good but there has to be an intellectual economic framework within which it operates.

She never used the word "vision" thank heaven but I think that's right. I think you've got to have both. Those who are leaders need to have a framework within which community action can be supported and resources as well as the other way around. You don't wait for each other to happen but there needs to be that partnership. That is why I worry about Tim Fischer's good idea of going around and asking people to nominate for the National Party after - and then finding out later what they stand for. I mean, that's - you do need community based candidates but you also need a national framework that allows communities to operate. So there is lots of debate in this issue. It's a really interesting one, I think.

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Third question

I will direct the question to Joan, because I know you've got a very strong background in education and training policy but the other two of you might like to pick it up as well. I remember in 1996, David Kemp, just after the liberals got back in, made very strong statements about how the Federal Government would work to empower regional communities, regional communities will be empowered to decide for themselves on how to meet the training needs of themselves and their young people. It was a very, very clear and very strong but very brief statement. It only last a few months and it was the - looking back.

JOAN KIRNER: What the statement or the action?

Questioner: Well, the action didn't - I will talk a bit about what action followed but looking back it is clear that it was a response to the Hanson phenomenon and the backlash from the bush. What became clearer over the next 18 months was that the strategies that - within education and training they were seeing as the way to empower the bush was to increase the market structure of the education and training system, the market strategies were seen as the solution that would give people power. 

I think that is fundamentally flawed, particularly where you're in regional and smaller rural communities where you don't have the economy scale, where you are even in a position to negotiate for the training that you want. So I think there have been real problems and gaps in different aspects of Federal Government's approach and I think in the areas of service delivery and education and training, for all that it is being relabelled not as service delivery but as a market, as a competitive system, it still needs to be a service delivery, particularly for the bush.

JOAN KIRNER: Well, I have to say, yes, yes, yes but I think it relates back to what I was saying earlier that as well as - as well as community participation, you need a framework which is in fact empowering in terms of resources, Government responsibilities and, and I have no problem with this, and partnership with non government or private organisations. There are some basics without which you'll not get increased participation in education and one of those is low fees or no fees. So to say on the one hand we'll have more regional participation and to on the other hand change the whole fee structure against participation, is contradictory. So I'm not suggesting community participation and empowerment as a panacea, I'm suggesting it as an essential part, as I think we've all said tonight, of change but it is not sufficient for change.

Chair: Prof Kym Adey

Any other comments there? Karlene.

KARLENE MAYWALD: Yes. I just also like to add that it is one of the key ingredients of providing opportunities in communities, that we need to up-skill the workforce in those regional areas. If you're going to attract new industry to areas, you've got to be able to provide them with the workforce when they get there. The other problem that we have is if you don't have the workforce and up-skilling facilities within the region to attract that new industry, you put yourself in a situation where you're not going to attract the appropriate people from other areas as well because you don't have the educational facilities they are looking for for their children or you don't have the medical facilities they will be able to get in the city centres so the community is not attractive to a potential developer. So communities need to be able to develop ways to be able to up-skill the workforce and educating the community is a very important factor in revitalising the bush.

Chair: Prof Kym Adey

Thank you. Next, keep it short, please.

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Fourth question

Thanks, Kym. My name is Matthew Retallick, I am a community board member for Women's Housing Association here and we provide a statewide service for women and children escaping domestic violence and we provide housing services in three regional areas within the state and they are actually managed locally - the Adelaide staff just go out one a year, you know, to do all the red tape. However, they cost more so we get with the Adelaide bureaucrats questions about continuing of that service and, you know, we really struggle with that because our community housing is legislated to operate under partnership and partnership, in our experiences, often meant a big stick approach. That they know what the answers are. That they treat the partnership organisation as an arm of their own department and it's your job to implement what they've come up with. So I thought I would sort of approach this to Joan because it seems she had a partnership between herself and some of the different departments she was Minister for. How do you actually get beyond that sort of culture that talks partnership, that talks working together, that talks listening to the local community but then struggles with what they hear.

JOAN KIRNER: I dare not say change the Government, that would be political. That is exactly the situation we were in in Victoria increasingly over the last seven years where women's services, housing services, you name it, were rebadged and the community was token rather than participatory. In fact the community became scared to speak up and what was really interesting, I think, that the community that was scared to speak up, particularly in women's domestic violence housing areas, or they wouldn't get their services, they actually exercised their vote silently. They weren't game to speak up but they exercised their vote silently.

