Post-COVID, Australians go back to grassroots
The regions offer brighter post-COVID futures, predicts demographer Bernard Salt.
Has the coronavirus changed the outlook for rural and regional Australia? The short answer is yes, but it’s a complex story that needs to be told and richly illustrated. The immediate outlook for much of rural and regional Australia has improved with the breaking of the drought.
But across the balance of the decade other factors will coalesce to affect the regions, including the downshifting of baby boomers out of the city into lifestyle towns; the impact of new technology such as the National Broadband Network combined with a greater tendency to work from home; and a rising concern about the risks and costs associated with a big-city lifestyle.
But before we look to the future, let us examine how this nation’s relationship with rural and regional Australia has evolved.
For the first 200 years of European settlement, Australians pressed inland in hot pursuit of grazing and cropping lands, as well as minerals. This was to be expected with an economy at the time based on agriculture and mining.
By the latter decades of the 20th century our engagement with the bush changed. Even the term the bush shifted from the romantic concept captured by Banjo Paterson to the somewhat pejorative term it is today.
From the late 1970s onwards, the older teenage sons and daughters of regional Australia left the farmlands and country towns in search of further education, training and job opportunities in the capital cities (see map).
By the turn of the century rural and regional living was reimagined by baby boomers looking for a bit of a sea change or a tree change. But in hindsight these movements were flings — weekend idylls — that blossomed in the narrow commuting band that surrounded capital cities.
The Australian way of life changed at around the time of the global financial crisis. The sea-change and tree-change lifestyles were usurped by the rise of city-based knowledge work; inner-city apartment living epitomised a new aspirational lifestyle.
Some remote regions flourished briefly as fly-in, fly-out destinations within a narrow window that existed between the GFC and the collapse of the mining boom. Towns such as Karratha, Moranbah and Roxby Downs captured the zeitgeist.
But even after the FIFO boom the regions still kicked on in places. During the past decade tourist destinations, especially in far north and southeast Queensland, prospered with the rise of cheap air travel and a demand for holidays and higher education by Asia’s middle class.
Adversity had settled on regional Australia long before the arrival of COVID-19. Drought in the back half of the 2010s depleted the interior, especially the Murray-Darling Basin. Drought-breaking rains arrived in February, but only after bushfires had ravaged the eastern seaboard in January.
Then, after this series of searing events, came the pandemic. The immediate impact was harsher on the densely packed cities than in the sparsely settled regions. Indeed, some rural municipalities escaped the infection entirely including Burdekin, Kyogle, Colac, Walcha and Robe.
Nevertheless the impact on some regions is suffocating: the demise of international tourism will affect far north Queensland; the loss of international students will affect university (lifestyle) towns such as the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast; and the diminution of the barley market will affect the cropland communities of Western Australia.
There is hope new grain markets may be found; that domestic tourism may take up the slack. However, I think there is less hope that student numbers may be easily recovered. All this, and possibly even more pain in due course, is the knock-on effect of the pandemic on regional Australia.
Yet I still say the outlook for the residents and farmers and businesses of regional Australia during the 2020s remains positive. The winds of demographic and social change are being reset in favour of the bush. Here is my argument.
One of the key drivers of social change in regional Australia in the coming decade will be baby boomers looking to cash in their city-based homes and downshift to lifestyle properties just beyond the commuting orbit of capital cities.
Some will go to the Gold Coast. Others will downshift into the inner city. Most will stay put and turn their 60s renovated bungalow into a lifestyle retreat. But enough will downshift to the bush to have an effect on destination communities.
Consider the example of Mid Murray Council (2019 pop: 9100), located immediately east of the Adelaide Hills and straddling the Murray River’s southward flow to the sea. With farming, boating, fishing and a range of idyllic river towns to choose from (Mannum, Blanchetown, Swan Reach), this is quite possibly the perfect destination for middle-aged lifestylers from middle Australia looking to escape the city.
During the 2000s, Mid Murray Council lost 200 residents; in the decade to last year the area gained 900 residents. No other rural community in Australia has transitioned made the transition from population loser to population winner from one decade to the next, or at least not to the extent that has applied to this municipality. There is clearly something alluring about Mid Murray that baby boomers simply cannot resist; it is a secret destination that is a secret no more. The 2016 census profile provides a clue as to why Mid Murray is such a boomer magnet. Kids, teenagers and adults up to the age of 44 are drawn out of this municipality, no doubt towards the bright lights of Adelaide (see line chart). But then, as if organised by some kind of generational hostage-exchange program, into Mid Murray flows a bigger, older, baby-boomer cohort (aged 50 to 70) no doubt in hot pursuit of a prized lazy-river lifestyle.
