Human rights in regional, rural and remote Australia
Address by Chris Sidoti, Human Rights Commissioner to the South Australian State Conference of the Country Women’s Association, Peterborough, 24 September 1998
Times of change
When the CWA started in 1923 about 40% of Australians lived in rural communities. Rural Australia was made up of small but functioning communities whose members had to work hard but could make a living from the land.
In 1998, however, rural Australia - "the wide brown land" - is an unhappier place. A place that has been all but forgotten in the changes facing Australia and the world at the end of this century.
Today Australia, indeed the world, faces economic, social, cultural and technological changes that exceed even those of the Industrial Revolution. Global technology, computerisation, travel and access to information are affecting every level of the community and changing the structures of our society. The changes today are happening at an unprecedented rate. A rate beyond the ability of most Australians to cope with. Most have no tools that enable them to cope.
A letter in a newspaper recently from a farmer in Queensland said, "I never want to hear the word globalisation again. It just bamboozles people." This antipathy is understandable - particularly when people in rural Australia are experiencing the effects of this change more than anyone. In the last few decades the globalisation of agriculture and the decline in the terms of trade have resulted in a loss of income for many farming families and many farms are now only marginally viable, if they are viable at all. Many communities in rural Australia are under siege - they have declining populations, declining incomes, declining services and a declining quality of life. The infrastructure and community of many rural, regional and remote towns have been slowly pared away. It’s been described to me by a woman in Port Augusta as "the dying town syndrome". People are moving out of towns where they can no longer make a living or find a job - at the last census date only about 15% of all Australians lived in rural areas.
In the words of a woman from a small town in NSW
"As we head for the year 2000 my greatest concern is for the viability of small rural towns which are slowly being obliterated by loss of services, institutions and medical care ... We all need to fight this insidious process or there will be only ghost towns where busy and fruitful communities once flourished."
Bush Talks
To address these issues facing country towns - to look at and attempt to remedy the human rights dimensions of those problems - the Commission started its Bush Talks program early this year.
Bush Talks is a series of consultations to identify human rights issues in regional, rural and remote areas. At this stage, the BushTalks program is primarily concerned with listening to country Australians about their concerns.
Before this we have visited almost 20 centres in other States. We have had productive meetings with the CWA in those centres and your National President, Mrs Margaret Smith, has supported the Bush Talks program since its commencement. We’ve also heard from a range of welfare and advocacy groups, Indigenous people, women’s organisations, business leaders, local government councillors, government agencies, as well as a large number of concerned parents, families, teachers and other individuals.
Bush Talks has four main objectives.
- We seek to inform
country Australians about their human rights and the role of the Commission,
a small attempt to overcome what has been called the "Sandstone
Curtain" of the Great Dividing Range. As one woman wrote, "education
and promotion campaigns never seem to get past the Great Dividing Range.
Rural communities have been left behind in the social changes that are
occurring to people on the Eastern sea board."
- We want to provide
a forum for country Australians to voice their human rights concerns.
Through the program we are offering an opportunity for different regions
in Australia to hear what is happening in other rural communities. The
Commission acts like a "country telegraph".
- We aim to identify
key human rights issues for rural Australians which the Commission can
then do further work on during the next 2 years. That might be an inquiry,
a submission to government, a report, or a project in partnership with
a local government authority or a State or national representative organisation.
Ideas for what we should do come up constantly as I meet with country
people and their organisations.
- We intend to develop practical solutions to the main human rights problems that are raised . I was told in Tamworth in March "People in rural Australia know they’re hurting, but they don’t know the solutions".
Why Bush Talks?
Since its establishment in 1986, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission has investigated many particular situations of human rights breakdown: homeless children, people with mental illness, access to clean, safe water, access to appropriate health services, violence based on race or ethnicity, children and the legal process. In every case we found that rural and remote Australians have distinctive human rights problems.
Soon after I was appointed Human Rights Commissioner I published a paper, in May 1986, on human rights in rural Australia. The overwhelming response to that paper convinced me of the need to do much more - to look comprehensively at what is happening to human rights in rural, regional and remote Australia.
What are human rights?
Human rights belong to every person by virtue of birth. They are not only for majority groups or for minority groups.
Human rights are not granted to us by others or by the government. They are ours to be enjoyed simply by reason of our common humanity and innate dignity as human beings. For that reason we cannot agree to give them up and they cannot be taken away from us.
