Rural towns are short on diversity- and it’s holding them back

AgriFutures Rural Women's Award national winner Nikki Davey.

Loads of glam and glitter at the beautifully produced black-tie dinner at Parliament House as hundreds gathered for a celebration of our rural women leaders.

Farmers, country business people, agriculture bureaucrats, researchers and advisers – and a good gender mix reflecting the true role of women in the bush.

But not such a diverse crowd by other criteria.

The lack of ethnic diversity in the bush is a result of choices made by migrants. It’s not the fault of rural and regional Australia but it’s obvious when the country comes to town, as it did in Canberra for the 2023 Agri­Futures Rural Women’s Award last Tuesday. And it’s something that tends to hold rural towns back in terms of size and economic vibrancy, according to demographer Bernard Salt.

Look at his analysis of the 102 biggest towns in Australia. The 2021 Census showed 42 per cent of people in Sydney were born outside Australia, with Melbourne and Perth at 38 per cent, compared with 6 per cent in Broken Hill and Grafton. The average was 29 per cent, which was down one or two percentage points from pre-pandemic times because of the exit of foreign students.

Salt says the proportion of people born overseas in regional towns doesn’t change much between censuses. “Most diverse cultures tend to remain in the capital cities where they have family and friends, where they can ­access jobs, where there are food stores and religious facilities that align with their needs,” he says.

The lack of cultural diversity is even starker in small-town Australia.

In March, Salt analysed 752 relatively small towns ranging between 1000 and 50,000 residents and used a set of criteria to rank the top 36 towns. The criteria included having a household ­median income of more than $1282 a week; less than 5.1 per cent unemployment; more than 15 per cent of residents with university education; and no less than 14 per cent born overseas. Several towns had from 6 per cent to 12 per cent of residents born overseas – too low to make it into the top category. Salt wrote that small rural and regional towns need “skills, training, entrepreneurial energy and a measure of diversity to deliver opportunity to residents”.

There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that entrepreneurialism and tech skills and migration go together, so an intriguing question as the bush begins to demand more technology is whether it will also change the face and the size of rural and regional towns.

The need for tech is something AgriFutures’ chair, the former independent MP Cathy McGowan, pushed this week as a way to overcome the severe shortage of workers outside the cities. Technology is already embedded in much agricultural practice – although you can’t drive drones or GPS-guided tractors all day – and a new digital-savvy generation is discovering that working on the farm is not all mud and mustering sheep. But as McGowan says, agriculture needs to be “reframed” to attract workers.

The AgriFutures awards are doing their bit in promoting the changes in the bush: it’s not just that they celebrate women who for generations were stereotyped as homemakers or the unpaid ­labour out in the paddock, but also because they reward non-traditional activity.

The winner this year is Nikki Davey from Glenmore in Victoria, the co-founder of Grown Not Flown, an app that connects buyers with their local flower producers. Launched in 2021, it has more than 1000 growers on the platform and 3500 users in 30 countries.

Davey told the Canberra dinner that even though she grew up on a farm, she “can’t fix a fence” and she’s never the first port of call in her family when there’s a farm problem. But Davey is really, really good at data, and she’s not only found her niche, but is a great example of country tech.

Gareth Adams, a Melbourne-based entrepreneur building a company called R-U-Ontrak, jumped on LinkedIn this week to back McGowan, noting: “Reality is we need a thriving bush tech ecosystem, whether they are focused on agtech, mining tech, clean tech or just tech – our only hope of having liveable cities is to have a robust regional sector.”

Adams has worked with private equity and venture capital and is now focused on a start-up to build continuous improvement models in areas such as healthcare and deal with social challenges using lived experience data and AI. He argues that we ­“either keep and grow our rural and regional areas or we end up with very big cities”. He says: “So how do you build sustainable communities in regional centres and small towns? If you don’t have a tech sector, and you don’t have tech in those centres, that becomes pretty hard because they just all collapse back into the cities again. It’s fundamental to how the country evolves that you have tech in regional centres and in rural centres. If you’ve got a holistic view of how Australia (will grow), you have to have a tech sector that goes into regional and rural Australia.

“I don’t think you can afford to have a country where you’ve got 40 million people live mostly in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane …”

Building robust communities is on the agenda at the Global Entrepreneurship Congress in Melbourne next week, with sessions including Small Towns, Big Dreams; building thriving rural start-up communities; and How to Foster Vibrant Ecosystems in Small Cities. As land values in the country rise and the tyranny of distance reduces due to technology, “reframing” the regions is an idea whose time has come.