Visioning a future for rural and regional Australia

Rural and regional parts of Australia have consistently faced the interplay of three distinct challenges: the viability of small-scale agriculture as a basis for farm family and settlement livelihoods, climate variability and an increasingly globalising economic environment. In response to these changes, three key shifts in social policy have been observed since World War II: a shift in economic policy from protectionism to market-based approaches, a shift in natural resource management encompassing a recognition of scarcity and degradation and the need to better manage natural resources (such as land and water) and, in the face of rural decline, a shift in policy moving away from government as provider to a position promoting the economic self-sufficiency of communities.