ABSTRACT
Rural areas of the developed world have experienced a detectable shift in the way they are governed. This has been associated with the ‘hollowing out of the state’ (Jessop 1997) and a rescaling of state functions downwards to the local level as well as upwards to global institutions, such as the EU and the WTO (Swyngedouw 1997). In Australia, an equally significant process has been the horizontal displacement of functions from the state to decentralized forms of governance through the market. Although much is made in discussions of modern political life of the ‘withdrawal of the state’, the federal government in Australia remains thoroughly interventionist in those spheres (predominantly economic) that it wishes to control, while retreating primarily from areas that it sees as less important, such as rural community welfare. A preferred outcome is a competitive and efficient market economy and this is promoted indirectly through market mechanisms and more directly through quasi-autonomous national institutions such as the National Competition Council (NCC), the Productivity Commission and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. National Competition Policy (NCP) has provided a mechanism driving the shift from government to governance – with the latter being a ‘changed condition of ordered rule, or the new method by which society is governed’ (Rhodes 1996: 652). Through the governance approach, the Commonwealth government has been able to divest itself of unwanted responsibilities and regulatory powers, while retaining considerable control over the overall direction of the economy. Significantly for our analysis in this chapter, the NCP has been a major agent for transformation, and a source of contention, in the rural and farming sector.
