The Regional Australia Institute has released a new report, entitled “Rethinking the Future of Northern Australia – More than Mines, Dams and Development Dreams”.
Rethinking Northern Australia
In a well reasoned and considered report, The RAI suggests that
the vast potential of northern Australia is being held back by serious bottlenecks in infrastructure and human capital, but strategies for sustainable economic and population growth need to shift beyond the simple solutions and polarised debate of the past 50 years.
Those interested in the public policy [and community] issues of rural and regional Australia will be interested in the excellent work of the Regional Australia Institute.
From their site:
We run a tightly focused research agenda, improving the quality of and access to knowledge on how we can ensure the prosperity and sustainability of Australia’s regions, and our nation as a whole.
Of note, is their work on a visualisation tool called “insight”.
Insight – Regional Australia Institute
The tool allows users to make comparative analyses of Regional Development Areas [RDA’s] or Local Government Areas [LGA’s]
It is an online index and interactive map that tracks the competitiveness of Australia’s 560 Local LGA’s and 55 RDA regions.
[In]Sight spans ten themes and 59 indicators specifically tailored to reflect the fundamentals of sustainable growth in Australia, capturing the competitiveness of LGA’s and RDA’s according to current economic performance and drivers of future success.
There is NOTHING like access to HIGH-SPEED and RELIABLE broadband infrastructure.
Source: SpeedTest.net
I have NOTHING like access to HIGH SPEED and RELIABLE broadband infrastructure.
A small rant regarding my network access today……
I have been involved, both personally and professionally, in the planning and development of information and telecommunications projects for Education, Business and Communities for almost 30 years. Most recently, my focus has turned to my region and my own needs. This seems as reasonable a case-study as any I have previously seen or worked on.
We understand the links between telecommunications access and income creation. The economic drivers for regions are many, but telecommunications infrastructure is non-negotiable in my view.
Source:NIEIR – State of the Regions 2007
I live approximately one-hundred Kilometres from Victoria’s capital city, Melbourne [Australia’s second largest city, soon to be its largest]. As a rural resident, I live on a property without access to copper-based ADSL services [ ADSL + Distance/Loss = Bad ] and have to satisfy myself with wireless technology and services from Telstra that do not come close to those of my friends, colleagues, customers or even competitors.
My day-to-day business, my children’s education and even my community’s connectedness relies on high quality telecommunications infrastructure.
This should be a challenge to all local councillors and prospective State and Federal politicians and/or candidates.
The most recent review of the National Broadband Network [of which I am a supporter] three-year rollout map highlights what I can only describe as the “Central Victorian NBN Banana..”
The current and planned lack of access is obvious. This is a map of planned activity for the next three years. This is not the only such “Banana” in the state, but it is the one that concerns me most at present.
Given the HUGE demographic challenges being faced in this peri-urban region as well as the most recent effects of the catastrophic “Black Saturday” bushfires, I am still at a loss to understand how this region in particular will not be considered for NBN infrastructure to at least beyond 2016-17, if at all?
NBN Banana
It is ironic that in an area of Victoria that has worked with State and Federal MP’s that have included, Fran Bailey MP, Marsha Thompson MP, Bill Shorten MP and Stephen Conroy MP as well as regional and local councils for much more than a decade to improve telecommunications and other services [such as gas pipelines], we are no closer to improved broadband infrastructure.
It seems prescient that local organisations [of which I was involved] presented both successive State and Federal Governments with a telecommunications network infrastructure plan, preliminary engineering and business case ELEVEN years ago.
The map below, which matches my “NBN Banana” was a logical network outline presented to both State and Federal Governments nine years ago – pre NBN…and was the basis of planning for a number of years by both local councils and related organisations.
This was euphemistically called a community of integrated networks or “C.O.I.N’s”
Proposed COINS Network 2004
Why a Community of Integrated Networks [C.O.I.N.’s]?
*This section is a copy of originals published by the Central Ranges Local Learning & Employment Network in 2004
When the most detailed socio-economic scan of the Macedon, Mitchell and Murrindindi shires was completed in March 2004, it highlighted little if any coordination of education provision with health, youth or other services.
