This is a summary of the VCOSS Rural and Regional State Budget Submission 2012-13. You can use the links above to read the whole document as well as the full State Budget Submission 2012-13.

• Introduction
• Supporting children and families
• Early education and lifelong learning


• Building a healthier community
• Getting people where they need to go


• Preparing for and recovering from emergencies
• Key recommendations for rural and regional Victoria

Stronger People
Stronger State

Focus on rural and regional Victoria

The State Government has earmarked $1 billion in targeted investment in infrastructure and jobs in rural and regional Victoria over the next eight years through its Regional Growth Fund, to create more jobs and better career opportunities.

For that investment to be effective, it must first build the strengths of rural and regional Victorians, to make sure that they have the skills and training for those jobs and career paths, can get to school, training and work, afford a roof over their heads and food on the table, and are well enough to participate in the workforce and the wider community.

Currently rural and regional Victorians are more likely to have poorer health, leave school earlier, earn less and find it harder to manage their everyday costs than their Melbourne counterparts. In addition, many have recently endured some of the worst natural disasters that we have seen in generations: bushfires, long-term drought, and flooding.

While tight-knit regional communities often demonstrate remarkable resilience, many experience tough times and concentrations of disadvantage – in fact, some of the most disadvantaged areas of the state are in rural and regional Victoria.

Across the board, rural and regional communities suffer persistent inequalities in access to basic services. As well, they face additional pressures. Cost of living issues are exacerbated by a forced reliance on cars, resulting from the costly combination of scarce services and poor public transport. Housing costs are increasing rapidly in fast growing regional cities, making the task of finding affordable housing within reach of jobs more difficult.

That makes community services all the more important, but effective service delivery often has higher costs and access for staff to training and development is more limited in rural and regional areas.

As it has in its emergency management planning, the State Government should adopt an ‘all hazards, all agencies’ approach to building rural and regional Victoria by recognising that:

• support for struggling children and families pays off later in happier, more productive lives,
• engaging children and young people in education from an early age and through critical stages will make them more likely to get and keep jobs,
• building a healthier community creates a stronger workforce and frees up massive amounts of funding from chronic care services,
• good public transport is essential for getting people to school, training and work, and
• strengthening people and communities before they face disasters and staying with them for the long-term after disasters will lead to real recovery.

Until that happens, many rural and regional Victorians simply will not be able to take up the job opportunities that the State Government is banking on to strengthen our regions.

That’s a waste of investment and a waste of opportunity.

With expectations that the State Government will deliver a tougher Budget in 2012-13, the State is at a crossroads. The full VCOSS State Budget Submission, available at http://www.vcoss.org.au/what-we-do/state-budget/stronger-people-stronger-state.htm, warns of the risks for Victoria’s growth and prosperity if the Government takes the wrong turn.

This dedicated Rural and Regional Budget Submission highlights the particular challenges facing rural and regional Victorians and their communities.

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Supporting children and families

No matter where they live, families struggle for all sorts of reasons. But struggling families in rural and regional Victoria are likely to experience greater disadvantage than their metropolitan peers and be less likely to get through tough times and issues – simply because they have far less access to support services and often none at all until issues escalate into major crises.

That has long been the case for rural and regional Victoria, but it has been exacerbated in recent years by dramatic population growth in regional cities (with Bendigo, Ballarat and Geelong accounting for 36 per cent of the population growth in regional Victoria), long-lasting impacts from drought, bushfires and flooding, and entrenched disadvantage in Aboriginal communities.

The result is pressured services in regional cities which have to close their waiting lists and deny families access to critical early intervention support, and often no services at all in smaller communities.

The lack of specialised services further highlights the need for better links between community services and early childhood services and schools which are often the only formal institutions that struggling families in rural and regional Victoria engage with.

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Early education and lifelong learning

The rates of young people in rural and regional Victoria who finish secondary school and go on to tertiary education, whether university or TAFE, continue to fall. In fact, the further a Victorian child is from a major city, the less likely they will be to complete year 12.

This poses a long-term risk to the potential for new industries and job creation in regional areas, and the capacity of rural and regional Australia to adapt to structural change. Yet a number of important programs that have been helping young people to stay engaged at school and in ongoing learning are under threat in this Budget – not least the Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning (VCAL).

