Latest news with #ruralAustralia
ABC News
28-05-2025
- General
- ABC News
Concerns over "dire" regional mental health services
Right now, many rural Australians are grappling with the impacts of drought, floods and other natural disasters. But despite the added strain, there's a significant shortfall of mental health assistance available, driving calls for federal and state governments to de-centralise regional mental health services, to give local communities more control. FEATURED: Associate Professor Mathew Coleman, Chair of Rural and Remote Mental Health Practice at the University of Western Australia.
The Guardian
22-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
How ditching the Liberals can put the grunt back into the Nationals – Australia's rural party
It's been a lonely week for the Nats. Personally, I am on Team Split. I think it's high time they put the grunt back into the country party. Yet having taken the hard decision, David Littleproud – at time of publication – is now sitting astride the barbed wire fence, poised between Team Stay and Team Split. It's the worst place to be. He appears to be having second thoughts. It is true that outside the Coalition, the Nationals will not get their bums on ministerial seats in a future government, but hear me out. This is not the end of the Earth in a more fractured political environment. Notwithstanding Labor's thumping win this month, you just need to look at data from rural voting booths to see more unpredictable patterns as more people challenge the Coalition status quo. The major parties' primary votes are trending downwards. Rural Australia holds the balance of power – if it wants to exercise it – in pretty much every parliament. Rural Australians are minority voters and at best 30% of the population. But it is a big enough bloc to wield with intent, if only we could muster our forces. You don't require night vision goggles to see the potential power of country Australia. There is a whole bloc of rural and regional MPs sitting in the Nats party room, minus Perin Davey (on votes) and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price via defection to the Liberals. Yet the new leadership team of the Liberal party both hold rural electorates: Sussan Ley in Farrer (NSW) and Ted O'Brien in Fairfax (Queensland). The putative challengers were Angus Taylor who has been a rural MP up until the last election when Hume was reclassified outer metropolitan. Price is a Country Liberal senator for the Northern Territory. The clue is in the title. The Liberals hold more rural territory than the National party. There are rural independents, like Indi MP Helen Haines, Mayo MP Rebekha Sharkie and former Nationals Calare MP Andrew Gee, who saw off the Nationals rival easily. The point is there are lots of rural political representatives in federal parliament, so how does the National party differentiate itself? Their sole branding point is that they only represent rural and regional people. The Coalition split was allegedly about four policies: nuclear energy, supermarket divestiture, a $20bn regional fund and action on rural phone and internet coverage (praise be!). Let's park the fact that they did nothing about these ideas in their long tenure under Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison. Leaving the nukes in the just-not-feasible basket, the old market-based Libs would never go for such interventionist policies. The most likely side to even talk about these would be the crossbench or the Labor party. The untethered Nats could plot a course to a sensible centre right position that carves out a new city-country contract. Or they could skip down the yellow brick road to Trump world. As a stand alone party, they will live or die by their policies and their capacity to connect with a changing rural voter base as margins get more unpredictable. Younger generations with different voting histories are also moving in, seeking cheaper housing and better lifestyles. There are good reasons to go for a full makeover while you have time to create a modern country political brand. The crossbench has shown the Nationals could develop policies that don't have to appeal to the Liberal party as long as they got support from other quarters. It could get weird. As Donald Trump has shown, transactional politics can make for the strangest of bedfellows. Free to roam, the Nationals could deal with any party, including Labor. Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott did such a deal for their respective electorates of New England and Lyne with Julia Gillard in 2010. They were hammered for it even though the agreement made major commitments to parliamentary reforms and regional Australia including their own electorates. Better still, the deal was made public for their own voters to see. As voters, we cannot see what the Nationals have demanded from the Liberals in the Coalition agreement. We cannot see what the Liberals demanded of the Nats. If you need examples of lateral thinking, the banking royal commission grew from a crossbench alliance driven by Nationals own senator John Williams going rogue with Greens senator Peter Whish-Wilson and senator Nick Xenophon. They successfully forced the two big parties to act. The federal Icac and action on climate were two key policy planks of both the Greens and the country community independents. Those issues formed part of a platform that provided a launching pad for the city-based teals, the same folk eating the Liberal party's lunch. The Nats own nuclear policy came about as a Coalition fig leaf for the Coalition's lack of climate policy. So to the Nats, sit down and do some hard yakka to reshape the party for the political landscape as it is, not as you would like it to be. Forget about bowing to oligopolies and billionaires. Remember the key employers in regional areas are not mining and farming now but health services, aged care, education, construction and retail. Professions mostly dominated by women. Where did the Coalition lose ground? With women. Labor has very little interest in the bush because there are no votes in it for them. What better way to get them interested in rural policy than to signal you are open to all sides of politics.