We had examples of things like a women's refuge wanted to call their place the Joan Kirner Refuge, which after the election I actually needed, but they weren't allowed to. They were told by the department that if they did, they wouldn't get their resources so they called it Joan's Refuge instead. Now, if the department had been - the department was only doing what it was told by the Government and that is that the community is all right as a consumer but the community doesn't have a role as a citizen. So I think the way to change it is to, as country communities are starting to do, is to insist that they have a role as a citizen, not just as a consumer.

If you can get that view through in the community and those of you who have heard anything about people together and Purple Sage Project in Victoria, will know that we set about, amongst communities, getting that view across, that is that you are a citizen, not simply a consumer and as such, you have a right not only to partake but to shape and I think it is a really important debate and housing groups are - community housing groups are just the sort of people to keep the debate going.

MARGO KINGSTON: I will just quickly add to that also because I found it incredibly frustrating when dealing with Government departments in a range of different funding issues that they are so adamant in protecting their own little buckets of money that it really does not matter what the issue is about, the way in which Government funding is packaged these days, make it very consumer unfriendly and for anyone out there in the private sector who is looking at entering into a partnership in any way, with Government, find it all very, very difficult and red tape and bureaucratic. You hear that all the time.

The problem is that we have these little packages put together that is an initiative here and then it is withdrawn. Then there is another one comes in, then it's withdrawn. Then it is repackaged and here it goes there and it is the same bucket of money just being shuffled around time and time again and until we can start to look at a holistic approach and allowing the community to determine where that money is best spent in their community, we are going to find that Governments will continue to lose the faith of the public in relation to how they fund projects.

Can I just add one thing, there is some interesting stuff happening here in Aboriginal Affairs in Canberra, where there is a very good Minister with a long history of interest in Aboriginal affairs, Michael Wooldridge, and he has just started to pilot a different way of doing health in remote Aboriginal communities. I mean, for a start, there's not many doctors or no doctors there. Secondly - I mean, health, you just can't deal with it on it's own in remote Aboriginal communities because there's all sorts of other things impacting on health so the idea is to cash out the individual Aboriginal person's Medicare entitlements. 

So you say, okay, on average, an Australian spends $840 a year on - they get a Medicare rebate. So we allowed that $840 of all the Aboriginal people in that community and we will give the lump sum to the local community group and they will decide where the health priorities are in that community. So you can do things like - the community might decide, well, actually nutrition is really big in our town. We are going to fund a market garden as part of our budget. 

Now, that stuff obviously is - there's potentially terrible problems with it but there are potentially wonderful empowering solutions. I mean, one of the problems with Aboriginal health is that white people come in and say, well, you're unhealthy, you do that, that and that and the cultural constraints and the lack of trust means that we're not getting anywhere in Aboriginal health. We're not getting improvements. So as an idea for grass roots empowerment, that's the most radical one I have heard and I would be really interested to see the results and it would just be wonderful if it worked.

JOAN KIRNER: The real danger there is that once you've averaged out the amounts, if there is no more, then what you've actually got is a semi voucher system which relieves the Government of their responsibility.

MARGO KINGSTON: That's true but what happens in some of these Aboriginal communities, Joan, is that there is no services anyway so it is not as though you're spending - each Aboriginal is spending - the Government is giving them back $840. They're getting nothing.

JOAN KIRNER: Yes, but the argument is that they are entitled to the same education - sorry, health in this case, can't resist education, health expenditure as - to continue and then they are entitled, in a positive discrimination sense, to extra funding to allow them to do the other things which in fact they need to do as part of the whole package. It's too easy for Michael Wooldridge, too easy. Though I acknowledge what you have just said, he does have some better understanding of that than he does of tampons.

