23 October 2008
"Her beauty and her terror - the wide brown land for me!" - The individual and family wellbeing of Australian rural and regional families in drought
Dr Ben Edwards, Research Fellow, Australian Institute of Family Studies
Dr Matthew Gray, Deputy Director (Research), Australian Institute of Family Studies
Abstract, slides and audio of presentation
The following audio presentation is brought to you by the Australian Institute of Family Studies as part of our monthly seminar series in which we showcase national and international research related to the family.
The seminars are designed to promote a forum for discussion and debate. They are open to the public and free of charge.
Seminar facilitated & speaker introduced by Ms Sue Tait.
Dr Ben Edwards:
Yes, the title of the talk is Her Beauty and Her Terror, the Wide Brown Land for Me. I was very excited when I thought of that. The link between Dorothy Mackellar's famous poem - My Country - and our study. I think it resonates on two separate levels. The first being the iconic nature of rural life in Australia and how we, as a country, relate part of our identity to that rural life.
The second, I think, is the push and pull that comes with living on the land, and what has historically happened on the land. We've had the pull of the beautiful Australian landscape - its rugged beauty - and the push - the harshness of the landscape.
I think the third thing that resonates with the title is the fact that Dorothy Mackellar wrote this poem in 1908. It's 2008. So 100 years later droughts and flooding rains are still occurring. In fact, we're in the midst of the longest drought on record. But droughts are not a new thing for the Australian landscape. What is new, though, is that climate change seems, from the evidence to date, seems to be exacerbating the effect of drought, both in terms of the severity of drought and also the frequency of drought.
So what we're going to be talking - Matthew and I - are going to be talking about today are ... the first crop of results from the Rural and Regional Families study, which is a large scale study of 8000 individuals from across Australia in rural and regional areas.
One of the key focuses of the study is to look at the impact of drought on families. Our collaborators on this project - and they've had quite a considerable role in both the design of the study and also the measures included in the study - are collaborators are Dr Boyd Hunter from the Centre of Aboriginal Economic Policy Research at the ANU, and David De Vaus from La Trobe University.
What I'm going to do is provide the sort of front-end framework context. I'm going to talk about climate change and how that impacts on the frequency and severity of drought, the policy context and also describe what we know to date and what the AIFS study might add to our understanding, and then describe the methodology around the study. Methodology is quite important in the context of this particular study because it is difficult to disentangle the impact of drought as opposed to the more general decline in rural and regional areas of Australia.
So this slide is quite a busy slide but essentially tells you one thing, which is that, on average across Australia since 1980, the average mean temperature has increased. The blank line gives you an 11-year moving average. So we can see that it's increased over the years. Now this data is from a report to the federal government's review of drought policy - and I'll talk a little bit more about the review in a few minutes time - by the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology. The report basically finds that, in terms of temperature, the long-term average hot periods is about 5% and, with the advent of climate change, it's going to go up to about 10 to 12%. So this just demonstrates the overall average increase in temperature.
Where it's located is also very important. So this slide shows the hot spots in Australia, in terms of the change in degrees per decade since 1950. We can see from this slide that one of the features of this, and it's more pronounced for rainfall, which is the next slide I'll show you, is that it's not evenly dispersed, and that areas of Australia that have higher levels of agriculture are experiencing higher levels of temperature relative to other sort of more cooler areas in the north.
When we look at rainfall, when the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology report focused on rainfall, they didn't find that there was a reduction in average rainfall across the whole of Australia over time. What they did find is the pattern of rainfall has changed. What we do find is that there's a - particularly on the eastern southwest of Australia - particularly the East - the decline's being quite marked, per decade, since 1950. This report's available on the web so if you're very interested in this you can download a copy from the Department of Agriculture's website.
So the policy context, the national review of drought policy that the government initiated on 23 April 2008 is in the context of climate change. The policy settings prior to that were, for one, in 20 to 25 year event, you were eligible for assistance that's referred to as exceptional circumstances because of the nature of the circumstances, it's a one in 20 to 25 year event.
Now, with the advent of climate change and based on the climatic assessment report that was completed just recently by the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology, we know that that one in 20 to 25 year policy parameter is likely to change - has changed - with the advent of climate change. The other two elements of the government's review are in terms of the social impacts of drought, and also the economic impacts. The expert panel has just released their report, co-incidentally, today. The productivity commission is due to release a draft report on the drought support measures and the economic assessment of the drought support measures at the end of October, with a final report early next year.
So this is a period of rapid policy change. I think the Rural and Regional Families study has been able to provide some input into these reviews by the fact that we were able to anticipate this. This was prior to the election that we started this study. It was in the early stages of 2007 but we recognised that this was a particular issue.
So what do we know? This is mainly what prompted us to do the research. There's no really large-scale studies in Australia or internationally that focus on the impact of drought on families. It's a difficult thing to measure and it's a difficult thing to disentangle. What's historically happened with the research on drought, and there hasn't been a huge amount of research on drought, is that there's been more of a focus on particular communities that are in drought.
