RURAL AND REGIONAL AREAS
Most people in NSW live in only a handful of big cities, and this needs to change. Such change requires major investment to make regional NSW more enticing to move to.
Many regional towns once had much larger populations than they have today. They can cope with more people living in them. And many of them would like to have more people coming their way.
But we need to upgrade regional infrastructure if we are to entice more people to go bush. It involves more than just ensuring that towns have decent transport, schools, housing, and health services.
Certainly when it comes to health, regional towns struggle to attract doctors and depend on locums caring for patients in hospitals. Governmental action is necessary to make it more enticing for doctors and other medical professionals to go bush - whether through making regional medical placements last for several years or through other means.
However, a major issue surrounds rural highways and roads.
Many regional centres lie on undivided highways. A simple accident on any such highway can potentially stop all traffic between towns, unless there are suitable alternative routes available. Other regional roads, like the Waterfall Way from Bellingen to Dorrigo, are prone to closure from landslips.
I have also seen the twists and turns which make travel awkward, especially for buses and other heavy vehicles, on highways like the Gwydir Highway from Grafton to Glen Innes and the Illawarra Highway from Wollongong to Moss Vale.
We must upgrade such highways, to ensure minimal traffic disruption when accidents happen and speed up travel between towns. But if locals or regular users actually like the character of existing highways, regardless of how prone the highways are to closure from accidents or landslips, they should be encouraged to suggest alternative routes to ensure highway resilience.
Upgrading these highways can be simpler and cheaper than building entirely new roads. As long as there are two lanes going in either direction, with a solid concrete barrier or a decent median strip dividing them, highways then become much better for drivers - even in a narrow highway corridor full of twists and turns.
You can see a very good example of good upgrading in a narrow corridor along much of the Great Western Highway in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. Formerly an undivided two-lane road, this highway has been adequately widened. If other rural highways looked like that, drivers in regional areas would find life easier and people would be enticed to move inland.
While taking buses and trains all over NSW over the years, I have seen many newish housing estates emerging around many towns and regional centres. While it is good to see people moving to inland regions, their roads really need upgrading. Therefore, rural road upgrades really make sense.
Meanwhile, if many regional centres have sustainable growth in population, an opportunity exists for better train services.
But many existing railways need upgrades. Straightening many twists and turns in the railways can speed up regional train travel, which then becomes more appealing. I have taken trains along most existing railways in regional NSW, and I know that slowness from twists and turns puts people off.
Many towns lie along disused railways, but there are some pushes on to bring back trains. I know about campaigns to bring trains back to a railway beyond Armidale, in northern NSW, as well to revive disused railways to places like Mudgee and Cessnock. I sincerely hope that these railways come back to life.
Over the years, people have argued that Australia needs to introduce high-speed trains. But we honestly lack the population spread to make high-speed trains viable, and building railways to take only high-speed trains is incredibly expensive. Moreover, putting them in fast-growing coastal regions can cause excessive population growth and put much farmland at risk. However, spending small fortunes to simply straighten existing railways, as well as getting rid of many archaic and dangerous level crossings on them, will make train travel faster and safer.
In the meantime, I see one particular project, the abandoned Maldon-Dombarton freight railway, as needing to be finished. Started in in the 1980s, this freight railway to the south of Sydney was stopped for apparently no good reason. Now freight trains clog southern Sydney's railways as a result. We really need to complete the Maldon-Dombarton railway, in order to let freight trains bypass southern Sydney. After all, do all trains carrying freight or minerals or rural produce really need to go only to Sydney?
Speaking of rural produce, we need to preserve our best farmland, and this includes managing our water resources and the like. A surge in mining coal and extracting gas has caused the loss of quality farmland and wilderness. Those fossil fuels damage surrounding land, making it unsuitable to ever grow and produce food again. Protecting farmland will allow us to feed ourselves and the world.
Of course, mining is the lifeblood of many regional centres. City dwellers in particular frown on extracting minerals like coal, for environmental reasons, but an end to mining will economically destroy many towns, with no guarantee of "green" jobs emerging for retrenched workers. And mining involves a lot more than simply digging up and trucking out, with lots of other different jobs also at risk if mines close. We therefore need sensible planning for regions currently reliant on mining coal for their economic security.
We also need a proper discussion about water management.
Governments long ago were arguably issuing more water licences to farmers than river systems could cope with. But simply buying back water licences has done much damage in communities in southern NSW. At the same time, complaints have been raised about irrigators in northern NSW capturing and storing huge amounts of water during floods. Without water, farms and communities cannot function. Issues like these should be examined in discussing how NSW best manages its water resources.
These are just some ways to make rural and regional NSW more appealing to move to. The correct infrastructure needs to be in place to enable sustainable growth in regions.