Many people think of human rights only in terms of civil and political rights such as freedom of expression, the right to vote and so on. These are of course fundamental human rights. But matters relating to people’s economic and material well-being are equally matters of human rights.
Human rights include the right to an adequate standard of living. The enjoyment of this right requires, at a minimum, adequate food and nutrition, clothing, housing and necessary care and support such as health and medical services. Human rights also include the right to work, the right to social security and the right to education. They impose an obligation on government to give assistance and support to families in need.
These rights are often overlooked because they raise issues of public welfare and public spending.
However, Australia has made solemn commitments that oblige it to uphold these rights and ensure that the basic needs of every person are satisfied.
Everyone in our nation has the same rights. People in the bush should not be excluded from the enjoyment of those rights simply because they make up less of the population or live outside metropolitan centres. As one person stated recently "we pay the same taxes in the bush so we should get the same services".
Many of the problems currently facing rural Australia are economic or climate related and beyond our control. But many of the problems are also human rights problems and can and must be addressed. I would like to go into some detail about the concerns that have been raised so far, look at how they might be relevant to South Australia and talk about how they are issues of human rights.
Human rights problems in the bush: South Australia
One of the major areas of concern that have been raised is the decline in social services. The diminishment of community life that this causes is one factor in high youth unemployment and youth suicide. Another issue of great concern to both individuals and businesses in country areas is access to essential services such as Australia Post, Telstra and banking services.
Perhaps these problems are issues in rural South Australia even more than in most other states because of the very small number of people living in small towns and rural areas. 86.1% of this state’s population lives in ‘urban’ areas. But only three of these urban areas have more than 20,000 people.
Services
Globalisation, economic reform and cuts in public funding have had a huge impact on rural communities. Public and private sector agencies seek to cut costs by closing services such as banks, schools and hospitals which are deemed unviable when they do not have enough customers or students or patients to justify their existence in monetary terms. This becomes a vicious cycle as rural populations are declining, which results in the closure of services, which in turn makes it more difficult to attract and maintain new populations.
Several government reports have shown that people living in isolated areas and in communities of less then 5,000 are especially affected by the lack of access to services. They can face a ‘lack of information’ about what is available, the absence or inaccessibility of many services, poorer quality services, higher costs associated with accessing services, inappropriate service and funding models that are developed for urban areas and poorly motivated staff.
Health services
One of the most urgent issues we have heard about, which is of particular concern to older people, is the decline in health services - including the basic minimum of hospital and ambulance services - not to mention important psychiatric and specialist services.
The health status of rural Australians is worse than that of urban people and rural Australians have a different pattern of ill-health. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare states that the rate of avoidable deaths in country areas is 40% higher than in capital cities.
Yet in rural centres across Australia people are suffering from reduced hospital, aged care and health services. A letter from NSW stated
".. we are experiencing massive changes and restructuring of our hospitals, ancillary community services, abolition of dental services, reclassification of hospital beds, hospital closures in smaller centres, all of which cause financial hardship, stress, extra travel costs because of State Government’s health economic rationalisation."
I am hearing the same story all over the country. At a meeting in Burnie in Tasmania in May, people described inadequate co-ordination of services and fragmentation occurring as a result of short term government grants and privatisation of health services. For example on the North West Coast there was a five month wait for paediatric services and a two month wait for home assessment of people requiring aged care.
People were discharged from the hospital system as quickly as possible with little care extended to them in their homes. One woman told us
"An elderly man was discharged at night and sent home in a taxi despite the fact that no care was properly available to him."
Another person told us of the local hospital where sixty patients were under the night-time care of two nurses whose duties also included the delivery of babies at the same time.
In South Australia rural communities are facing the same decrease in services.
In rural and remote areas there is a significant under-supply of general pratitioners. In country South Australia this under-supply is estimated at 41 practitioners.
There is also a lack of specialists in rural areas. Nationally about 1 in 5 specialists reside in rural areas (2,580 out of 12,000) but the percentages vary considerably across the States, with the smallest percentages recorded in South Australia and Western Australia.
In Wudinna, SA (527 people), the dental surgery is only open one day a week and the ambulance service is provided solely by volunteers.