A number of communities within this region demonstrated some of the highest rates of youth disengagement [and associated social and economic problems] in the state. This was combined with labour-market dynamics that suggested a large section of the population was loosing ground in all areas of employment and training outcomes at a time when the nation was growing strongly.
The percentage of non-job ready adults was growing alarmingly, well beyond comparable regions.
Source: NIEIR & CRLLEN Inc
A cross-sectoral and community alliance of local and regional providers already existed and was working to develop strategic initiatives designed to reform programme and service delivery to the communities they served.
At the time [2004] an alliance was formed between local governments, local progress associations and the Central Ranges Local Learning and Employment Network Inc to lobby Governments for improved telecommunications infrastructure.
The Objectives of the network were:
To improve the outcomes for young people entering the work-force or further study.
To improve the skills available in local communities.
To reduce the recurring costs of modern communications to agencies in the region
To improve the range of services and applications available to communities in these areas
To provide infrastructure that can be used as an attractor for higher levels of education and training
To promote collaboration between existing organisations with overlapping requirements and resources
To provide mechanisms by which communities and local economies can promote regional skills, both internally to the communities and externally to the rest of Australia and the world
The network was intended to provide services to a range of agencies, communities and individuals in the region, including:
Primary, Secondary and Tertiary education organisations;
Healthcare agencies;
Vocational training agencies; and
Community and youth agencies such as libraries to name just a few.
There were some relevant case studies that demonstrated the effectiveness of this type of collaboration. These included:
Many similar networks existed. The goal was to create a series of bridges between existing networks and build capability, particularly in our smaller communities, with a view to synchronizing and expanding delivery right across the learning needs of our communities and our local economies.
[End of 2004 reprint]
An NBN Banana ? Can we peel it or make fruit salad?
Eleven years on and this can only be described as a failure for our [my] region.
Given the the hundreds if not thousands of hours that have been devoted by many many community and regional groups to improve broadband access for the region, it appears we are left with the “NBN Banana”.
This situation is not good for my business, as everything I do, based on my telecommunications access, is at least a factor of FIVE more expensive and a factor of TEN slower than my colleagues, clients and competitors. Even within small geographic areas, the inequity of access to such services is substantial and profound. This applies equally to the services, businesses and regional development opportunities that would or could be based around appropriate telecommunications infrastructure.
The situation for education and training providers, for those seeking to improve their skills and access to online services [because of distance and cost] also face the same structural inequality built in to our local economy.
The extrapolation of such a small case study for strategic regional and national development is clear.
In a Federal election year, rural and regional telecommunications infrastructure needs to be a major strategic priority.
At a local level, regional and council representatives need to re-consider the implications for our local economies, now and in to the future and should consider re-establishing the strategic imperative around telecommunications and consider “getting the band back together”, the alliance of numerous community organisations that worked so hard to make broadband access a priority for our region.
Among the most interesting debates in economics today is the dispute between Jeffrey Sachs and William Easterly over how best to help the world’s poor. The discussion is interesting not only because it concerns the most important question in all of economics, but also because Sachs and Easterly happen to be exceptionally good communicators. And like the longtime Mets-Yankees rivalry, both happen to be at New York universities: Sachs at Columbia University, and Easterly at New York University.
At stake is the question of whether development economics requires a Big Push or piecemeal reform. In The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, Sachs argues that the world’s least developed countries are caught in a poverty trap, and that success requires a doubling of foreign aid. In The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, Easterly contends that much foreign aid has been wasted, and that it would be better to focus on taking modest, deliverable steps to make poor people’s lives better.
Whoever is right (my own view is that the truth lies somewhere between the two), the Sachs-Easterly debate has helped to galvanise a revolution in development economics. Integral to the development economics revolution has been the advent of rigorous randomised trials to find out what works. Long regarded as the ‘gold standard’ in medicine, a spate of randomised trials are taking place across the developing world.
