STOP BEATING AROUND THE BUSH ON REGIONS

Article by Paul Garvey courtesy of the Australian.

While business leaders and policymakers were converging in Perth on Monday for The Australian’s inaugural Bush Summit, more than 2000km away, in the state’s remote Kimberley region, pastoralist Chris Towne and a group of workers were battling to contain a massive fire sweeping across the plains of Gogo Station

It was the latest in a series of deliberately lit fires that have collectively burned through tens of thousands of hectares of land at Gogo, which sits just east of Fitzroy Crossing. The fires have destroyed pasture that would have helped feed the thousands of cattle spread across the station.

Once again, the task of dealing with the blaze had fallen to Towne and his employees. And once again, there had not been any action taken against those suspected of starting the fires.

“It is getting so out of control and taking up so much of our time that we need to get people on the ground to arrest them and make a point that you can’t do it,” he said.

“If this was bushland outside Perth it would be front page news.”

Towne’s experience in many ways encapsulates the sentiment expressed by many at the Bush Summit: that Western Australia’s regions feel forgotten and ignored.

In session after session, speakers lamented the vast gulf between the volume of wealth generated for the state and nation by the regions, and the standard of services provided in return.

People in the regions have long felt as though they were unappreciated by the cities, but in WA there had been some very real policy decisions that reinforced that perception.

The first parliamentary act after Mark McGowan led Labor to its emphatic win at the 2021 state election was to set about dismantling the system for determining the WA parliament’s upper house, the Legislative Council.

Historically, regional voters were disproportionately overrepresented in the upper house.

A vote within one of the regional divisions was worth roughly four times a vote in the metro regions, an inequity that had long frustrated psephologists and hurt Labor’s prospects of controlling the Legislative Council.

The freak 2021 result gave Labor a one-off chance to reset that system.

The next election and the one-vote one-value system will almost certainly see regional representation in the house of review seriously curtailed.

Since then, there has been a string of policy decisions that have further drawn the ire of those in the regions. Logging of native forests was ended.

New restrictions were introduced on fishing. Plans to close the state-owned coal-fired power stations of Collie were announced. Only a sliver of the funding promised for the rebuild of areas devastated by Tropical Cyclone Seroja was delivered.

Health and education standards in the regions remain an ongoing concern, while some parts of the Pilbara, Midwest and Kimberley regions have suffered from rising levels of crime and social dysfunction.

But it was the introduction of the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act in July that drew the most vocal response.

The new laws saw regional landowners facing substantial costs for heritage surveys, as well as serious financial penalties and jail time in the event they breached the new regulations.

The firebrand president of the Pastoralists and Graziers.

Association of WA, Tony Seabrook, led the charge against the act. He helped co-ordinate a record-breaking petition to parliament against the laws, and led protests to the steps of parliament.

WA Premier Roger Cook ultimately backed down, announcing just six weeks after the act came into force that the new laws would be repealed.

While the risks around the new laws may have abated, the anger felt by Seabrook and others has not. For farmers and pastoralists, the confusion around the heritage laws was just the latest example of their disenfranchisement.

“What this government has done in taking away our representation is basically say ‘we don‘t care about the bush’,” he said.

“I stood on the steps of parliament house last week. It says on the wall there ‘The parliament of Western Australia’.

We don’t see it that way anymore, it’s the parliament of the metropolitan area. We don’t have a say there.”

Seabrook’s comments at the Bush Summit drew some of the biggest cheers of the day.

The ongoing frustrations in the regions also stem from the perceived inferiority of living standards and services.

The quality of health and education and the lack of adequate services that are taken for granted in the cities remain a persistent issue across regional WA.

WA Nationals MP Mia Davies told the summit that governments all too often failed to look more broadly at the other services that are needed to support regional towns.

“When I think about childcare or aged-care services – the things that actually allow businesses to thrive and for communities to stay together – it’s very challenging to deliver those even 100km from Perth, let alone if you’re up in the Kimberley or out in the Goldfields or down in the south of the stat

“So it’s making sure that you’ve got the whole package, not just good health and good education.