MARGO KINGSTON: But Joan, the point is, a, it's a pilot program and b, the whole thing is being set up by Aboriginal people on the ground in the community. Now, I'm not saying it will work at all. I'm just saying that as an experiment in empowerment, it is a very interesting one and it is not as though they are saying, oh, we'll throw you this bucket of money and goodbye and good luck. I mean, obviously there's lot of stuff happening in that community but - I mean, I can see possibilities for this to be extended to white communities with health services. You know, the horrors of no rural doctors, of literally - I don't know, I find this incomprehensible, a three month waiting list to see your GP. I mean, it's common place in the country. Of perhaps giving the town of Walgett, you know, what they spend on health every year and saying what are your priorities. Now, you might have a lot of young mother's in Walgett, you might have, you know, an outbreak - you know, they need a specialist in a particular thing. I know it is only the start and I know its fraught with difficulties but conceptually it is just superb when you talk about getting grass roots and the previous speaker that talked about, oh, why don't we abolish state governments, I mean, this is a way to do it on the sly. So you know, I know there are problems and I know it is obviously not popular in this room, but it's an idea that is really worth thinking about, I think.

JOAN KIRNER: But as an addition, not alternative. That is - I mean, it is a really important debate, this one - America has been having it for ages, we can't continue it now but we will over dinner, I'm sure.

KARLENE MAYWALD: I would actually like to just quickly add something to that debate. In regions in South Australian we actually have that occurring at the moment. We have regionalisation of our health services were we have a regional health authority that the bucket of money is given to and they determine what their priorities are within a criteria. It works very well when there are checks and balances but it does also mean Government can say, well, there is your bucket of money, there is no more and it means that the cuts and where we have to actually deliver the services within that budget can become very, very difficult and, yes, it needs to in my particular region because we have seen services increase and we have seen particular funding in areas where we never got funding before. We have got podiatry, we have got all sort of things coming up there now that we have never had before, which has meant that the service delivery is much better but it needs to be balanced with, you know, what happens when you run out.

Chair: Prof Kym Adey

Okay. Make this the last question.

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Fifth question

Okay, sorry, I will try and condense it. I must say I am horrified at the thought of three months waiting time to see a GP but let us not forget that the Adelaide Dental Hospital, it is a two year waiting list to even get a basic diagnosis, let alone any treatment. So that poverty and lack of resources is not limited to the bush areas, it certainly occurs in the cities. Karlene was talking about a lot of people in the bush being asset rich but income poor. Well, if you go out to Salisbury or down to Hackham West you will find plenty of people who are not only income poor but they are very asset poor as well. 

It seems to me, I have felt throughout this talk of two nations, bush versus city, that this is setting up a false division in our community that there are rich and poor in the cities, rich and poor in regional areas, and that the interests of the poor people in Berri are much closer to those of the interests of the people at Salisbury than they are to rich people, be they in Berri or Springfield, and that we are setting up a false dichotomy if we talk too much about city versus country. What I really wanted to ask, I attended a meeting not long ago where someone was pontificating about Pauline Hanson and was saying that it was the alienation of people in regional areas which had led to the huge vote for the One Nation Party in the Queensland State election.

When it came to the Victorian State election there was the same alienation of people in regional areas but most irrationally they voted Labor. I didn't see it was irrational at all. It seemed to me, if you want to get rid of Kennett, to vote for a possible alternative is a fairly rational way of voting, probably more so than voting One Nation. However, I could be biased, but I wondered if - well, Joan and Margo, particularly, I suppose, could comment the idea of building communities making linkages between groups within communities, were the Labor people in Victoria particularly good at this? Was this why the regional areas, or the regional cities in Victoria voted Labor, not the real bush but the regional cities, whereas that didn't happen in Queensland? How do we account for this difference because I refuse to believe that either in Victoria or Queensland that they are irrational?

MARGO KINGSTON: I will have a go first. It was really striking the lack of support for Hanson in Victoria during the Federal election and it was striking that a lot of young people especially were very concerned by Hanson's racism and were very up front in telling her all about it on the road. I have thought about this a bit and I suppose I tend to say that Victorian and South Australian country - and this is a wild overgeneralisation - have had - I suppose in a way you could say, well, Victoria has ended all Native Title rights of their land by appropriating it very early so they can afford to be less racist. But more than that I think that there is a much: (a) Victoria country is generally wealthier and; (b) there is much more institutionalised power by Aborigines and acceptance by white people. I think there is something in that.

I also think there is something in the fact that Victoria is very multicultural and has much less time for the homogeneous type stuff that Queensland does. Now, what you have got to remember in Queensland is that it is unique. That in Queensland more than half the population lives outside the capital city, which is why we have often had National Party Premiers. So it is also much less educated, Queensland country. It is much more homogenous, very few migrants, if any. Brisbane is a homogenous capital as well. So that the - especially the education levels. 

