(Image: Mitchell Squire/Private Media)

The Nationals are onto a good scam. They eternally invoke the welfare of regional Australia, which they claim comes second to that of metropolitan Australia, for their policy obstructionism and support for corruption, rorting and pork-barrelling. But they never deliver actual outcomes for regional communities, which on many indicators have gone backwards despite them being in office for the past eight years, and for 19 of the last quarter-century.

Let’s have a look at a range of indicators on the welfare of regional communities over time and see how well served they’ve been by the Nationals. We can draw on a large dataset compiled by the private Torrens University that has time series data broken down by metropolitan, inner and outer regional and remote areas.

Education Between 2015 and 2019 participation in vocational education rose in major cities but fell in inner and outer regional areas, and in remote areas, among both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Participation in higher education rose in cities between 2011 and 2019, but fell in inner and outer regional areas, though it rose slightly in remote areas.

Families and community Although the proportion of single-parent families with children under 15 rose marginally in cities, it rose significantly in inner and outer regional and remote areas. Volunteering rose in cities but fell in regional and remote areas. The proportion of low birthweight babies fell in cities but rose in regional areas — though it fell significantly in very remote areas.

Employment The level of long-term unemployment nearly doubled between 2006 and 2017 in inner and outer regional communities. The level of low-income, welfare-dependent families with kids fell in the cities but rose in regional and remote areas. Between 2006 and 2016, the employment participation rate in regional areas fell while in metropolitan Australia it rose — meaning one of the few important achievements of the Coalition government failed to reach regional communities. The main driver of rising participation, female workforce participation, rose in regional areas during that time — but only marginally, while it increased significantly in cities.

Health The level of people with behavioural or mental health problems increased much more in inner regional areas than in cities between 2014 and 2018. In those years the proportion of people with psychological distress or who were overweight rose in the regions and declined in cities. The level of premature death between the late 1990s and the middle of the 2010s fell by more than 20% in cities but by less than 15% in regions; deaths from diabetes rose in inner regional areas, and deaths from suicide, which fell noticeably in urban areas, rose in regional communities. Avoidable deaths from cancer and diabetes or external causes rose in regions and fell in cities.

For the party that claims to represent the regions and which has been in power for the great bulk of the years since the mid-1990s, this is surely a litany of failure, despite the billions of dollars its ministers have rorted and misdirected across those years. The falls in outcomes just in the years since 2014 are particularly worrying.

Even when regional Australia has done well, it has been in spite of the Nationals, not because of them. As Crikey has repeatedly shown, agriculture is Australia’s great productivity, production and export success story of the past 20 years. Even during severe drought, Australian farmers earn more in real terms than they did during the ’90s. But the Nationals have consistently opposed the reforms that enabled this success.

They’ve doggedly opposed water trading, which has allowed a crucial resource to be directed to where it can create the most value. They have persistently supported drought relief for inefficient farmers, drawing criticism not just from the likes of the Productivity Commission but from farming groups for propping up producers who shouldn’t be kept going.

Barnaby Joyce’s agriculture white paper in 2015 — which was predicated on maintaining a low-productivity family farming industry — supported another long-running Nationals policy: concessional loans for farmers, which merely encourage farmers to take on unsustainable levels of debt and make uncommercial decisions.

And in any event, the Nationals have long since abandoned farmers as their core constituency, preferring instead to take huge donations from fossil-fuel companies and support extractive industries over agriculture.

Regional communities are only the pretext for the Nationals to run their scam. If they ever actually delivered for those communities, they’d lose their primary tool for leveraging taxpayer dollars out of their Liberal colleagues. They have a vested interest in, even an addiction to, keeping their communities poorer, worse educated and in poorer health.

Regional communities can only prosper in spite of the Nationals, not because of them.