Two entrenched rural problems this week: the childcare desert facing farming families, and the state of regional roads heading into an election full of infrastructure promises nobody quite believes yet.
#17 | Childcare Deserts, Killer Roads & Why Rural Families Keep Losing Out – Agsolutely Fabulous
Childcare: the wait-list starts before the baby’s born
In plenty of rural regions, families go on childcare wait-lists from around 20 weeks’ gestation and still don’t get a placement, even two days a week, until somewhere between six and twelve months old. That’s not a scheduling inconvenience. It’s the difference between a town keeping its nurses, teachers and shop workers, and a town slowly losing them, because there’s nowhere for their kids to go.
Traditional, town-based childcare doesn’t solve it either, because for a lot of farming families the drive itself is the barrier: over an hour each way isn’t viable twice a day, which is part of why distance education and homeschooling get so much uptake in the bush. In-home care schemes exist federally, with rebates for nannies or carers coming to the home rather than a centre, but places are so limited that the flexibility the scheme is supposed to offer barely exists in practice.
Around election time, both major parties tend to roll out childcare infrastructure promises. Labor has previously committed roughly a billion dollars toward building new early education centres across around 160 projects nationally. The catch for rural voters: these builds tend to land in marginal seats, not necessarily where the wait-lists are longest, and there’s rarely a mechanism that accounts for families who can’t physically get to a centre-based service in the first place, regardless of how many new centres get built in town.
The frustrating part is how small the fix could be. Bodies like the Isolated Children’s and Parents’ Association have been putting practical solutions to government for years: expanded in-home care places, community hall-based rotating care, recognition that rural families are a genuine access minority even without meeting the conventional criteria. The mechanisms already exist. They’re just under-resourced and rarely renewed long enough to build trust or momentum.
Roads: the other infrastructure nobody wants to fund properly
Regional road maintenance is frequently contracted out to companies with little local accountability, in areas remote enough that nobody checks the finished work. The result: expensive contracts, and roads that don’t noticeably improve. Every election cycle brings fresh road funding promises, and every cycle the local knowledge that would actually make repairs effective, where water runs, where causeways fail, which sections flood, gets ignored in favour of contracts awarded from a distance.
For an economy that runs on road freight, this isn’t cosmetic. If trucks can’t move, the country stops. Livestock, grain and groceries all move by truck or rail from where they’re produced to where they’re processed and sold, and a national road network still largely built around two east-coast corridors leaves a lot of the country dependent on single, regularly cut roads, the Stuart Highway among them.
Sharing the road: a few rules that would save lives
A few plain-language reminders for anyone driving regional roads, especially towing a caravan for the first time: give trucks more space than you think they need, because loaded weight means stopping distances well beyond anything a car needs. Don’t park in truck rest bays or emergency ramps, they’re positioned exactly where truckies are statistically most likely to need to pull over, often in blind spots you won’t realise you’re sitting in. Don’t camp near water points or dams, it stops stock drinking. And don’t light campfires you can’t fully extinguish before you leave; on private or leased land, that fire risk is someone else’s livelihood.
None of this is about begrudging tourists their road trip. It’s about recognising that regional roads are, for a lot of the people driving them, an actual workplace, and treating them accordingly.
Leave a comment