Education for rural Australia

This chapter focuses on responses that can be initiated from a community perspective. But before outlining the capacity for progress on these issues we must first identify the heart of the problem, our concern with the intensification of globalised free trade and what this means for the continued viability of country living. At the heart of this concern is that the changing way in which globalising enterprises operate increasingly constrains, at a local level, opportunities for everyday families and small businesses to maintain their livelihoods and communities. It emphasises regional stakeholders developing detailed analyses of their local assets, human and natural, and exploring new opportunities to build economic value from these assets in global value chains. It means that the data that they need analysed quickly can be processed overnight and reported back to the business by the time they return to work the next day.