“Too often, governments come along in an election cycle and they’ll say ‘here you can have some money for your school’, but you won’t see them again for another four years.

“And school, while it’s incredibly important, isn’t the only thing that’s going to make that community thrive.”

WA’s health system has been struggling to source adequate numbers of doctors and nurses for some time, and the problem is particularly acute  outside Perth.

Maternity services were stopped at Carnarvon hospital more than a year ago due to staff shortages, forcing expectant mothers into an almost 1000km round trip to give birth.

WA Country Health Service chairman Neale Fong said attracting more healthcare workers to the regions would in turn help make the regions a more attractive place to live.

“The No.1 key issue for the bush and for the liveability of the bush is access to healthcare, and the No.1 crisis situation in our healthcare industry at the moment is the workforce,” he said.

But attracting more medical professionals to the regions, he said, would take more than just offering ever higher salaries. “It’s not always about the money with healthcare staff,” he said.

“ It’s a simple thing like having a decent house to live in and feeling secure in your community.”

Furthermore, housing is by no means just an issue for doctors and nurses in the regions.

An inability to source adequate accommodation at a reasonable price can be a major impediment when trying to attract the sorts of ancillary workers that turn a town into a more attractive place to live.

The major mining and oil and gas towns are infamous for their sky-high rents, and while deep-pocketed mining and oil and gas companies have the funds to tackle the problem for their own workers, the knock-on effect for other lower-paid workers can be huge.

Karratha mayor Peter Long says the three biggest problems in regional WA are “housing, housing and housing”.

“We can’t get doctors because we can’t provide them a lovely house, and that’s the same with everything,” he said.

“The mining companies are good, they actually provide houses for their own employees, but they then expect the barista and the publican and everyone else to just appear. They are only paid $60,000 when the (mining) employees are being paid three or four or five times that.”

Roy Hill chief executive Gerhard Veldsman said that while the big mining companies pumped huge amounts of money into regional communities, they could not do it alone.

“The issue we’re facing is we can’t provide them with the quality of life that they would get in Perth. If we can’t actually address that quality of life, we are restricted to FIFO,” he said.

“Yes, we can actually try and build more houses in Port Hedland, but if you’re worried that somebody’s going to break in, or if you can’t get to medical services or psychiatric services, all of those basic things we take for granted in Perth, people aren’t going to want to live there.”

Australia’s richest person, mining magnate Gina Rinehart, used a rare public address to issue a six-point plan for improving the regions.

At its centre was a call for more of the wealth generated in outback WA to remain there.

“Frankly, we should have the best-equipped and most luxurious hospitals in Newman, Tom Price, Dampier, Cape Lambert, Port Hedland and in other mining towns, thanks to the revenue we create in the Pilbara and similarly in other mining areas,” she said.

“And ditto, see 24-hour, 365-days-a-year airstrips, so that the better-equipped and fastest Royal Flying Doctor Service planes can always arrive.

The task of defending the state government fell to the Minister for Regional Development Don Punch, who argued that a lot of – investment went back into regional WA.

“This talk of a metro-region divide, I don’t think it’s helpful because I think we all have a responsibility to take Western Australia forward as a whole state,” he said.

“The regions make an immense contribution, the metropolitan area makes a contribution as well. It’s not all riding on the sheep’s back.

“That doesn’t mean to say there’s not an argument about everybody’s fair share or working towards addressing issues, but we collectively have to do that and we have to be accountable for how we do it.”

While Punch himself hails from a regional seat, he defended the government’s denuding of regional representation in the upper house as the result of the quirk under the old system that saw one Legislative Council MP elected with just 98 votes.

The state Labor government, he said, was committed to improving both the infrastructure and the way of life in WA’s regions.

“It’s not all about building a bridge or building a road, it really is looking at the totality of what makes a region an interesting and vibrant place to live in,” he said.

“And if we do that, people will want to stay, build a career and have a family.”

Back at Gogo Station, meanwhile, Towne is longing for the day when he can focus on his cattle instead of trying to negotiate the complex world of Kimberley politics.