Rusted Off: Navigating the Gulf between Parliament and Rural Australia

Gabrielle Chan is a journalist who became a farmer. In her new book Rusted Off, she looks to her own rural community’s main street for answers to the big questions driving voters. Why are we so fed up with politics? Why are formerly rusted-on country voters deserting major parties in greater numbers than their city cousins? Can ordinary people teach us more about the way forward for government? Gabrielle Chan addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 10 October 2018 to reflect on her book’s findings.

RUSTED OFF: NAVIGATING THE GULF BETWEEN PARLIAMENT AND RURAL AUSTRALIA

GABRIELLE CHAN

More than 20 years ago, I arrived as a metropolitan migrant to a farm outside a small town. I had no connection with country Australia. I had no desire to live in country Australia but I had rather inconveniently fallen in love with a farmer.

I had grown up in Sydney suburbs, raised by a Singaporean Chinese father and an Anglo mother. I had rarely been west of the Blue Mountains. Growing up in the seventies in outer suburban Sydney, I did not see many faces like mine. I negotiated my way through school and landed a job at News Corp as a copy girl and then a cadetship at The Australian. I started covering state politics in the 1990s and then moved to the Canberra press gallery after Labor premier Bob Carr won the NSW

election in 1995.

I moved to the farm in 1996, the same year Pauline Hanson came to parliament. My father was horrified: “Haven’t you ever seen Wake In Fright?” He was terrified for his daughter as the political debate started to fracture (again) on Asian immigration. I was heading to a place that was smaller, more isolated and much whiter.

For someone of my background, everything about moving to the farm left me unmoored. I was entering a conservative Anglo family culture in the conservative industry of farming near a conservative small town in a conservative electorate from three-metre wide terrace in Surry Hills, via the press gallery.

There were two transitions to make. The first was cultural, from the city to the country. I noticed little things; everything from bone crushing handshakes to the unspoken small town rules. I puzzled over why the town had a lion-dancing club – from the Chinese New Year tradition – when what it had was a line dancing club. I saw social divides across class I had never noticed in the city. There was farmer vs townie. Catholic vs Protestant. Of course, the city has class divides but they are harder to see. In the city, demographics have postcodes.

The second transition was from political insider to outsider. I left a life which revolved around a few square kilometres of Surry Hills and then federal parliament circle to a world which was completely disconnected. I struggled with that transition more because it changed my identity. It felt like I had lost something.

In the process, I struck people who had diametrically opposed views to me on the topics of the 1990s, including the Mabo judgement. At that time, farmers were scared of losing their land. I didn’t understand how some multi-generational farming families, with a heartfelt emotional connection to place, could not understand more ancient connections. So I heard reflections of Pauline Hanson and I railed at these other opinions and was shouty and ill at ease, when in reality, my transition had been a gift. It was a chance to see the world from the other side.

With young children, I was drawn into the necessary social infrastructure; mother’s groups, playgroups, cake stalls, progress associations and school council. Conversations about life, the universe and everything were conducted over nappy changes and play doh. I related to people over cake recipes and rainfall, finding common ground. These conversations still included politics; just not the high politics and reverse ferrets that we talked about in press galleries but politics in the way it touches people’s lives. We covered all the ministerial areas – immigration, education, health, communications, foreign affairs, treasury. This was politics that crosses the divide between the inside world of parliaments and the outside world of people who are not involved in the assorted industries of government.

At the same time, I kept a foot in my other camp, returning to the Canberra press gallery when my youngest went to high school. The internet, the collapse in media revenue, social media and 24-hour news stations had changed things markedly since I had left and it showed. Politicians and media were more shouty – a bit like I was when I moved to the country – and voters were more angry.

By 2016, a sizeable portion of Britain voted to leave the European Union as did a portion of the US for Donald Trump. I noticed the demographics of those voters looked a lot like my own community; older, whiter and firmly of a place. Malcolm Turnbull, who had been high in the polls, nearly lost the 2016 election. In order to think about what I considered the biggest political story, I needed to let go of the press gallery and return to my main street. I wanted to interview people I had known over the years, outside my own social groups to discover the detail of their lives and reflect how they land on their political views. I wanted to have conversations with people who might not have the same views as me and find some common ground because I could not see that much of it happening in parliament. So this project became a piece of very slow journalism, which aims to marry the micro on my main street with the macro of national political debate.

What did I find?

Our little town of Harden Murrumburrah was built around a railway and it had gone through acute economic dislocation when the railway jobs were rationalised in the 1980s. It has a population of 2000, 3000 if you count the surrounding farm district. The abattoir came and went as the drought hit stock prices in the nineties and the noughties. Larger towns suck up our workers and while they are there, they do their grocery shopping and attendant services. Fellow residents who were beyond what they describe as the NSW acronym – Newcastle Sydney Wollongong – felt ignored and complained from lack of services.

