Demographic Change,Differential Ageing,and Public Policy in Rural and Regional Australia: A Three‐State Case Study

This paper takes a differential demographic change in six rural settlement categories within rural and regional Australia as the starting point for the measurement of differential ageing using a Relative Ageing Index which compares ageing in sub‐populations with the national norm. The spatial units employed are 412 rural communities, approximated by social catchments each consisting of a country town and its surrounding dispersed population. The study covers the period from 1981 to 2006 and includes the rural areas of New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia, excluding major cities, peri‐urban areas, and the remote rangelands. It examines demographic change and differential ageing in a selection of the rural settlement categories recommended for further analysis in the report of the ‘Demographic Change and Liveability Panel’, one of three advisory panels established in 2010 by the then Commonwealth Government seeking to develop a sustainable population strategy for Australia. Ageing profiles are produced for the whole study area, for the individual rural settlement categories, and for the urban and rural components within each category separately. Results show that differential ageing is least advanced in the ‘regional cities’, most advanced in the ‘sea change’, but of most concern in the agriculture‐based rural settlement categories where it exacerbates the effects of overall population decline. In all categories, ageing in the dispersed rural population element exceeded that of the urban component. Results emphasise the vital role of the ‘regional cities’ category in future public policy development supported by ameliorative and collaborative measures for their surrounding agriculture‐based communities.     

The UN Arms Trade Treaty: arms export controls,the human security agenda and the lessons of history

The UN conference to negotiate an Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) concluded on 27 July 2012 without reaching consensus on the text of a draft treaty and saw both the US and Russia calling for more time to negotiate. The ATT process marks the latest in a series of attempts to insert human security concerns into arms export controls. The setback in July raises questions about the current level of international support for the human security agenda, as well as the relative power of different actors to shape global governance structures. This article locates the ATT negotiations in the broader history of multilateral efforts to regulate the international arms trade, from the 1890 Brussels Act to post‐Cold War initiatives. The historical record shows that such efforts are more likely to succeed if they are negotiated or imposed by major arms exporters. The introduction of human security concerns, as well as the merging of export control and arms control agendas, went some way towards reversing this trend. In particular, it created a broad international coalition of supportive states and NGOs from the global North and South. Yet disagreements over the purpose of an ATT remained. The draft ATT included human security provisions, but China, Russia, the US and a number of emerging powers ensured that state security considerations remained paramount in decision‐making on arms exports. The US was the first major actor to announce its unwillingness to sign the draft ATT in July 2012 and two alternative interpretations of US actions are considered. The article concludes by considering the options available to supporters of the ATT process following the 2012 conference and examines the notion that the ATT campaign has become an initiative ‘out of its time’, one that might have had success in the 1990s but not in current circumstances.     

Investigating Private Motorised Travel and Vehicle Fleet Efficiency: Using New Data and Methods to Reveal Socio‐Spatial Patterns in Brisbane,Australia

Australian cities have seen continued long‐term growth in private motor vehicle travel that has imposed increasing vehicle energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. This paper investigates the spatial patterns of vehicle energy consumption on urban areas through an analysis of vehicle travel and of vehicle fleet efficiency in Brisbane, Australia. This is achieved by combining motor vehicle registration records and Australian government's ‘Green Vehicle Guide’ of vehicle fuel efficiency database. The results of a spatial analysis of the private vehicle trip distances derived from journey to work data and fuel energy consumption associated with the private‐owned vehicles decomposed to local areas show that private vehicle energy use tends to increase with increasing distance from the city centre (e.g. central business district). This analysis demonstrates that differences in vehicle trip distances and lower proportions of high‐efficiency vehicles in the outer suburbs aggravate vehicle energy consumption in those locations. The paper further compares vehicle energy use results for Brisbane against spatial patterns of suburban socio‐economic disadvantage. The paper demonstrates that access to vehicle fleet technology may compound other forms of socio‐economic disadvantage and vulnerability.     