The Guardian
21-05-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Stella prize 2025: your guide to the shortlist, from Michelle de Kretser to Amy McQuire
The Stella prize has created a space for voices that might once have been whispers. This year's shortlist – made up entirely of books by women of colour – is a testament to the importance of truthfulness, painstaking research and the urgency of confronting shame. The shortlisted books pay particular attention to gaps in white patriarchal colonial histories and the need to unsettle firmly held beliefs. Such challenges take place in intimate spheres: in the home, in a rural town, in Australian institutions (especially in universities), and in national and international arenas. Several books evoke nations, including Australia, that have long been culturally, linguistically and racially diverse – though this diversity has often been obscured. The shortlisted books take diverse and experimental forms. They include novels, a novel with nonfiction elements, a family memoir with fictionalised events, a collection of essays and a history grounded in rigorous archival work. Each book is also an irresistible read: compelling and unsettling. Translations is a beautifully crafted novel with a haunting atmosphere. The novel traces Aliyah's relationship with her nine-year-old daughter Sakina, her journey into rural Australia and how she becomes embedded in her community. Aliyah is introduced as having 'arrived at the understanding that, beyond reliance on the Divine, all forms of dependency were at best a risk, and at worst a waste of her precious time'. She is haunted by the loss of her father, her relationship with her ex-husband and by other instances in her past – which slowly emerge as the novel progresses. A sense of mystery permeates the novel, which reveals the extent to which Aliyah's existence has been infused by her estrangement from a sense of belonging. In rural New South Wales, she begins to find connections with a Palestinian man and a Kamilaroi woman. Aliyah also meets an old friend who needs her protection. Sign up for our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Not a single sentence in Abdu's novel is expected; each turn of phrase caused me to see the world in a different light. For example, when Aliyah is asked what she's doing in her spare time, she says: 'Defibrillating a farm.' Land is of vital importance to Aliyah, partly due to her having some Palestinian heritage on both sides of her family. Distinguished by its compelling characters and rural setting, Translations evokes the connections between dispossessed people who attempt to remediate their sense of loss. The Burrow is about a family shamed and grief stricken by the loss of their youngest child, Ruby. The baby drowned in the bath when she was six months old, while her maternal grandmother, Pauline, was having a stroke. During a Covid-19 lockdown in Melbourne, the family gives the surviving child, Lucie, a longed-for rabbit. She names the enigmatic creature Fiver. Pauline, who broke her wrist and needs support, moves in with the grieving family during the pandemic. The novel seamlessly shifts points of view between the parents, Amy and Jin, and Pauline and Lucie. This humanises all four characters, evoking the intensity of their desires and capturing the forced intimacy and very real claustrophobia of Covid lockdowns. The novel is written in precise prose, making it thoroughly engrossing. Its brevity does little to lessen its emotional impact. Each character is portrayed as being pushed to the brink. In the process, they begin to come to terms with the complexity of family, the loss of Ruby, and how – individually and collectively – their lives might continue. Black Convicts exploded all I'd learned about convicts in primary and high school – and much I'd forgotten. Naturally, there were Black convicts. This book, based on Chingaipe's rigorous and determined archival research, shows that convicts of African ancestry were transported to Australia on ships in the first fleet and into the 1850s. Many of these men and women had been trafficked to the Caribbean as slaves or were descendants of slaves. Several transported Black convicts were political prisoners who had resisted colonisation in their countries of origin. Chingaipe's book is especially interesting for the connections it makes between the Transatlantic slave trade and the transport of Black convicts. While slavery existed in Australia in various forms, Chingaipe's book explicates how subjugation as part of slavery served as a blueprint for the convict system. The book also examines connections between the growing of sugar in the Caribbean and in Mauritius – where the ban on slavery was not enforced – and in Australia, where sugarcane was first grown by an enslaved black man. Black Convicts is thorough and impeccably researched. It is especially admirable for its piecing together of the lives of people who exist only as archival traces. It contains compelling sections on encounters between First Peoples and convicts of African descent, and on Black convict women and Black political prisoners. