The Curse of Urbanisation
It is happening around the world, the race to urbanisation. People moving from the rural and regional areas to the bigger cities chasing employment and opportunities.
This trend is gaining in momentum and is fraught with major problems that are now starting to rear their heads in Australia and other countries.
When I was young, in the 1970’s I grew up in a small western Queensland town and I remember adults complaining that kids were not staying in the towns, that they were moving to the Coast to places like Cairns, Townsville, Mackay, Rockhampton, to find work and opportunities and as such the smaller towns were dying.
Now in the 2010’s with my own children reaching work age, the problem is the same except now they are leaving the larger regional towns like Townsville and moving to Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne to find work and opportunity, and the regional towns are struggling with this loss of population.
I understand that Australia is a big country and that we have an enormous cost of infrastructure delivery, and Urbanisation provides a significantly better return per person on the infrastructure dollar spent. However what is becoming frighteningly obvious in Australia is the loss of understanding of what our regional and remote, rural, mining and agriculture industries play in the wealth of our nation as a whole.
We have the natural resources and the available land to be one of the world’s great food producers, and as a by-product, manufacturing. We have heard the talk about Northern Australia being the food-bowl of Asia, but as I related in a previous blog, we simply do not have the population (voters) above the Tropic of Capricorn to concern our political leaders, who are solely focused on being re-elected in the next 3 year term.
As a country we have the potential that almost every other country in the world would kill for….but as Urbanisation continues we, as a collective, forget that food and essential products are not actually made at Woolworths and Coles, but rather on the land in remote and regional Australia.