Rural Youth Migration Trends in Australia: an Overview of Recent Trends and Two Inland Case Studies

Much of what has been written on the topic of Australian rural youth migration trends and processes has often proceeded from data‐free, or data‐poor grounds. In this context, this paper analyses recent trends in youth (15 to 24 years of age) migration for a temporally‐consistent set of Statistical Divisions (SDs) in inland rural Australia, and for local government areas within the Northern Tablelands and Slopes and Ranges of northern New South Wales and the Western Australian Central Wheatbelt. The paper finds that rates of youth loss from rural regions have increased over the past twenty years. Yet the patterns, processes, causes and impacts of rural youth migration are distributed in a spatially‐uneven fashion. Some remote areas are receiving net migration gains while booming ‘sea change’ coastal regions have experienced heavy losses. While the ‘flight to the bright city lights’ syndrome is evident, relatively high proportions of young people in the Northern SD of NSW move within their immediate region. Nevertheless, some common understandings concerning youth mobility were also confirmed. Gender differentials in migration propensity between women and men are evident even at quite local scales. Young people are also more likely to search out capital cities than the rest of the population. Most inland areas still continue to experience heavy losses of local youth. A more precise understanding of rural youth migration trends is an important stepping stone in the establishment of a reinvigorated research effort into young rural people's perspectives of their changing life chances in their home communities.     

Hospital restructuring in smaller urban Ontario settings: unwritten rules and uncertain relations

Important changes are underway in the management and provision of welfare service activities in advanced capitalist societies as governments scale back their responsibilities and commitments to social security and health care. In order to understand the processes by which the reform imperatives of the central state are implemented at the local level, it is necessary to account for particular organizational and place-based contingencies which influence decision making and strategic response. This paper presents a framework for understanding the context of executive decision making in the human services sector and uses the framework to illustrate issues of locally designed hospital restructuring in smaller urban centres in the province of Ontario, Canada. Specific experiences of the Chief Executive Officers of two non-metropolitan hospital settings are examined to explore the unwritten rules of hospital conduct and the relations of uncertainty that characterize efforts to restructure hospital services through formal arrangements with other independently governed hospitals and health care delivery organizations.     

Human security and development in Africa

There has been a recent rise in optimism about Africa's prospects: increased economic growth; renewed regional and national political commitments to good governance; and fewer conflicts. Yet, given current trends and with less than eight years until 2015, Africa is likely to fail to meet every single one of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Home to almost one‐third of the world's poor, Africa's challenges remain as daunting as ever. Despite highly publicized increased growth in some economies, the combined economies of Africa have, on average, actually shrunk and are far from meeting the required 7 per cent growth needed to tackle extreme poverty. A similar picture emerges from the analysis of Africa's performance on the other MDGs. In a world where security and development are inextricably connected in complex and multifaceted ways, Africans are, as a result, among the most insecure. By reviewing a select number of political, security and socio‐economic indicators for the continent, this analysis evaluates the reasons underlying Africa's continuing predicament. It identifies four critical issues: ensuring peace and security; fostering good governance; fighting HIV/ AIDS; and managing the debt crisis. In assessing these developmental security challenges, the article recalls that the MDGs are more than time bound, quantified targets for poverty alleviation–they also represent a commitment by all members of the international community, underwritten by principles of co‐responsibility and partnership, to an enlarged notion of development based on the recognition that human development is key to sustaining social and economic progress. In recent years, and often following failures, especially in Africa, to protect civilian populations from the violence and predation of civil wars, a series of high‐level commissions and expert groups have conducted strategic reviews of the UN system and its function in global politics. The debate has also developed at the theoretical level involving both a recon‐ceptualization of security, from state centred norms to what is referred to as the globalization of security around the human security norm. There has also been a reconceptualization of peacekeeping, where the peacekeeping force has enough robustness to use force not only to protect populations under the emergent responsibility to protect norm, but also enough conflict resolution capacity to facilitate operations across the conflict–development–peacebuilding continuum. This article opens up a discussion of how these ideas might be relevant to security regime building and conflict resolution in African contexts, and suggests how initiatives in Africa might begin to make a contribution to the theory and practice of cosmopolitan peacekeeping.