Education is just one example. I first met Maggie-Kate in our pony club but later she attended our little high school. I say “little” because last year, the high school had six students in Year 12 which makes it one of the smallest high schools in NSW. That means usually there is a very limited range of subjects. In the last year, there was no physics, chemistry or two-unit maths, let alone three-unit maths.

Maggie Kate had set her sights on being a doctor from the age of eight, when her little sister Deanna was born with a congenital issue. She got a lot of support from her mum Cate, who raised her without her father. Her grandfather Bernie, a stock carter, was a constant presence who also contributed. No family member had been to university before. So, the teachers pulled out all stops, Maggie Kate worked her backside off and became the first student anyone can remember who has qualified for medicine straight out our high school. It made front page news in our local paper.

Getting into medicine was only the start of the journey. Moving from a small town to the city is no mean feat for a young person with no supports there. Maggie-Kate had spent a night or two in Sydney so the move to the city away from family was daunting and not just in personal but in cultural terms. In my region, which tretches from the thriving town of Young to the booming Canberra satellite town of Yass, our Australian-born population is 84 per cent and the top five migrant source nations by birth are England, New Zealand, Netherlands, Germany and America – in that order.

Compare my region to Australia’s two largest cities and you will see the contrast. In Greater Sydney, at the 2016 census just over 57 per cent were Australian-born, and China is the top migrant birthplace, followed by England, India, New Zealand and Vietnam. In Melbourne, Australian born make up 60 per cent but the top migrant birthplace is India.

Right now, half the Australian population was either born overseas or has a parent born overseas. As my colleague journalist and author George Megalogenis writes, he nation is quickly being separated into a series of “distinct cultural identities”. While the nation’s south-east corner can be counted as “majority new Australian”, in the rest of the country “old Australia dominates”. Megalogenis argues that the migrant intake, which remains at 190,000 a year, helped to create a “top ten world economy” but that policy makers have a job ahead. By moving from the city to the country, I lived those two parts of Australia. And listening to politics as closely as I do, I can hear lots of messages directed to either side of the divide but less messages uniting us.

The confusion I felt moving from a city to a country was a cultural one. Likewise, as Maggie Kate walked into a very diverse lecture theatre, she estimated the audience at about 10 per cent Anglo. She suffered my discombobulation in reverse. Far from being put off by her experience, Maggie Kate survived and thrived. She fell in with a group of international students – and why not? She was a country migrant. Just this year, our town’s heart burst with pride as she qualified as a doctor. The friends she made at university will become lifelong and earlier this year she travelled to Sri Lanka for her friend’s wedding and dressed in a sari. Her grandfather Bernie, who carted sheep for us for many years, could scarcely contain himself at his grand daughter’s achievements. He asked me, “How does she keep all that in her head?”

That made me think. We are only 90 minutes west of Canberra yet the gap between country schools and city schools can be vast. My children boarded in Sydney for their senior years. For that reason, I am sure no one would have batted an eyelid if one of mine got into medicine. Is it that odd that a kid at a little local country school should make it into medicine? Why was she the first?

The reason is, the opportunities between country and city can be vast. It was brought home to me again a few weeks ago, when I was covering the drought in southwest Queensland. One of the farmers also happened to be a spokeswoman for the Isolated Children’s Parents Association (or ICPA). We got onto the subject of education and she told me that there were eight very large government shires in Queensland that had no high school. We are a country which requires children by law to attend school. How is this possible?

Education is just one of the noticeable divides. My fellow residents notice other gaps such as the lack of drug rehabilitation services and shrinking health services. Connectivity and mobile service are major issues. You can’t have a baby in many country hospitals these days. People rail against city-centric decisions such as the NSW council amalgamations. They want jobs so they can stay in their place; they want infrastructure; and they want access to the health, education and broadband services that city people enjoy, but they want it without the crap that city people have to put up with. The congestion, the pollution, the population pressure.

Main Street blues

One of the perennial debates around country towns and in our main street involves how to get a larger population to drive growth and critical mass. It is one of the sad songs sung about country Australia and it is a real issue. Our exposure to population loss was brought home to me when the local abattoir closed in the Millenium drought. As breadwinners lost their jobs, they took their families and moved on. Our school lost a full-time teacher, the principal became a teaching principal, our footy team, with its long proud history in the Group 9 competition, had to fold.

I was working on my local paper at the time when Council was arguing about the Local Environmental Plan. Flick to 2018 and they are still arguing, having made little headway and still with template planning laws which might suit larger regional centres but certainly not small towns.

