The term “inner city elite” has become a buzzword in the Australian political consciousness. Politicians like Bob Katter and Barnaby Joyce refer to a neglected rural wonderland full of bush battlers scammed out of their immense contribution to Australian society by ‘woke city slickers’ who think beef grows in a supermarket refrigerator. Joyce, in particular, uses the phrase “weatherboard and iron” — also the title of his autobiography — to differentiate an apparently poorer, struggling rural Australia from the glitzy, well-provisioned city. Bob Brown’s 2019 “Convoy to Queensland” — an ill-advised attempt to publicise the climate change impact of the Sunshine State’s coal-mining industry — was widely decried by voices in the National Party, and ultimately blamed by many in Labor for Bill Shorten’s unexpected election loss that year.
At the centre of these conceptions of our country is a heavily discussed “urban-rural divide” that stretches back through the rhetorical history of Australia — take Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s infamous rule over Queensland, built on an ‘us-and-them’ mentality rooted in a gerry-mandered rural heartland whipped into a frenzied distrust of both the National Government and urban Brisbane.
The University of Sydney is often described as the epitome of the woke elite by Australian reactionaries. As one of the Group of Eight universities with their primary campus in urban centres — it symbolises the perceived difference in attention — and subsequent funds — collected by city-dwellers. I spoke to USyd students from both rural and urban backgrounds, to find out if the divide illustrated by National Party politicians reflects reality for these students.
It is certainly true that there are large differences between an increasingly sparse rural population and Australia’s cities. In 1911, the time of Australia’s first national census, only 60% of Australians lived in “urban” areas, which presumably included regional centres that did not constitute major cities. However, by 1954, the population of the capital cities overtook that of regional and rural Australia. By 2021, 76% of the then population of almost 26 million Australians lived in major cities. Even more illustrative of our overwhelmingly centralised population is the fact that around two thirds of Australians live in a capital city, with 39% of our population living in Melbourne and Sydney alone.
Urban population centres are also the fastest growing parts of the country, with Sydney, Melbourne and South-east Queensland (including Brisbane and the Gold Coast) accounting for 75% of Australia’s population growth since 2020. This has occurred alongside the much decried death of the small town, with a large number of particularly younger regional Australians moving to urban areas for the opportunities they provide.
While declining as a percentage of the population, the bush maintains a hold on Australian national identity. Historian Russell Ward’s famous “Bush Myth” suggested that the Australian national identity, defined by values of egalitarianism, irreverence, social obligation (often defined as “mateship”), and adaptability, emerged from the itinerant “bush workers of the Australian pastoral industry, completely disproportionate to its numerical and economic strength.” Think drovers battling the harsh ‘Overland Route’ across Queensland, or shearers unionising against grubby, greedy bosses.
Even historians opposed to Ward’s outlook see the bush as the site and source of “the” Australian identity. John Hirst suggested that Ward’s “Bush Myth” only really gained prominence among urban radicals bent on misty-eyed nostalgia about the 1891 shearer’s strikes in Outback Queensland that birthed the Australian Labor Party (ALP). Instead, Hirst forwarded the “Pioneer Myth” as a cornerstone of modern Australian identity. The “Pioneer Myth” centres around “the taming of the new environment to man’s use,” celebrating “courage, enterprise, hard work, and perseverance.” This more conservative mythology was democratised by the idea that the ‘Pioneers’ built a legacy for all Australians.
It is important to note that these are not the only narratives that have defined modern Australia. Much has been made of ANZAC mythology as a national narrative, and recently more critical approaches to Australian colonial history have become mainstream. Typically, the Bush and Pioneer myths marginalised First Nations Peoples and the horrific violence inherent to colonisation.
New narratives, germinating from the turn towards “black armband history” in the 1970s and blooming in the post-Mabo shift since the 1990s, have incorporated Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders into national mythology to a greater degree. However, even in these narratives, the bush plays a central role: it is the arena in which the ANZACs steeled themselves through a harsh country adolescence, or the site of bloodshed between white settlers and First Nations people.
