AAP General News (Australia)
12-25-2000
Fed: Renewed interest in regional Australia by politicians
By Shane Wright
CANBERRA, Dec 25 AAP - RARA.
It says it all really, the shorthand term for rural and regional Australia.
And ever since the rise of Pauline Hanson's One Nation, RARA has been on the lips of
any politician worth their salt and wanting to keep their seat in parliament.
They only had to look at the way Steve Bracks swept through regional Victoria last
year to realise the folk of RARA were not happy with those in power.
The National Party discovered people out in the bush had long memories, voting in Labor
in the seat of Benalla which had been held by the National/Country parties for the best
part of four generations.
Interestingly, that defeat in Benalla occurred around the same time as Prime Minister
John Howard embarked on his listening tour that took in a swathe of those unsettled rural
and regional areas.
The interest in RARA is a combination of events, not least of which is the knife-edge
on which many MPs sit on in electorates outside metropolitan centres.
Of the 35 seats held by the coalition with a margin of five per cent or less, 21 of
them are in regional areas in the rural sense of the word.
And as Benalla showed, even a seat held comfortably can go in the flash of voters' pencils.
In the case of Benalla, the seat had been held by 7.5 per cent by the National Party's
Victorian leader, Pat MacNamara, before Labor's Denise Allen `stole' the seat and the
show.
So on top of Mr Howard's listening tour, voters have seen Treasurer Peter Costello
don a pair of gumboots to see northern NSW.
Democrats Leader Meg Lees and Labor Leader Kim Beazley, plus most of his frontbench,
were out there walking about the dusty roads, looking over the wheat crops, talking about
the problems of mobile phones.
There was also the rural health component to this year's federal Budget which gave
the National Party a chance to sell its merits west of the Great Divide.
Queensland sugar growers got a handy package to help them plant this year's crop to
take advantage of a surge in world prices.
Dairy farmers in all states received a $1.8-billion package to offset the impact of
industry deregulation, the first industry to get such a bailout even when its own leaders
were advocating a lifting on restrictions.
Perhaps the biggest nod to RARA was the $1.6-billion roads package announced this month,
to help take peoples' minds off the high cost of petrol.
The search engine on the federal parliament's website goes haywire when the words rural
and regional Australia are put in - evidence of the way almost every decision is couched
in terms of RARA.
Is it having an impact?
Benalla, though now more than seven months ago, would seem to say no.
The Border Mail newspaper, one of Australia's largest regional dailies that takes in
much of the area covered by Benalla, recently conducted a poll on issues in the region.
It found the cost of fuel and the GST were the two single biggest issues of interest to voters.
There was nothing about all the money for roads, not a mention of the dairy package
or the sugar package, not a pip about rural health.
It was all about concrete issues - how much it costs to get about and to do business.
It just proved that no matter how you couch it, rural and regional Australians have
recognised they are just as important as those seats in western Sydney protected from
Badgerys Creek airport.
Just another cheer for RARA.
AAP sw/daw/cdh/mg/de
KEYWORD: REGIONAL YEARENDER
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