But I would argue there has been an important shift since the noughties. Over my 20 something years at home, I can’t count the number of times fellow residents have yearned for the big employer, providing hundreds of jobs. Slowly though, people are recognising that that really doesn’t happen anymore. At the same time, we are transforming with a greater number of smaller businesses based around coffee, boutique homeware shops and specialty goods. Little towns across country Australia are working to attract more visitors to stop, spend a dollar and look around, in the hope of one day they might come back.

For example, we live equidistant to a smaller town – Jugiong – which has remade itself as a food destination. It has a great cafe – the Long Track – which sits high on my coffee index and a flash pub with add-on boutique shopping that would not be out of place in posh centres in Sydney and Melbourne. It has become a weekend favourite amongst Hume Highway travellers and nearby larger centres for the Sunday drive.

In both towns, I see tree changers moving in who are escaping Sydney and Melbourne real estate prices, looking for a better lifestyle, a strong sense of community and more space while not giving up good coffee. They are joining locally born people to create and drive community groups to fill in government policy gaps. It is also driving a gentrification of small towns.

These changes are creating new demographics in rural and regional towns. It is mixing up the old rusted on conservatives, the rusted off voter – which I will get to in a minute – with a dash of more progressive tree changer.

If towns like mine could capitalise on the demand for larger lifestyle blocks than the quarter acre, the real estate agent and our local schools and employers would be very happy people. But we cannot because of planning laws. Tree changers and locals interested in buying land complain that even though there are a number of double blocks in town, they are not for sale. Because of the lack of larger blocks for sale, people put together two blocks to get the space they dream of in their country fantasy. As a result, we currently have one block of land for sale in town. Yet state government will not allow the release of new land which is based on a formula for larger regional centres.

We have people interested in opening businesses in our small main street but we have vacant shops owned by landlords, a fair portion of whom will not maintain these spaces, leaving them to literally rot before our eyes. In some cases, they are a safety hazard, left accessible to vandals and bored youths. Yet communities have no recall, and local and state governments remain silent on the issue. Landlords sit on these premises as superannuation yet the town is crying out for more businesses.

Still, it is always embarrassing to talk about lack of services as we are 90 minutes from Canberra and four hours from Sydney and therefore classed inner regional. Outer regional and remote community challenges would obviously trump our issues but my aim was to tell the story I know best. I can tell you it is very disconnected laws like these that are noticed on my main street and remarked on as examples of government failure to attend to community needs.

The neglected class

When I moved west of the divide, voters around me were firmly rusted on to Coalition MPs. Historically, we have had Labor MPs at a state level, notably ministers Billy Sheahan and his son, the now Justice Terry Sheahan, but it’s safe to say our voters are of a conservative bent. What I witnessed though, over the years, is an increasing frustration with politics and politicians.

Here is Ken, a friend and subject, talking about the majors: “The major parties are there to see how they are going to fight to win the next election. It’s like a business. They are trying to outdo the other one. They aren’t worrying about the people out in Australia, they are just looking after themselves in one little corner. Bugger the ones outside.”

Ken is the son of a soldier settler, who sold the farm when Ken was a young adult. He worked on a bread delivery run for a long time and swore he would never pick fruit or work in an abattoir. He ended up doing both and then found himself unemployed in his fifties. Now he volunteers for the local historic society and the State Emergency Services.

For me, he epitomises the Rusted Off country voter. In the senate, he told me he votes for all the “silly ones”. He stopped voting Liberal after the former state and federal MP, Alby Schultz – himself a former abattoir worker – retired. Ken told me: “When Hanson got in, over at the Men’s Shed didn’t they go right off? I said she is going to get in [to Parliament] and stir the others up. Now they are listening.”

If I think about the people that are actively angry, I think of the neglected class. While people look on in horror at the Canberra cycle of spills and dysfunction, the ones who change their vote form the Big Middle of our little town.

This neglected class comprise the people who service farms, look after the very young and the very old, keep the schools going, keep the hospitals running, do the council work (in the streets as opposed to sitting as councillors), stock the supermarket shelves. The neglected class are the very foundation of country towns, and you don’t hear about them from most rural MPs who tend to focus on farmers and agriculture as “the backbone” of Australia. The neglected class feel they have no sway over governments or politicians, and they feel inadequately represented by the media. They have no lobby group representing them. This they share with city voters but the neglected class, previously rusted on voters, are rusting off the major parties in larger numbers.

They expect the world to change but not too fast. Conversations around discontent and the failings of government in country areas are invariably followed by “but I wouldn’t live in the city if you paid me”. People tend to be slightly more socially conservative (though not always – witness the SSM vote) and economically interventionist. Their big beef is with the lack of trust they have in government and the lack of consideration of them from city-based power centres. They know their MP can’t fix every issue, but they want he or she to have a go. They don’t mind immigration as long as it’s done on the nation’s terms rather than the immigrant’s terms. They feel if migrants want to come to Australia, they should be grateful.