Could Mid Murray be ahead of the baby boomer downshifting city-escaping curve? Baby boomers will not remain in the city throughout their retirement years. The 2020s is when many can be expected to sell up, move out and settle into a lifestyle zone positioned just beyond the commuting orbit of a capital city. And what better time to do that than in the post-coronavirus years? Mid Murray meets this brief precisely.
There is no shortage of commuter towns just beyond the edge of Australian capital cities. But what is the outlook for remote regional towns?
Consider Bunbury (2018 pop: 74,000) in WA’s southwest: too far from Perth (180km) to be sustained by commuting, it operates like the de facto capital city of the independent state of southwest WA. There are more Bunbury residents today in every year of the life cycle than there were in 2000 (see bar chart). There’s growth everywhere in this community.
And why not? I suspect Bunbury doesn’t know it’s a provincial city; it commands a hinterland that is getting denser and richer every year. It would not surprise me to see direct flights between Bunbury and Melbourne (or Sydney) at some stage in the 2020s.
Gympie (2018 pop: 21,000), 170km north of Brisbane, has a Bunbury-like profile; it attracts newcomers across all age groups. The exception is a modest outflow of people aged 40 to 44 (see bar chart). This is how demographic disruption begins: it starts with the loss of aspirational types in their early 40s who leave in search of job opportunities.
Tasmania’s Burnie (2018 pop: 27,000), on the other hand, though still growing in demographic terms, is being reorganised (see bar chart). Young parents in their 30s and early 40s take their kids (aged 0 to 15) out of primary and secondary school and leave. But Burnie attracts and/or holds on to people in their 20s (key workers) as well as older lifestylers and retirees (55-plus). Burnie probably has a strong sporting culture and a vibrant volunteering scene, given this profile.
Perhaps towns seeking to staunch the loss of population should look at ways of better connecting secondary-school kids into the local community, perhaps via sports clubs or other commitments; this just may make parents reconsider the need to leave.
Indeed, let the demography tell the story: Bunbury, you need more of everything; Gympie, create opportunities for early 40-somethings (and their kids); Burnie, celebrate your outrageous abundance of 20-something youth and energy. The profile of most Australian towns generally fits somewhere along the spectrum created by these three rural communities.
Then we come to the specific effects of COVID-19 on the regions. The Department of Social Services, the body administering the JobSeeker (unemployment) program, published payments data by small area for March and April, the opening months of the pandemic’s impact. We have reaggregated this data to show the percentage impact of the rise in unemployment, caused by coronavirus, on the 100 largest towns in Australia (see towns chart).
At a national level, the increase in JobSeeker payments between March and April was 55 per cent; in Sydney and Melbourne the increase exceeded 70 per cent. In Port Pirie (2018 pop: 15,000), the increase was 13 per cent.
The regions may be losing teenagers, attracting retirees, even conceding aspirational 40 to 44-year-old residents to capital cities but, when it comes to the coronavirus, not only have there been fewer deaths and infections across regional Australia but the early jump in unemployment has been greater in the capital cities.
And the reason is that for decades rural Australia has tithed its youth to the capital cities.
As a consequence, youth-based institutions and culture have flourished in our biggest cities in the form of tertiary education campuses, and in a job market geared towards hospitality, the arts, sport and that is particularly vulnerable to a pandemic-inspired shutdown.
Towns such as Port Pirie, Whyalla, Port Augusta, Mount Isa, Muswellbrook, Murray Bridge, Alice Springs and Kempsey, for example, which long ago ceded their youth to bigger cities, tend to retain modest workforces in the hospitality sector, and as such have been less affected by shutdown unemployment than the capital cities.
Based on this evidence, places such as the Gold Coast, the Sunshine Coast, Bowral-Mittagong, Gisborne-Macedon, Ulladulla and other tourist and hospitality-based economies, including Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, have been most exposed to the effects of the shutdown.
Job losses in every city, town and region cause pain. But the job losses across regional Australia have been proportionately less than in the capital cities. It just may mean that regional Australia is more business-ready to recover from the shutdowns.
And to some extent, hasn’t that always been the story of regional, rural and remote Australia? It is the irrepressible capacity to keep going, to recover, to rebuild and perhaps to be helped along in this process on this occasion by favourable demographic winds. Building a stronger Australia includes building stronger regions.
Bernard Salt is managing director of The Demographics Group. Research by Hari Hara Priya Kannan. bernard@tdgp.com.au