Additionally, the politicians of the National Party (and unassociated crackpots like Bob Katter) tap into a perceived degradation of the importance of these myths in wider Australian society when they decry the rural-urban divide. In the world constructed by the likes of Barnaby Joyce and David Littleproud, the city no longer cares about the country. I, at a 2021 debate at the National Press Club in Canberra, witnessed Littleproud berate Tasmanian Labor MP and then Agriculture Minister Julie Collins for ignoring farmers. I believe the words were something along the lines of ‘the closest you’ve ever been to a farmer is when you fly 10,000 feet above them in your aeroplane.’
Despite the National Party’s claims that city slickers don’t care about the country, every urban student I spoke to also affirmed the importance of the Bush in how they see Australia. Second Year Politics Major and lifelong Sydney-sider Will Thorpe suggested that rural Australia “definitely is” a big part of the Australian identity, “because we are a big country and we have a long heritage of the Bush being an iconic part of Australian culture, though we are in fact a highly urbanised nation.”
Gabrielle Woodger, a Politics and Sociology major from Western Sydney, said that when you consider the idea of Australia, “that’s the one iconic image — going out to the Bush, small town identity; everyone knowing each other, and community, and togetherness.” Even second-year design student Gabriel Bean, who noted that he didn’t think about rural Australia often, conceded that “the Aussie battler, wrangling the wild” is “what other countries see as Australia more than Australians see as Australia, but it’s still really important to our identity.”
More importantly, regional students also noted they had never experienced prejudice from urban students regarding their regional backgrounds. Kailee Collins, a Third year Marine Science student from Tumut, in the NSW Riverina, when asked about urban students’ attitudes, suggested, “I don’t think they’re really bothered about it.”
Marc Paniza, a first year Archaeology major who relocated from the Philippines to Batemans Bay in Year Eight, noted that he was expecting “USyd students to be pretentious,” and stick their proverbial noses up at him for his regional background.
“I was generally expecting people would view me differently. I thought, ‘oh, okay, I’ll probably try not to mention it…when I’m here now, people, I don’t think they care at all.” Urban students mirrored these attitudes. None of the students I spoke to projected negative attitudes towards people from Australia’s regions, although it should be noted that my sample size was small.
Notably, the only student who flagged any sort of negative attitude towards people from their area was Gabrielle, from Western Sydney. “No one has said things to my face, but I’ve heard of people saying [negative things] about Mt Druitt. I’ve heard people on the internet say ‘I don’t know anything past Parramatta, Parramatta is the furthest west I would go.’”
Apparently, in terms of student experiences, the gulf between the inner city and the western suburbs is wider than anything indicated by urban perceptions of rural Australia. A Nationals PR hack might suggest that this indicates Western Sydney is at the very least in the consciousness of urban Australians. However, every student I interviewed — both urban and rural — noted warm sentiments from urban students towards the Bush that are not shared by Western Sydney. Perhaps the enduring weight of Bush-centred national mythology means urban students feel a connection to rural Australia that they don’t share with the marginalised suburbs of their own city.
Yet the Nationals continue to bang on about a rural-urban divide in terms of city siders who don’t understand the real conditions in the Country, look down on the people of the Bush, and selfishly hoard the economic prosperity of the nation — economic prosperity produced in the bush.
This supposed economic divide is one area where at first glance the complaints of Nationals politicians seem to align with reality. Two decades ago, submissions to a Senate Standing Committee on poverty noted a “large and growing gap between the incomes of those living in the capital cities and those living in the rest of the country. The incomes of metropolitan residents increased at about double the rate of those living in other major urban centres and regional and rural towns in the five years to 1996.”
One student, Kailee, did note that she noticed wealth in Sydney far more than she did in her home of Tumut. “Almost everyone I’ve met in Sydney is rich,” Kailee said, “And they all do stuff like skiing and go to private schools.”
However, a 2017 report by the Grattan Institute poured cold water on the notion of a pronounced divide in wealth between rural and metropolitan communities. According to the report, “the popular idea that the economic divide between Australia’s cities and regions is getting bigger is a misconception. Beneath the oft-told ‘tale of two Australias’ is a more nuanced story.”
“Income growth in the regions has kept pace with income growth in the cities over the past decade. The lowest income growth was typically in suburban areas of major cities. While unemployment varies between regions, it is not noticeably worse in the regions overall.”
