Bridging the city-bush divide

UQ researchers are helping improve communication and relationships between the city and bush.

The UQ Gatton team will use a $40,000 grant from the Federal Government with support from AgForce Queensland, to help counter perceptions that the urban majority hold negative, even hostile, views of farmers and their land, water and animal welfare performance.

Team leader and School of Natural and Rural Systems Management Lecturer Dr Bradd Witt [Bradd not Brad] said the aim of the project was to understand more about the perceptions and reality of rural issues.

Dr Witt said the grant would pay for more detailed surveying of rural and urban Queenslanders about rural issues and what the urban majority wanted from rural landscapes and communities.

His wife Katherine Witt and Dr Bill Carter, also from the School of Natural and Rural Systems Management, will help develop and conduct surveys from November until the middle of next year.

“Any attempts to improve communications and relationships between the city and the bush needs to be based on detailed research into the nature of public interest and the drivers behind current urban perceptions,” Dr Witt said.

“We need to understand what issues people are responsive to and which issues affect them and why this is the case.”

He said the city-bush divide was perceived to be widening with many rural people feeling marginalised from the urban majority who have imposed strict environmental policy such as land clearing regulations.

“There’s a lot of stereotypes in rural people’s minds about the city and vice versa.

“There’s a view that everyone in the city hates them and is too easily influenced by urban based lobby groups.

“They perceive that this is affecting them negatively because a lot of the policy hasn’t been very good from their point of view.”

A preliminary rural survey of 300 people in Brisbane last year asked adults what they thought of farmers and the condition of the environment in farming.

Most were empathetic to the farmers’ plight but a small group were untrusting and unsympathetic to farmers.

“We found a hard core of about six to nine percent who were very untrusting of farmers as individuals and felt that we needed very tight regulations because farmers were doing the wrong thing and did not have good knowledge of management of the land,” Dr Witt said.

The data will be compiled in a report for the Federal Government and AgForce plus also some articles for academic journals.

MEDIA: Dr Witt (5460 1064) or Miguel Holland at UQ Communications (3365 2619)