Media Releases
'End of the Rural?'
Released: October 1, 2003
Rural Australians have "grudgingly" come to accept free market policies, a public forum will be told during a national conference at the University of New England next month.
The forum, "The End of the Rural?", will include speakers Professor Geoffrey Lawrence, Director of the Rural Social and Economic Research Centre at the University of Queensland, and Rick Farley, former Executive Director of the National Farmers' Federation.
The forum, free and open to all, will be in Armidale Town Hall on Thursday, December 4 at 8 pm, and is part of a three-day conference at UNE, organised by The Australian Sociological Association.
Professor Lawrence is also expected to talk at the conference about rural Australians' precarious future. "Present policy settings seem to be accelerating socioeconomic decline in rural regions, but the overall outcome appears to be a grudging acceptance by rural people of free market policies," he said.
Mr Farley will be looking at how the floating dollar has affected rural communities and will pay special attention to Indigenous communities that, he said, "will become a significantly larger proportion of rural and remote communities over the next 24 years". Mr Farley is Chairman of the NSW Resources and Conservation Assessment Council and a member of the Australian Landcare Council.
The forum will encourage questions and debate from the floor. It will be chaired by UNE¹s Associate Professor Tony Sorensen and include Jan FitzGerald, President of Australian Women in Agriculture. It will conclude at 10 pm.
One of the conference organisers, UNE Senior Lecturer Dr Peter Corrigan, said the public forum was aimed at sparking thought among regional Australians about their future. "That is why we posed the question, 'The End of the Rural?'," Dr Corrigan said. "We would like to hear what our community thinks is their future."
The conference itself, on December 4, 5 and 6 will be made up of sessions in which sociologists from across Australia will present papers on a range of topics. Areas to be examined include health, family life, the environment, and ethnicity. Among the almost 200 papers to be presented are Dr Gail Hawkes's talk on "The Sexual Landscape of the New Millennium", Eduardo de la Fuente's presentation on "Teaching Introductory Sociology through Popular Culture", and a paper presented by Kath Albury titled "Understanding Pornography in Australia".
Media contact: Dr Peter Corrigan, School of Social Science, UNE, Armidale
(02) 6773 2179
or
Lydia Clifford, Public Relations Manager, UNE, Armidale
(02) 6773 2779.