In Kenya, researchers have shown that deworming drugs dramatically reduce school absences, while worm-prevention education programs had no impact whatsoever. In the Philippines, savings incentives have been shown to boost the assets of the poor. And in India, a program that paid teacher bonuses raised [“acrobat”] student test scores by a significant margin.
The reason randomised trials are so powerful is that they allow us to know the counterfactual: what would have happened if the program was not implemented? Because participants are assigned to the treatment and control groups by the toss of a coin, we can be sure that any systematic differences in outcomes are due to the program itself.
Beyond program evaluation, randomised trials have also been used to help researchers learn more about issues of governance, which have long bedevilled development efforts. In a famous randomised trial in Benin, researcher Leonard Wantchekon persuaded presidential candidates in the 2001 election to randomly alter their campaign strategies: giving high-minded public policy speeches in some villages, and pork-barrelling clientelist speeches in other villages. He found that candidates won more votes when they delivered a clientelist speech, and that male voters tended to be more easily swayed by offers of local patronage than female voters.
More controversially, Marianne Bertrand and co-authors recently followed a group of Indian applicants through the notoriously corrupt process of obtaining a driving licence. One group were offered a financial reward if they obtained their licence fast, while others were not. The researchers found that the payment did indeed lead applicants to get their licences faster, but their skills were no better. Given a surprise driving test afterwards, 69 percent failed. Evidence from the randomised trial helps understand how corruption in the licensing process operates, and may assist reformers in improving the system.
As the results from these and dozens of other randomised trials begin to pour in, development economists will continue to hone their knowledge about what works best, and whether the kind of grand strategy of Sachs or the more piecemeal approach of Easterly is likely to offer more promise for raising the living standards of those in developing countries.
Yet while randomised policy trials are transforming development economics, it is startling that our homegrown development challenge – raising the living standards of Indigenous Australians – has seen so little attention to rigorous evaluation. With Indigenous life expectancy at third world levels, too much of Indigenous policy seems to be driven by instinct, and too little by results.
Instead of digging in behind their favoured solutions, wouldn’t it be better if both sides of politics admitted that most social policies aimed at improving Indigenous living standards have failed? Once we acknowledge how little we know, we might then begin by applying the same gold standard evaluation technique to Indigenous social policies that we apply to new drugs.
A dozen randomised trials of Indigenous social programs would cost comparatively little, but provide valuable new evidence. In health and education, employment and family policies, Indigenous policymaking could do with a little less rhetoric and a little more of the modest searching that characterises the best of development economics today. Think your policy works? Let’s toss a coin and find out.
The Australian Local Government Association [ALGA]released it’s highly valuable State of the Regions Report yesterday, 27th November.
The survey of Australia’s 64 regions is commissioned annually by the Australian Local Government Association (ALGA) from National Economics. This is the 9th survey undertaken by National Economics.
Editors Note: The Central Ranges LLEN Board commissioned National Economics in 2002 and 2004 to produce the CRLLEN Environmental Scan. A document and data set that has been highly valued by planners across our region. An enhanced scan of the LLEN region will be published in 2007.
The 2006 State of the Regions survey is set against a backdrop of accelerating of population growth in the ‘resource zones’ and a ten-year land boom that saw land values triple between 1996 and 2005 creating a housing affordability crisis for renters and first home buyers.
Despite improvements in broadband usage, the lack of connectivity in parts of regional Australia translates to an inability to attract new industry and well trained productive workers. Lower land costs make these regions attractive to low-income earners, fixed-income retired or semi-retired households.
Regions with higher concentrations of low and fixed income earners tend to be less attractive to young people and skilled workers which further reduces the skills base and accelerates the loss of skills and critical mass for improved connectivity.
The key to reversing this vicious cycle is to reverse the flow of skills and improve connectivity – both transport and communication – between relatively disadvantaged regions and successful regions as well as international markets. The report says Australia’s local government areas could resemble California’s Silicon Valley, given a boost to regional innovation, and mentions the Bendigo Community Telco as an example.
