BendigoWeekly www.bendigoweekly.com.au
ISSUE 716 FRIDAY, JUNE 17, 2011
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Wedding day photos page 11
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Foster care at crisis point page 7
Give me 5 IT has become a feature of the Bendigo calendar, and it’s on again – 3BO FM’s Give Me 5 For Kids fundraising campaign. As part of this year’s campaign, mascot 3Brover visited students from Bendigo Violet Street Primary School.
FULL STORY INSIDE
RURAL RULE Photo: ANDREW PERRYMAN
Regional cities are the future
By ROSEMARY SORENSEN
WE are not a problem, we’re the solution. That’s what country Australia should be telling the city, according to historian Judith Brett. “There has been so much attention paid in the past few decades to the problems of the country,�
the La Trobe University academic said. “What we need now is to rebalance the debate and focus on the strengths of the country and on its potential.� Dr Brett said the pendulum began to swing back towards rural Australia when the three country-
based independents who hold the balance of power in the current Federal Government found themselves centre-stage. These were politicians with “a passionate commitment to regions�, Dr Brett said. “I saw them coming out of a long political history, when the
promise of Federation was the promise for the continent, for nation building. “The country viewpoint was made visible nationally, and that has resulted in slightly more coverage.� Dr Brett has written a quarterly essay, published this month under
the title Fair Share, about the need for Australia to re-think the importance of the country to the nation’s identity. “My sense was that, for the past few decades the city looked on the country as like welfare places, where people had to be helped to live out their lives with dignity.
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