It is also much more closer to the guilt of treatment of Aboriginal people. I honestly think that part of the racism - why Queensland and Western Australia are more racist than the other States is because the time scale of when atrocities were committed is shorter. I think they are still guilty. There are still people whose parents shot Aborigines on their properties in Queensland and Western Australia. Now, I mean, that is a very controversial view and not many people agree with it but I still think that there is that "Oh", you know, that sense of difference and shame between the races in Queensland. 

Also, the fact is that in Victoria the Labor party did a lot of work in the regions, a lot of work. This wasn't a flash in the pan country people going: "oh, I think I'll vote Labor this time". There was huge policy work done and huge effort put into the bush. One of the ironies for Labor has always been that, you know, the country should be their natural constituency. That, you know, it is born in the country, after all, the Labor Party, with shearers, and the National Party has always been agrarian socialist for Christ's sake, the single marketing desks and all the rest of it. I mean, they have never been at the big end of town. It is a big challenge for Labor and a challenge that they really must sit down and do something about now and Bracks did it in Victoria. 

So, you know, a combination of the different profiles of country Victoria and Queensland the fact that Labor in Victoria has put enormous work into the regions I think might help explain the difference.

KARLENE MAYWALD: I think they are radical in Queensland, they voted for Joh for many, many years and I think I will leave it at that.

JOAN KIRNER: Margo is quite right when she says the Victorian Labor opposition put a lot of work into the regions. Not only work on policy but work in choosing candidates, some would say for a change, who were community based and that really paid off. I mean, young women like Jacinta who was opposed to a Liberal guy, she needed a 6% swing, she worked her butt off in that community, she was third generation in that community, she worked with all the diversity of groups there and really they were looking for somebody who would work with them. I think actually what happened in regional Victoria and rural Victoria - but they went to some independents - was that unlike the city, it was the eastern suburbs of Melbourne which did not go Labor, they could actually see what the withdrawal of Government services was doing to their community.

They could actually see and feel it, in terms of people, in terms of cohesion, in terms of services, and they drew the conclusion that they didn't want a Government that took away their services and their cohesion and then had the audacity to build phallic projections all over Melbourne and give them no share in the richness that was supposed to be Victoria. So I think it was so much clearer what was happening in Victoria in the country than in the city because you close a school in the country, as Karlene would know much better than I do, then you actually take the heart out of it, out of that town. So I think there was that and there was also, as I said before, some good policy work done. So you have got a matching of the community's felt needs and the party's actual policy work.

That is not yet true of the Labor part in urban areas. We have still got a long way to go to actually convince people that it is time for a change in those areas.

Chair: Prof Kym Adey

Thank you. I regret, ladies and gentlemen, that time requires that we bring proceedings to a halt. Just before I thank the speakers I would advise you that, probably fitting after a comment from Joan earlier, that both Margo and Joan's books, both books, are available from Imprints and you can buy them there. The other point is that, I just emphasise, that the Whyalla Campus of the University of South Australia will be hosting a Regional Australia conference in April and if you want additional information about that that is also available at the back of the room. There are also copies of Karlene's speech, I think, available at the back of the room as well. 

There is some information concerning the UTLC Summer School for those who are interested. Ladies and gentlemen, I think it is appropriate at this stage that I do thank the speakers. I think you can agree with me that Margo, Karlene and Joan have offered something quite special here tonight and it is a rare day that we get three people with the kinds of perspectives and experience that they have together in the one room at the one time. I am certainly very grateful they have made time to be with us tonight and I think they have added yet another chapter to the contribution that the Hawke Centre makes to debate about public issues in Australia and tonight in association with UTLC and we are very glad that that took place. So could you join with me please in thanking our three speakers. Before we disappear I would now like to invite the director of the Hawke Centre, Elizabeth Ho, to present gifts to our speakers. Thanks.

ELIZABETH HO:

I will just say very quickly that I think tonight is a case of good things come in threes. We have got three gifts for our three wonderful speakers and I think the words that will remain with us, I hope, are connecting communities. Thank you.

MARGO KINGSTON: Can I just say one thing? As part of the Herald’s move towards accountability and connectivity with the community we must declare all gifts and that will be duly done.

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