Regional Versus Remote Australia

Where is the Fair Go for remote businesses like us?

We trust that our regional readers of this newsletter will not be offended with the following comments. The reason being is that there are many — especially bureaucrats — who mainly live and work in major cities around this nation, and many corporate companies who now appear to have a bureaucratic philosophy, meaning there is not much to distinguish between Government and Corporate Australia these days.

As far as these ‘bureaucratic powers’ be, they mostly live — albeit almost exclusively — in or close to the major cities. So, there are no arguments with the fact that they and two-thirds of the Australian population are city ‘dwellers’ or close to being defined that way.  Therefore, the balance of our population — the other third — is defined as living in ‘Regional’ Australia. And how is regional Australia defined?

Well, the authority on this would be the Regional Australia Institute — and where are they based? In Canberra.

I guess this is fair enough, as they are amidst the ‘storage information capital of knowledge for this nation’ which is required for their research — and also surrounded by the power brokers who can be useful. So, their Canberra base can be argued to be a logically sensible place for their HQ, as opposed to be being based in Regional Australia in places such as Tamworth or Ballarat, Toowoomba or Whyalla, Katherine or Port Hedland or Launceston.

Now, The Regional Institute defines ‘regional’ this way:
“Regional Australia includes all of the towns and small cities and areas that lie beyond the major capital cities (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Canberra).” End of quote.

Tasmania doesn’t even get a look-in within the definition, nor is the Northern Territory worthy of a mention. So why is this so? Well, according to my logic, it must mean there has to be a third definition. If the far west and the Territory are not worthy of mention for the ‘Regional’ category, we have a void. And this void also applies to the ‘lost and invisible’ Australians that bureaucracies appear to know nothing about.

And who are these lost and invisible people that even The Regional Australia Institute appear not to recognise? Well, here is the news for the new classification and it is — REMOTE.

Remote Australia. How do you define remote? Well, the name ‘remote’ adequately sets the scene in a far more graphic way than the word Regional. Remote can be adequately described as being isolated, distant, off the beaten track, beyond the black stump, wilderness, and that’s just to name a few!

We need the nation’s leaders and pace-setters to recognise that the difference between Regional and Remote is the difference between chalk and cheese. Remote has to be carved in stone as being a new classification. The reason for requiring this change can be summed-up with one bottom line word: frustration. Frustration caused by the ignorance of those who should know better — insofar as there is a huge difference between those living in Dalby, Queensland, and those living in Longreach, Queensland, but both are classified as regional.

There is an almost total ignorance by government departments and corporates about remote regions. They have no understanding, and here I’ll use a recent example of a local resident’s experience. An important letter was sent from Canberra requesting additional information from them relating to health. The letter indicated that if this information was not received back within 14 days, the application would be cancelled. The letter arrived at the Yaraka Community Postal Agency a week after the deadline date. Why? Because we had had wonderful rains! Rivers were up, roads were closed. The mail could not get through.

The recipient of the letter, upon receiving it, made a frantic call to Canberra to explain the situation. Now I’m not having a go at the Canberra bureaucrat — more likely some poor lackey — who could not understand and did not believe that it was possible to go three weeks without a mail delivery. It took some convincing that this was true. However, rules are rules and the application was cancelled and the poor person has to go through the entire process again. This situation could be easily overcome by using Postcodes to identify Remote areas that immediately flag an automatic extension for responses requiring information: Regional responses, for example, 14 days — Remote, 30 days.
And now for the real bane of contention for me!

The Hon. Minister David Littleproud, the Deputy Leader of the National Party, is the Federal Member for our electorate. He makes a point of coming and staying with us at the hotel as often as his time allows. It was he, who, during one of his stays here, put the story out about our emus being banned from the hotel. And as you probably know, this emu story went viral not only around Australia, but world wide. The publicity for the Yaraka emus was huge — thank you again Minister Littleproud.

A little while ago, Minister Littleproud sent us details about a government grant that was directed at ‘Small Hotels’ in regional areas. It was aimed at reducing energy costs and reducing the carbon footprint — you know the lingo.

We had previously heard about grants, but had dismissed them as we felt that as our business was relatively sound, it should not apply to us. We as a small business were keeping our heads above water.

However, the coronavirus shutdown in 2020 for the first six months was damaging so we thought, why not try for this grant as it would be wonderful to use for upgrading our four accommodation rooms which get used frequently by travellers and tourists.

We read through the criteria carefully and were able to tick-off all the boxes, so we went to the website and went through the stage of registering the hotel and received back confirmation that we were registered and given our registration number.

We then had to assess as to whether we could accomplish what had to be done within the available grant money period.

The first thing we had to provide was an accurate estimation of the materials required for the project — from the number of screws required, the amount of insulation, the split system air-conditioning for the rooms, and so on. Living in a remote region does not allow us the luxury of ringing-up a few tradies and asking them to come and give quotes.

However, whilst we could do material estimates ourselves, which was quite time consuming, we had to get an electrician go to the trouble of driving to Yaraka to inspect the job — a round trip of 330-odd kilometres and entailing four hours of driving. It took him a while to arrive in Yaraka, as he couldn’t just drop jobs that he was currently working on.

Finally, after about ten days of concentrated effort in getting all the quotes for the materials in plus the electricians quote, we felt very confident that the costings we had were accurate and we were ready to go to the next stage of the grant application process.

So, to the next stage we went, ready to put in the application for the grant. We now knew our costings were accurate, we knew we ticked-off all the criteria, we felt highly confident that we would be successful.

We opened-up the existing form, started Stage Three of the process and typed in our registration number.

And that is when a notice flashed-up on the screen telling us that the Queensland allocation of grant money had been used-up and was no longer available.

I should have been suspicious up-front when reading the criteria for ‘small hotels’ in regional areas as they started referring to hotels with 100 accommodation units.
One hundred rooms? Small hotels?

It’s the big hotels in the regional areas that are large enough to employ skilled staff to do paperwork; they are surrounded by tradespeople who can work-out what materials they need and quote quickly.
The so-called ‘small hotels’ in the regional areas can get all the answers to their questions for their requirements to fulfill the criteria for the grant by getting the tradies to do the work for them and get the paperwork for the grant done quickly, and submit the application probably within the first few days of the grant opening.

Remember our electrician? He had to take time-off and drive 330km. One supplier was based in Brisbane, others in Longreach, who did their quotes with the information we supplied, and it took time to do it properly.

Why? Because we are REMOTE!

If the powers that be really want to help small hotels in remote areas survive, guidelines for a new classification of Remote need to be added. And, essentially, to define what a ‘small hotel’ is that they say they want to help. I believe the criteria for a ‘small hotel’ in remote areas should be based on annual turnover — say a turnover of below $500,000 — which would certainly apply to us. This would knock-out just about all the hotels in Regional Australia.

This would define what small hotels are in these remote, isolated regions.
Justifiably, they should have their own category — Remote.

If anybody is listening, please let me know if you can understand my complaint — am I right or wrong?

Chris — cggimblett@icloud.com