Risks of unemployment
Economic viability seems to be the basis of all decisions about rural communities. Whatever the human cost. In the not too distant past, in all of Australia and even more so in rural Australia, if you worked hard you could get a job and a house, you could make a living and support a family. That is no longer a reality for many people. And people in the bush are suffering from that change more than most others.
High growth areas enjoy low unemployment rates. Roxby Downs is an example. It has concentrated mining and unemployment is only 3.4%. But elsewhere the picture is not so rosy. The unemployment rate in SA is 10.4%, compared to a national unemployment rate of 8.1%. As one man stated
"What is clear ... is that the massive reduction in the public service combined with the downsizing and cutbacks occurring in corporate Australia is having a drastic impact on regional Australia. The closure of a CES office, a SkillShare project, a Telstra depot or a bank branch has a huge effect on a small town economy. The real need to create employment opportunities outside the major metropolitan areas has never been greater."
Poorer regions offer fewer job opportunities for workers. Often towns will be dominated by a single industry or company and will not have the range of work options to attract a diverse and skilled workforce.
So often for these communities if there is no job in the local industry there is no other work available and unemployed people are forced to leave their homes and move to the city. If they didn’t leave, rural unemployment rates would be even higher.
Those who stay find it difficult to be unemployed in rural areas. Isolation and distance hinder the job seeking process. Jobs are more difficult to find and there is a greater risk of long term unemployment and of falling into hopelessness and despair. For young people aged 15 to 19 the risks are higher than for others. The rate of unemployment for South Australian young people looking for full time employment is around 35.5% (compared to a national rate of 28.8%).
One risk for young bored unemployed people is the desperate attraction of becoming involved in crime. The recent report on young people in the legal process Seen and Heard - a joint project by the Commission and the Australia Law Reform Commission - found:
"For many disenfranchised young people, it seems illegal activity of various kinds is increasingly being seen as simply part and parcel of economic survival - a routine way of managing one’s day to day living expenses."
Suicide
The reduction in services and the reduction in community support and well-being may also be factors leading to the high rate of suicide in country areas.
Youth suicide is a particular concern. Young people, particularly young men in rural Australia, are more likely to commit suicide than those in the cities. In particular young men in remote settlements with less than 4,000 people are at the most risk.
The reasons young people take their own lives are many and complex. The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's Report on Mental Illness identified many factors contributing to the relatively high levels of suicide among young rural males, including rural economic downtown and the corresponding decline of many country towns and farm properties, high levels of unemployment and increasing poverty, isolation from further educational opportunities and inadequate mental health and counselling services.
The same pressures affect older people too, of course, Sometimes they too suicide. I’ve been told of a young father of four who lost his job and hanged himself - apparently feeling a failure if he went on the dole. He felt that there is a stigma attached to being dependent on welfare for rural men used to being able to turn their hand to just about any job, if only the job is there to do.
In Port Augusta in June I was told that 4 or 5 adults had suicided in the town in the first half of this year.
But in general it is younger people with less maturity who are less able to cope. Economic conditions and remoteness combine to deny young people and others their basic rights, including in too many cases the right to life itself.
Economic and business services
The reduction in services to rural Australia also seriously affects the competitiveness and, ultimately, the survival of rural businesses. Whether these are large beef or crop farms or the local post office, many businesses are affected by the changes facing rural communities. Yet support of and investment in small business and industry in rural Australia are necessary to address the downward spiral of rural life. During our consultations people have spoken repeatedly about their concerns for telephone, postal and banking services. Today I’d like to speak briefly about banking.
The reduction of banking services in rural communities particularly affects elderly people and people with disabilities. They may be unable to use eftpos and ATMs because they find them confusing, even frightening, or they cannot remember their PINs or they fear being mugged after withdrawing from an ATM. If there’s no public transport to the larger centre which still has a bank, people unable to or afraid of driving simply cannot conduct their banking business.
The closure of bank branches also affects the viability of other services in the communities. When bank branches close people are forced to travel greater distances to access bank services. When people travel to larger centres they also conduct other business there, reducing the viability of other local businesses and service providers. This movement away from smaller centres puts the sustainability of those communities at even greater risk. It is another aspect of the "dying town syndrome".
