Clever solutions needed to slow country exodus

It can be tough living in country WA. Petrol and food is expensive, the closest doctor can be hours away and if it doesn't rain, water has to be trucked in.

People in country towns are resilient and fiercely passionate about their choice of lifestyle, but an alarming trend over the past decade has been the population shift from the bush to regional centres or the Perth metropolitan area.

Drought during the past 10 years and pitiful incomes for farmers has led to what used to be scores of farms no bigger than 1000ha being sold to neighbours and merging into huge farms averaging 8000ha.

Young men and women who would normally return to the farm after school are now opting to study in Perth or regional centres and, more often than not, they are being encouraged by their parents to find another career off-farm.

The impact is being felt in the essential services such as health, education, roads and transport as WA country towns - particularly those in the Wheatbelt - shrink.

Figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show that in the past 10 years the population has declined 13.5 per cent in Bruce Rock and 34.9 per cent in Koorda.

In comparison, Perth (up 18 per cent), Peel (31 per cent), the South West (22 per cent) and the Pilbara (14 per cent) all recorded growth.

Professor Matthew Tonts, director of the University of WA's Institute for Regional Development, said the decline in the agricultural regions had been happening since the 1960s and had slowly eroded the services in those towns.

"What tends to happen in these places is that the local economy begins to collapse and there are fewer jobs as people begin to move out or a local service is withdrawn or rationalised," he said.

"So it sets up a vicious cycle of decline. Sporting clubs are the best barometers of the health of a community and in a lot of places the football clubs are the first to disappear because they depend on a young, large male population."

In the past 10 years, 10 country primary schools have closed, with nine shutting between 2000 to 2005.

Tertiary education has also taken a battering with the agricultural college Muresk under threat of closing last year because of plummeting enrolments.

In areas such as Toodyay, York and Goomalling, within two hours drive of Perth, the population is on the rise because of the popularity of hobby farms, Wheatbelt Development Commission executive officer Wendy Newman said.

However, she cautioned, as the population ages and retirees move to some of the semi-rural areas to take advantage of cheaper house prices, health planning needs to run parallel with this shift.

She said many families were moving aged parents from the city to facilities within the region. But a doctor shortage that has hit rural areas in the past decade is predicted to last another five years.

Rural Health West figures show there are 72 vacancies across WA, which has forced many local shires to offer as much as $2000 a day to try to attract a doctor to their town.

Ms Newman said shires needed to approach the doctor shortage in a different way in the next decade by sharing doctors between towns to spread the coverage and cost.

"There is some good health planning which looks at how to refocus and provide the right resources so that we can take the pressure off a 24/7 doctor and share the load around a range of communities, rather than have one doctor in one community model," she said.

Declining rural shires needed to think cleverly, she said, citing the example of Ravensthorpe using the coastal town of Hopetoun to house the families of workers at the BHP nickel mine rather than resorting to the fly-in-fly-out culture.

"There are already some other towns taking advantage of the mining boom like Westonia and Dalwallinu," Ms Newman said.

"Critically in all of this is ensuring we have the appropriate telecommunications such as national broadband and mobile phone coverage across the State to ensure regional WA is not left behind."