The report paints a picture of regions and local communities fighting back by innovating and generating investment. It shows that:
Improved employment conditions in rural regions are encouraging greater levels of working age migration to some rural regions
The baby bounce continues in core metro and lifestyle regions
Local communities can take action to improve the speed and coverage of their internet services [Note: See our Broadband Broker Project]
High productivity regions are ageing relatively slowly
The capacity to innovate depends on knowledge networks at the regional level
Australia’s major centres are forming innovation clusters that attract high tech start ups
The land boom in Australia increased the self-perceived wealth of households across the nation
The report praises the Australian Government’s major broadband initiative – Broadband Connect and Clever Networks – which will have flow-on benefits and shows that much of the current investment in upgrading broadband services focused on upgrading existing exchanges in successful regions to higher bandwidths that provide higher speeds.
The report found that Australia’s most successful regions, when measured by the number of patents per 100,000 population and high tech start-ups, are still the major cities, particularly Sydney, and Melbourne.
It is evident that the major centres, with their internationally networked businesses, universities and research centres attract more firms, and the impact of this is that dense clusters of activity create a higher level of patent applications.
Municipalities that are (financially) smaller or (geographically) larger face additional disadvantage due to longer travel times and scale. The report finds that the quality of service each dollar can purchase can vary considerably between municipalities.
The resources necessary to give disadvantaged councils a better chance to play a more effective role in improving economic performance outcomes will in the main have to come from grants or other revenue enhancing measures.
Regarding council infrastructure, the report estimates that $2.3 billion in extra money is needed to bring resource-poor local government regions infrastructure up to the general standard. On the issue of road finance, the report advocates a move to road finance through user charges with council rates only paying for maintaining local access roads.
I highly commend this report to all LLEN members and those community members that have an interest and stake in sustainable regional development.
We would like to alert members, subscribers and all LLEN stakeholders to three outstanding upcoming forums that focus on much of what is at the heart to the work of the Central Ranges LLEN. Three world-class opportunities exist to engage with key policy makers, community leaders and researchers who are all focused on strengthening communities by finding ways to better synchronise local planning, improve skill, competitiveness and economic and social outcomes.
The two most important developments in policy making in recent years concern efforts to ‘join-up’ different public services and related initiatives to strengthen communities to help them become more economically and socially resilient.
The Centre for Public Policy Governments and Communities in Partnership conference will bring together key policy makers, community leaders and researchers from around Australia , together with leading experts from the UK, Ireland, Austria, Canada, the United States and New Zealand . The aim of the program will be to deepen the academic and policy debate about the impact and value of these transformations, and also to support the needs of practitioners to discuss cutting-edge cases and issues with colleagues from around the world.
Michael Porter, acknowledged as the most influential living management thinker, and respected Harvard Business School professor, will share his latest unpublished material on strategy and global competitiveness, with an in-depth focus on Australia. Professor Porter is a leading authority on competitive strategy and the competitiveness and economic development of nations, states, and regions. He leads The Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness.
Professor Porter’s work on Institutional structures for rural economic development and his work on regional clusters is of particular [and critical] interest to many stakeholders within the LLEN and broader region. I highly encourage representatives from peak industry bodies and local government planners to consider attending this event.
Asset Based Community Development – National Facilitator Training Workshops
An exciting opportunity exists for people Australia – wide who have an interest and commitment to Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) philosophies and methodologies, and want to further their facilitator / trainer skills, and become part of the creation of an Australian National Network.
The Asset-Based Community Development Institute (ABCD), established in 1995 by the Community Development Program at Northwestern University’s Institute for Policy Research, is built upon three decades of community development research by John Kretzmann and John L. McKnight. The ABCD Institute spreads its findings on capacity-building community development in two ways:
(1) through extensive and substantial interactions with community builders, and
(2) by producing practical resources and tools for community builders to identify, nurture, and mobilize neighborhood assets.
Three facilitator training workshops are being held, each with a maximum of 30 participants. Training will be provided and certified by the ABCD Institute at Northwestern University in Chicago, USA.
Contributors include The Municipal Association of Victoria, Centre for Community Child Health – The Royal Children’s Hospital and Peter Kenyon’s “Bank of Ideas” group.