The whole business of banking in the bush is undergoing radical change. The Australian Bankers’ Association predicts that
"bank branches will remain an important part of the banking scene but the number of branches will be reduced right around Australia. The more than 2,600 branches in rural Australia is too many to be sustained by a banking industry seeking to become more efficient, and then able to offer more extensive and higher value services."
Proposals in WA attempt to address the issue in that State but the recommendations don’t take into account the needs of elderly people and people with disabilities I mentioned. The Regional Financial Services Taskforce set up by the WA Minister for Fair Trading recommended
- that banks provide
rural communities affected by branch closures with greater access to
automatic teller machines able to use all types of cards and
- that Australia Post expand its regional giroPost network as a matter of priority, with federal funding where the introduction of the service is not commercially viable.
The National Farmers’ Federation has recommended that mobile banking services be developed and extended by service providers. These services have been welcomed by farmers particularly when they live considerable distances out of town and the services are provided by people who are skilled in their business. The NFF also recommended that banks should develop education programs for their customers, particularly the elderly, which would enable people to use available electronic facilities and make enquiries without having to visit their branch.15 Certainly banks must ensure accessibility for all.
Positive initiatives
As we move around the country we are also learning about many local initiatives to address these rural human rights problems. It seems that many communities are responding themselves in innovative ways. They are doing it with few resources but with great commitment. This demonstrates yet again that the strength of country Australia lies in communities working together to solve problems. Let me give you just a few examples of what I have seen.
In Port Augusta here in South Australia a group called Rural and Isolated Children’s Exercise (RICE) provides services to many of the most disadvantaged children on isolated settlements and properties across about two thirds of the State. It has been doing so for over 20 years. It offers family counselling and family support services, mobile child care and other programs for these children and their families.
Other communities are moving to establish services to support people from non-English speaking backgrounds. Rural Australia has a much smaller proportion of its population born overseas than urban Australia does. These people come from many different countries and so the numbers from each are small. They often experience isolation and do not know where to find the services and support they need. They can also experience discrimination and racism. There seems to have been a good number of groups established over the last year to two to provide this support. In Orange, NSW, a multicultural group was established last August. In Port Macquarie, NSW, I was pleased to speak at the launch of Multi Kulti in May this year. I have heard of similar groups forming elsewhere.
In North West Tasmania local community service organisations were concerned by the high level of suicide among young people. They knew that many suicides were of young gay men and lesbians but that these young people were rarely visible and seldom sought support from local community service agencies. They also knew that there were many outspoken opponents of repeal of Tasmania’s anti-gay criminal laws in North West Tasmania and that the area had seen meetings at which some of the most virulent anti-gay hatred had been preached. They feared the effect of these local events on young people struggling to establish their identities as gay or lesbian. These agencies cooperated in an extensive study of issues confronting young gay men and lesbians in the area and published the results in Working it out. They have decided on many initiatives to ensure that these young people are supported and affirmed in their own communities and that they are no longer forced to leave.
In Dubbo in New South Wales the Remote and Rural Health Training Unit has developed a new approach to two problems, the departure of young people from country towns and the inability of these towns to attract and retain health care workers. The unit is conducting a week long health care career options program for 20 yr 10 students from high schools in surrounding towns. It hopes that local young people will be interested in being trained in health care work and will remain in their own communities in these roles.
Conclusion
Without appropriate community support, including from city people, and government action the quality of life of many people in regional, rural and remote Australia will be eroded. This is an issue at all times but particularly at times of hard decisions about reductions in public expenditure. It is for economists to argue about the size of the public sector the economy can afford and for governments to decide how much public money will be raised and spent. My concern from a human rights perspective is about priorities. When allocating public funds, when developing or cutting programs, all levels of government ought to give primary consideration to the human rights of the people they represent and serve. As one person told us
"Governments must acknowledge the fact that people live in rural communities and need to be recognised as being a part of a society rather than part of an economy."
Priority should be given to providing adequate funding for programs that seek to meet the human rights of all Australians. These programs should encourage new businesses to create new jobs. They will help to draw people back into the towns and allow the process of renewal slowly to begin to breathe new life into dying towns.
The people on the land are part of the community of Australia. We all have a role to play in the future of our country. In Orange we were told
"We talk as if we are almost a different race - especially people on country properties. [But] the dependence goes both ways. There’s a whole lot of support the country gives the city and vice versa. Phone calls need to go both ways. Business goes both ways."Last updated 1 December 2001