The report did note growing dissatisfaction among regional and rural constituencies at the political status quo. However, the Grattan Institute disputed the idea that “the regions are getting a raw deal compared to the cities.”
Bella MacMunn, a former USyd student from Merryjig, in the Victorian High Country, spoke to the socioeconomic divide in Mansfield, her closest regional hub. Bella, who studied in Sydney for six months, said of Mansfield that “socioeconomically there is a spread, but there is a spread everywhere. Urban or rural, wherever you are there is a spread in wealth.”
“There’s the people who send their kids to Geelong Grammar School campus here, and there’s lots of people who grow up in Mansfield and then move to those schools. There are quite a lot of rich families. You know them, I can list them.”
Marc noted that the economic challenges faced by Sydneysiders were similar to those faced in Batemans Bay. “The city is crowded as well. [There are problems] with housing, cost of living. Even in Batemans Bay the rent is skyrocketing as well, it’s not different here in Sydney. Woollies and Coles are really expensive [everywhere]. When you decide to eat out, the prices here and in regional areas are pretty much the same.”
Looking at wealth inequality, unemployment, and income growth perhaps isn’t the right approach to locating the rural-urban divide. There was one other area that rural students consistently identified as a major gulf between the Bush and the metropole: access to infrastructure and resources.
Marc noted that “the biggest gap would be the quality of and access to resources and education. Everyone from regional backgrounds are always clamouring for more resources, like more hospitals to be built, so people don’t have to drive an hour for an emergency room.”
Media and Communications student Hanna Kwan highlighted a lack of educational opportunities in her hometown of Armidale regarding extracurricular activities. “When I first came to USyd I didn’t realise how big debating was because that was just not a thing at my school. I guess those things that are really normal in Sydney were not normal in Armidale. There’s just much more opportunity to do stuff.”
This is reflected in the low proportion of students from regional backgrounds at universities like USyd, which lists only around 2000 students on regional equity scholarships — the best measure I could find for this figure. By counting the numbers reported by Honi in 2021, I reached a figure somewhere between 1000 and 2000 students from regional backgrounds in NSW, with only 324 students hailing from interstate — of which many presumably grew up in major cities. There is no reason to suggest these numbers have since grown.
This gap emerges from well documented problems affecting regional and rural students from an early age. In August 2023, The Guardian reported that a NSW Education Department Audit found that the Department was “unlikely” to close a persistent and growing rural-urban education gap. According to the same article, the 2021 Education Census found that around 50% of regional students in NSW “were not on track to meet all five early development domains.” There has been no shortage of reports, audits, and investigations commissioned by the government to address this gap.
According to Philip Roberts, writing for the Guardian’s Rural Network, noted the 1973 Karmel Report, the 1988 Commonwealth Schools Commission Report, the 2000 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Inquiry, the 2018 Federal Independent Review, and the two Gonski Reviews. This demonstrates the stark gap between knowledge about the issue and the steps taken to address it.
Hanna also spoke about a rural-urban healthcare divide. “Healthcare is something that there’s a divide between regional and urban areas. Obviously, there are not a lot of specialists in Armidale, so you have to come to Sydney. That would be an excursion on its own. If you want to get tested for Anxiety or ADHD you have to book it in and then come all the way to Sydney and make that a week-long kind of thing. In Sydney healthcare is there, but in Armidale it’s not tangible sometimes.”
Bella explained that interrelated problems with healthcare services and infrastructure made it difficult for some rural Australians. “There’s lots of things we need to outsource,” said Bella, “we don’t have an orthodontist in town. If you can’t afford to run your car out to Benalla, there’s not a bus, there’s no public transport. It’s that kind of thing that often gets forgotten, that’s the kind of thing people complain about.”
Gaps in regional healthcare and transport infrastructure are similarly well-documented. Deakin University academics noted that “urban areas in Australia already have almost three times as many hospital specialists per capita as outer regional areas and many times more critical care specialists.” Regional hospitals often resort to transporting “emergency, anaesthetic and intensive care doctors” when needed. The academics noted that this represented a considerable problem during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic when many of these specialists were restricted by necessary quarantine measures.