So too are programs and services that support early childhood education and care, despite international research showing us that the best way to improve education outcomes later in life – when students are leaving high school for the workforce, university, or further training – is to invest from an early age. In rural and regional areas, kindergartens and occasional child care services are often critical to provide children with an early education experience and to provide some respite and flexibility for parents.

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Building a healthier community

Too many Victorians come into contact with health services too late, when a lack of access to prevention and early intervention services, information and decent living standards mean symptoms have escalated into complex, acute and chronic conditions, such as diabetes – a scourge of many rural and regional communities.

This is particularly so in rural and regional areas where the investment in health is even more skewed towards hospitals, with too little in preventative health, early intervention, and locally available services for mental and primary health.

As a result, Victorians in rural and regional areas have poorer health across a range of indicators, including lower life expectancy and much higher rates of avoidable deaths.

The lack of mental health care services in rural and regional Victoria is a big concern, and has been exacerbated by growing demand in the wake of recent disasters like the 2009 Victorian Bushfires and 2010-11 flooding. Not having access to responsive early intervention mental health services has great individual costs, including limiting people’s ability to work and study, as well as costs to the broader community.

Alcohol and other drug services also need to be focused on early intervention and to be available locally for them to work. Many people in rural and regional Victoria simply cannot access support when and where they need it because of a lack of services and growing waiting times.

The failure of our health system to respond properly to diversity in our community, particularly the lack of culturally appropriate services for Aboriginal Victorians, contributes to third world health outcomes for many in our communities.

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Getting people where
they need to go

Access to transport is a growing problem for rural and regional Victoria, and one that creates and exacerbates issues of isolation and missed opportunity – including work and education.

Tens of thousands of Victorian households have moved to the outer suburbs of Melbourne, fast-growing regional cities or small rural towns in the past few years (including 23,000 people into Bendigo, Ballarat and Geelong), only to find they cannot easily get around them or out of them unless they have and can drive a car.

This can be seen in the dramatic discrepancy between public transport spending in rural and regional Victoria compared to metropolitan Melbourne – $550 per person compared to $750 per person, according to Budget forward estimates. Incredibly there has been virtually no additional funding for local bus services in regional cities over the last three years.

Some long-suffering communities in rural Victoria are chronically underserved by transport alternatives to the car. Many of these towns have high concentrations of disadvantage or a very high proportion of seniors with limited mobility. Even where there are buses or trains from smaller towns, they often leave early in the morning or return late, so that many people – often those who are old or unwell – are forced to wait for hours after they have been to the doctor, or other appointment. Others are hampered by schedules that arrive too late for them to consider tertiary education or training opportunities.

New initiatives are needed in this Budget to open up access to public transport, link up existing services, and protect important programs and services that are currently under threat.

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Preparing for and
recovering from emergencies

One in six Victorians is likely to be affected by an emergency in their lifetime1 – and many will experience more than one. As a result, they are more likely to experience depression, anxiety disorders, complicated grief, substance abuse or other impacts. Many will recover quickly but, for some, recovery will take many months, if not years, particularly if their distress is compounded by the stress of homelessness, unemployment, financial difficulty, or other issues.

Children and young people are particularly vulnerable – not just to the disaster itself, but to the way their parents or carers also respond.

Both the social and economic impacts of emergency events on individuals and communities are long term. Often new needs arise long after the period of emergency has ended. However current emergency management arrangements tend to assume a return to ‘normal’ community capacity and economic activity in a relatively short timeframe. This undermines the social and economic recovery of Victorians and their communities by imposing inappropriate and unrealistic timeframes and expectations, leaving many individuals without the supports they need.

The Victorian Government has made welcome investments in the emergency management planning capacity of local government by funding emergency management coordinators in high fire risk areas. However there remains a significant, systemic and ongoing lack of alignment between responsibility and capacity for emergency management planning, response and recovery, especially for large scale events.

The emergency management green paper, Towards a more disaster resilient and safer Victoria, also identifies these issues, and this process has the potential to both provide greater clarity and identify areas for resourcing.2

Inefficient, and in many cases ineffective, reimbursement mechanisms further undermine the capacity of community sector organisations to effectively meet the needs of affected communities. These mechanisms currently penalise community sector organisations financially for their response and recovery effort.

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Key recommendations
for rural and regional Victoria

Read the VCOSS State Budget Submission 2012-2013 at
http://www.vcoss.org.au/what-we-do/state-budget/stronger-people-stronger-state.htm for full recommendations.