Diversification for sustainable development in rural and regional Australia : how local community leaders conceptualise the impacts and opportunities from agriculture, tourism and mining

Although the multiple economic, environmental and social challenges threatening the viability of rural and regional communities in Australia are well-known, little research has explored how community leaders conceptualise the impact and opportunities associated with economic diversification from agriculture into alternative industries, such as tourism and mining. This qualitative research, utilising the Darling Downs in Queensland as a case study, documents how 28 local community leaders have experienced this economic diversification process. The findings reveal that local community leaders have a deep understanding about the opportunities and challenges presented by diversification, articulating a clear vision about how to achieve the best possible future for their region. Despite excitement about growth, there were concerns about preserving heritage, the increased pressure on local infrastructure and an ageing population. By documenting local leader’s insights, these findings may help inform planning for rural and regional communities and facilitate management of the exciting yet challenging process of growth and diversification

Importance of a resilient air services network to Australian remote, rural, and regional communities

Rural, regional, and remote settlements in Australia require resilient infrastructure to remain sustainable in a context characterized by frequent large-scale natural disasters, long distances between urban centers, and the pressures of economic change. A critical aspect of this infrastructure is the air services network, a system of airports, aircraft operators, and related industries that enables the high-speed movement of people, goods, and services to remote locations. A process of deregulation during the 1970s and 1980s resulted in many of these airports passing into local government and private ownership, and the rationalization of the industry saw the closure of a number of airlines and airports. This paper examines the impacts of deregulation on the resilience of air services and the contribution that they make to regional and rural communities. In particular, the robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness, and rapidity of the system are examined. The conclusion is that while the air services network has remained resilient in a situation of considerable change, the pressures of commercialization and the tendency to manage aspects of the system in isolation have contributed to a potential decrease in overall resilience.

Development and interrater reliability testing of a telephone interview training programme for Australian nurse interviewers

Summary Background The final phase of a three phase study analysing the implementation and impact of the nurse practitioner role in Australia (the Australian Nurse Practitioner Project or AUSPRAC) was undertaken in 2009, requiring nurse telephone interviewers to gather information about health outcomes directly from patients and their treating nurse practitioners. A team of several registered nurses was recruited and trained as telephone interviewers. The aim of this paper is to report on development and evaluation of the training process for telephone interviewers. Methods The training process involved planning the content and methods to be used in the training session; delivering the session; testing skills and understanding of interviewers post-training; collecting and analysing data to determine the degree to which the training process was successful in meeting objectives and post-training follow-up. All aspects of the training process were informed by established educational principles. Results Interrater reliability between interviewers was high for well-validated sections of the survey instrument resulting in 100% agreement between interviewers. Other sections with unvalidated questions showed lower agreement (between 75% and 90%). Overall the agreement between interviewers was 92%. Each interviewer was also measured against a specifically developed master script or gold standard and for this each interviewer achieved a percentage of correct answers of 94.7% or better. This equated to a Kappa value of 0.92 or better. Conclusion The telephone interviewer training process was very effective and achieved high interrater reliability. We argue that the high reliability was due to the use of well validated instruments and the carefully planned programme based on established educational principles. There is limited published literature on how to successfully operationalise educational principles and tailor them for specific research studies; this report addresses this knowledge gap.

Nambour : the model rural school

This paper examines the Rural Schools of Queensland. Starting with Nambour in 1917, the scheme incorporated thirty schools, and operated for over forty years. The rhetoric of the day was that boys and girls from the senior classes of primary school would be provided with elementary instruction of a practical character. In reality, the subjects taught were specifically tailored to provide farm skills to children in rural centres engaged in farming, dairying or fruit growing. Linked to each Rural School was a number of smaller surrounding schools, students from which travelled to the Rural School for special agricultural or domestic instruction. Through this action, the Queensland Department of Public Instruction left no doubt it intended to provide educational support for agrarian change and development within the state; in effect, they had set in motion the creation of a Queensland yeoman class. The Department’s intention was to arrest or reverse the trend toward urbanisation — whilst increasing agricultural productivity — through the making of a farmer born of the land and accepting of the new scientific advances in agriculture.

Speaker attribution of multiple telephone conversations using a complete-linkage clustering approach

In this paper we propose and evaluate a speaker attribution system using a complete-linkage clustering method. Speaker attribution refers to the annotation of a collection of spoken audio based on speaker identities. This can be achieved using diarization and speaker linking. The main challenge associated with attribution is achieving computational efficiency when dealing with large audio archives. Traditional agglomerative clustering methods with model merging and retraining are not feasible for this purpose. This has motivated the use of linkage clustering methods without retraining. We first propose a diarization system using complete-linkage clustering and show that it outperforms traditional agglomerative and single-linkage clustering based diarization systems with a relative improvement of 40% and 68%, respectively. We then propose a complete-linkage speaker linking system to achieve attribution and demonstrate a 26% relative improvement in attribution error rate (AER) over the single-linkage speaker linking approach.

Tsunami alert : the mobile phone difference

Substantial growth has occurred in the telecommunication sector in Papua New Guinea (PNG) since 2007. Mobile telephony has spread to rural and remote localities, following decades of inadequate telephone services. This paper examines the introduction of mobile telephones into a rural village in PNG, and focuses on information access during emergency situations. It considers three tsunami alerts: one immediately prior to the introduction of mobile phone services in the area, and two which occurred after mobile phone reception became available. The research shows that for people with limited access to information, responses to threats such as tsunamis can be inappropriate and driven by fear and panic. By contrast, when there is reliable, timely information available, measured responses can be adopted. This research demonstrates how the use of newly-introduced communication technologies for handling emergencies may work in practice, benefitting people in poorer, rural communities.

Mobius markets : professional families in rural educational markets

Australia has many isolated communities that require human services provided by qualified professionals. Maintaining a viable and equitable spread of such educational capital across space as a public good is a challenge. Reports investigating this problem repeatedly point to ‘family issues’ such as limited options for children’s education, and limited access to ongoing professional development, as deterrents for rural/remote employment despite lucrative incentive schemes. This paper draws on semi-structured interviews with 30 parents of school-aged children, who work as doctors, nurses, teachers and police in six rural/remote towns in Queensland. We asked them how their family units reconcile career opportunities with educational strategy for family members over time and space. This paper considers these issues as a sociology of education problem in a context of educational marketisation and spiralling credentialism. This paper offers the concept of ‘mobius markets’ to capture the cyclical and intergenerational process underway in middle class professional families of investing in educational capitals, maintaining or maximising their value and profiting from them. A mobius strip is the topological anomaly of a single loop with one twist in it, whereby the loop becomes one continuous surface, not the double-sided shape it appears to be. This project is interested in how the middle class professional family is similarly on a constant circuit, investing in educational capitals, upgrading their currency/value, and profiting from them. This elaborated sense of educational markets extends the more usual sociological focus on school choice.