So here is our rural-urban divide. Rural and regional communities struggle to access resources readily available in the major cities. A proportion of this problem is attributable to simple geography: it’s hard to provision small rural communities, often at great distance, with facilities that cater to a much smaller population per unit than facilities in urban areas. However, this doesn’t explain a per capita deficit in specialists in regional areas.
The National Party held the keys to power — the Liberal Party, without the National Coalition, would never have been able to form government — for almost a decade before 2022. They are the only major single-constituency party in Parliament, representing exclusively regional and rural interests, and consistently trade on the perceived attitude gap between the Bush and the metropole. Yet essential services — in the direct purview of the government, the only organisation truly equipped to fix them — in the Bush continue to suffer from neglect and underfunding.
Disaster response epitomises the curious hypocrisy of the National Party and their Liberal bedfellows. The 2019-2020 Black Summer bushfires were noted as a flashpoint for rural communities by Marc. “People in my area usually think they are forgotten by the government, especially during the 2020 [bushfires],” Marc said, “do you remember when Scott Morrison got the heat in Cobargo, an hour drive from where I live? People were shitting on the government for their inadequate response to the fires. ‘Oh so its just in the middle of nowhere, we don’t really give a fuck’ — That’s just my take on [the government’s attitude].”
Yet Scott Morrison represented a government in coalition with the only successful single-constituency party in Australia — the party for the Bush, aka. the Nationals. Despite their constant bleating about city slickers not caring about the Country, the Liberal-National Coalition was missing in action when the communities they spoke for needed support most.
This is illustrative of the National Party in general. Rural Australians — the constituency of the political unit formerly called the Country Party — are consistently let down by a group that allegedly represents them. The rural-urban divide in infrastructure and resources lies directly in the hands of the government; yet a decade of Coalition control, and over a century of the National Party’s representation of rural electorates, nothing seems to have improved.
Not all rural electorates are underfunded. The National Party forces the Liberals to make concessions on Bush funding, and relies on perceptions of their effectiveness in this regard to win re-election in their rural constituency. The “Sports Rorts” scandal, for which National Party MP Bridget McKenzie took responsibility, saw some Bush seats receive inappropriate funding for unneeded sports facilities. Some rural electorates, like the National Party heartland of Maranoa, in South-western Queensland, received considerably more funding per capita than city electorates under specifically National Party pork-barrelling schemes. However, this funding doesn’t address wider systemic issues like broad educational disadvantage in the public school system, or a lack of specialist doctors in the country. Addressing these issues is apparently much harder — and perhaps less visible — than flying into a town, shaking some hands, flashing around a big cheque for a new bike path, and then flying back to Canberra again.
Australians, both urban and rural, clearly care about the future of the Bush. Every student I spoke to expressed hope for a brighter future for regional Australia but were pessimistic that would become the reality.. Overwhelmingly, students suggested that more funding needed to be allocated to regional areas.
A good place to start would be the demise of the National Party. The hypocrisy of this Australian institution, in manipulating a complicated rural-urban divide for electoral gain without actually addressing the real problems in funding inequality on a systemic level, is glaring.
In this area, there is hope. The 2017 Grattan Report noted that rural and regional Australians are increasingly abandoning the major parties — particularly the National Party — in favour of minor parties and independents. Labor hasn’t performed well in the regions — with some notable exceptions — for decades, and so isn’t incentivised to spend money on rural electorates. The Liberal Party has a well-known deal with the Nationals to avoid contesting rural seats, and the Nationals clearly don’t represent the best option for regional Australia.Unfortunately, the alternatives don’t exactly represent a shining light of hope for the regions. The Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party is the only main opponent to the Nationals in NSW, and represents a problematically conservative program, even without mentioning their attitude to gun reform. The party is also wracked with internal turbulence, and all three NSW MPs now sit as Independents. And little needs to be said of the erratic Bob Katter, the main opponent of the Nationals in outback Queensland, and his often bizarre and conservative policy platforms (not to mention his problematic history in the Queensland Country Party).
It’s clear that people from all over Australia care profoundly about the Bush. To secure the future of regional and rural Australia, for those living there and ultimately for all Australians, we need an alternative to the National Party that will confront the challenges that face the Bush, with fully funded public healthcare, public education, and public services. Only then will Australia’s vast interior have a bright future.