This view of immigration, (particularly of Muslim migration as the latest group to arrive in numbers) is confronting as the daughter of a migrant and occurs in our particular demographic and cultural context. These voters have many similarities with the swinging voters in the outer edges of the cities, but geography and culture differentiates them – those around me identify strongly as country people. These are obviously broad brushstrokes. I think of these country town people as the neglected class, sitting between those who rely more heavily on government payments and landholders and larger businesses who have enough assets to cushion them from economic shocks.

When I think about what might happen in rural politics in future, I look to the metropolitan electorates that hold the city version of the neglected class. No MP can get too complacent in the outer edges of our big cities. Those voters make their politicians work. Rural and regional main streets are starting to understand that. Like a bull led by a nose ring, rural electorates have more power than we think. That ring is an illusion. The bull still holds the power if he chooses to exercise it. Country towns are in a time of political transition and no one knows which way the bull will jump. Country voters are one fright away from determining governments. We represent 30 per cent of Australia and could have the balance of power in any future government.

Community moving ahead of government

As Australia wakes up to find its sixth change of prime minister in a decade, the big trend I see is that community is moving ahead of government. I can see exciting developments where country communities are getting together to fill the gaps left by government. Our town has been very active in supporting our locally educated

children through locally raised funds for further education, trades or tertiary qualifications to broaden their horizons via an organisation called the Harden District Education Foundation. In Yackandandah, Victoria, they have hooked up their medical centre, community fuel station and a greenfield housing site to renewable power. They are looking to be totally renewable by 2022. In Mingoola, a tiny town on the NSW-Queensland border, they actively sought out African refugees to help stem the population decline and keep their schools going. Mingoola welcomed four families with children by renovating housing and providing jobs.

As an aside, this week we discovered the federal government will impose new visa conditions on skilled migrants to settle outside major cities for up to five years. I would love more migrants to move to our regions and my town. After all, overseas trained Muslim Indian doctors, two of whom married local girls and subsequently settled, have looked after us for nearly 40 years. Yet for all this experience, there is still some disquiet in parts of the community about Muslim migration. My only warning to government from my experience is around the compulsory aspect of the

policy. Small communities with high numbers of local born population must feel comfortable and migrants must have jobs and housing otherwise you set both communities and migrants up to fail. Forced settlement has the capacity to feed divisions but done well by local agreement, such policies could build a diversity bridge to stop the cultural confusion experienced by myself and Maggie-Kate.

Alas, we communities cannot solve everything. Governments provide the

policy scaffolding for our lives, our economy and our environment. Governments cannot survive without community support and communities cannot survive without government support. We can only do so much in our own communities and that is where we really do need government to function well.

Conclusion

So here are some of my lessons.

Lesson 1: After three decades of economically rationalist policies and letting the free market rip, country communities are confused by our place. We are told as towns and businesses, get big or get out. We are told if we can’t get a job, move to the city, when attachment to place and its people provides most capacity for individual support. Rural Australia contributes 40 per cent of our economy but we are considered by some as “old Australia”, either rednecks or salt of the earth with no nuance in between. We also must also let go of our own stereotyping of city people.

Lesson 2: The best of our country MPs understand the importance of place but the worst of them play up a narrative that city people will never understand us. We need to let go of the decline narrative and find better ways to describe the challenges and the strengths of our communities. We need to scrutinise our representatives and not settle for second best.

Lesson 3: Across the country, communities are moving ahead of government. In my community alone, I can tell give examples of Indigenous reconciliation, privately provided fast broadband, bridging the education gap, innovative models for crisis housing and small town economic development. These are some of the best bush stories.

Lesson 4: We need to build from within and overcome social divides within our community. Like our politicians, main street community leaders need to consult with the rest of the community. As political disruption continues, governments will run at us with money and country communities need to have their own priorities ready to go. That way we can tell our MPs that we don’t want a school hall next to the old one, or a community building footpath, but we want a high speed internet learning centre for our kids. We can’t expect governments to put the right things in place if we haven’t told them what we want.

Ultimately, the lesson is federal, state and local governments, the politicians and public servants need to listen. Country voters are proving they are no longer adverse to up ending the furniture if they don’t like what’s on the table. When I started writing Rusted Off, I thought hard about place. I felt comfortable in Sydney where I grew up but there was no sense of belonging. I realised the other day I have now spent more time at the farm than any other address in my life.

While some might see me as a blow in, I don’t feel like a blow in. I feel like part of the community and it is from that vantage point, that I wrote this book. My new home represents the other half of Australia that completes the whole nation. Two halves of the one place. I celebrate it whole.