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion Theory & Practice appears to contain elements of fiction, essay and memoir. The book starts with what it terms an 'abandoned novel', a fragment about a man who is travelling alone in Europe and who spent two years of his childhood on a sheep station. I was drawn in by this story: like the rest of the book, it is engrossing and vividly written. But then Theory & Practice unfolds in a brilliant, surprising and transformative way, demonstrating De Kretser's immense skill as a writer. A short essayistic section provides a rationale for the book's title. It discusses an Israeli military commander who, inspired by poststructuralist and Situationist concepts, tunnels through the walls in a Palestinian city – with brutal consequences. But the ease with which 'theory' (De Kretser primarily means poststructuralist and feminist theories) can be implemented in practice is not the point of the novel. The voice of its narrator tells us 'the book I needed to write concerned breakdowns' between the theoretical and practical. Set in 1980s Melbourne, the novel is centred on a protagonist studying a master's degree in English literature. Breakdowns in theory and practice include the sexism and racism at the university where the narrator is studying, despite the department's avowed embrace of feminist theory, and the narrator's torrid relationship with an engineering student. While working on her master' s, the protagonist realises the gulf between her attachment to the 'Woolfmother' – the figure of maternal mentorship embodied by Virginia Woolf – and the blatant racism expressed in Woolf's journals. In practice, the protagonist is supported not by her engagement with theory but by her friendships with a gay academic who nurses men dying of Aids, and a Greek-Australian female artist. This book is completely consuming. Amy McQuire's Black Witness examines and dramatises a series of events that have been sensationalised in the mass media. They include the death of Mulrunji Doomadgee on Palm Island and the community's response, and the Northern Territory intervention. Her essays demonstrate the extent to which Indigenous people are disbelieved by the media and by the justice system, and the ramifications of ignoring Black witnesses. I was familiar with many of the events discussed in the book, and how they had been reported on. But McQuire's explosive essays demonstrate the flawed and exaggerated approach to reporting on Indigenous communities and people and the extent to which the media (at times) takes its cues from political leaders and the police. As McQuire writes: 'Journalists are not held accountable for not only their failures but their complicity in the continuing oppression of Aboriginal peoples on our own shores.' McQuire repeatedly points out the racist iconography and assumptions underpinning many of the narratives about Indigenous people which circulate in Australian media reports and public conversation. Her reporting centres Indigenous voices and acts of witnessing. And her passion makes the essays compelling. This book should be required reading for all Australians, especially for writers, journalists and politicians. Cactus Pear for My Beloved patiently and evocatively creates the world of Palestine before the Nakba – the expulsion of Palestinians from their lands in 1948 – as well as the period between 1948 and 1967. It describes the author's grandparents, who lived in a place named Tuffah, part of the old city of Gaza. Israeli authorities and institutions, such as universities (see, for more information, Maya Wind's Towers of Ivory and of Steel) have suppressed scholarly and public discussion of the Nakba. Sabawi's book begins in a time before the British withdrawal from Palestine. This is an emotionally affecting, clearly written family story, based on oral testimony from Sabawi's father, who overcame his family's poverty to become a writer and a poet. In a heartbreaking author's note, Sabawi mentions travelling to Gaza in 2023 to conduct research for the book and to reconnect with family members. It was only when she returned to Australia and was putting 'the final touches' on the manuscript that Israel invaded Gaza in the wake of the 7 October attacks. Since then, her family's homes have been destroyed and most of her relations have left Gaza or are trying to search for a safe place 'where there is none'. Sabawi's book is remarkable for its lucid prose and its straightforward evocation of the lives lived by the majority of Palestinians in Gaza, as well as the effects of repeated ethnic cleansing and dispossession. This article was first published by the Conversation. Camilla Nelson is an associate professor in media at the University of Notre Dame Australia
News.com.au
21-05-2025
- Politics
- News.com.au
Nationals have caused ‘destruction' of rural Australia: Bob Katter
Independent MP Bob Katter says the National Party has caused the 'destruction' of rural Australia. 'The National Party … they were the Deputy Prime Minister of Australia for most of the last 20 years, and if there were something that they did for rural Australia, I am not aware of it,' Mr Katter told Sky News host Ross Greenwood. 'People that keep going in the media thinking these people represent rural Australia, they have been the destruction of rural Australia.'
News.com.au
15-05-2025
- Business
- News.com.au
GrainCorp reports 17 per cent surge in net profit
Now Playing Australia's biggest grain handler and distributor GrainCorp is a barometer for the health of rural Australia. GrainCorp's revenue in the half year was up 21 per cent to $4.1 billion. Net profit rose 17 per cent to $58 million and the interim dividend was steady at 14 cents, with a special dividend of 10 cents.