There have been a number of studies that have taken the community focus to that, most notably of which, the report that was published in late 1990's - Drought in the 1990's - which focused on a couple of communities in New South Wales and Queensland. Another report a bit later than that that focused on three New South Wales communities and another which has focused primarily on children. All of these studies have provided detailed information around the nature of people's experiences in drought conditions.
The difficulty is that they haven't interviewed people and talked to people who aren't in drought conditions and, therefore, it's difficult to disentangle whether it's just a function of the experiences people are having and the impact that it's having is a function of the general decline of rural areas, as compared to the impact of drought.
What is drought? It's a difficult question to answer. There's many different ways in which you can conceive of drought and there's no agreed - no one agreed measure. Meteorological drought is the degree and duration of dryness, so rainfall deficits. Hydrological is basically stream flow, water flow, water allocations. Soil moisture deficits create agricultural impacts. Also there's a notion of economic impact of drought. There's also this idea of a social definition, what people perceive to be the impact.
I suppose the main point to note is there's many different ways in which you can measure drought. As we'll demonstrate today, it's quite a difficult policy challenge when you've got these different measures and some people ... it may be quite a contested landscape with those different measures.
To the AIFS study design; we spoke to 8000 people from across Australia. We did that through computer assisted telephone interviewing. We randomly dialled into four different types of areas. The areas were based on varying degrees of rainfalls, so we used the meteorological definition of drought as our definition. We dialled into severely drought-affected areas, moderately drought-affected areas, below average and above average areas.
Our definition of drought is relative to the long-term average for the area. So we took the average of three years of rainfall and compared it to the last 100 years of rainfall for that particular area. This is important because different crops, different farming practices might have developed in those areas to adapt to that particular climate. So unless you take into account the rainfall decline relative to the particular area, you're not going to get an assessment of the impact.
So we interviewed 2000 people in each of those four groups. We use that definition of rainfall deficits throughout to look at the impact of drought.
The areas in which we were interviewing people in had at least 10% of people employed in agriculture or a related service industry in 2001. The reason why we chose 2001 is because it was before the current drought and, therefore, we wouldn't be capturing the impact of drought. If we interviewed people in 2006, the areas that we might have been interviewing might have adapted to drought. So we needed to interview people in areas that had higher agricultural areas in 2001.
What we wanted to do was at least interview a large proportion of the sample who had one or more people in agriculture, or at least had been in the last three years. We had a quota for that - at least 30% of households. We found that in our sample 45% of households have one person or more who is currently or has been employed in agriculture in the last three years. We also wanted to be able to talk to men. Men don't like to talk on the phone as much.
So we tried to put in place some procedures so we could actually talk to men. When interviewers called up, they asked for the youngest male in the household. It's the standard household selection technique that's used in computer assisted telephone interviewing and what it tries to do is be able to get younger people - because younger people tend to not respond to these surveys as well - but also more particularly, men. We interviewed 53% female in this study.
As I alluded to before, we're going to be focusing on two different types of definitions for looking at the impact of droughts for this presentation. Rainfall deficit definition on the one hand, based on Bureau of Meteorology rainfall data, three years to last 100 years. We have our four categories; severe, drought, below average rainfall and above average rainfall. Then we have, on the other hand, social definition. People's perceptions of drought. I'll talk a little bit about this.
We asked people, are you in drought? Have you been in drought the last three years? Have you been in drought for the last year? Are you currently in drought? From that, we created four mutually exclusive categories. Sixty percent of the people in our survey said they were currently in drought. Thirteen percent said they were in drought in the last year but not currently. Five percent they were in drought in the last three years, not in the last year and not currently, and 22% said they were in drought in the last three years - not in drought in the last three years.
So we created these four mutually exclusive categories. You'll note that this is quite different to the rainfall data. This is one of the challenges with this type of research, trying to define and look at the impact of drought.
In terms of the rainfall data, one of the other things I did mention earlier was that our methodology - our sampling methodology - was defined on the basis of rainfall up to March - the end of March. We interviewed people from September to December. So we need to update our rainfall percentiles. This is the distribution of rainfall. The main points to note are that the severe drought category is about the same, so about 24% of respondents - this is a kernel density smooth graph.
Basically it's like a histogram. Frequency of people who were in the severe drought category is about the same - about 24%. Five to ten percent - it's 20% of the total sample. In the below average category we had a much higher number than what our sampling methodology had. We had almost 40% - 39%, and 16.5% of near above average rainfall.
One of the other points to note, and the main point I want you to take away from this slide, is that when we're talking about above average rainfall, we're not talking about flooding rains. We're talking about from the 50th to the 70th percentile. So it's a bit above average but it's not excessive rainfall.
They were our four categories. We interviewed that whole range of different areas. We asked people about, as I've alluded to, are they in drought? We also asked about whether their area or their household has experienced other natural disasters, such as floods, earthquakes. We even had a plague of locusts. Lots of demographic information about people in the household, as well as the respondent, whether people moved in and out of the area - both the household respondent and also other household members - because one of the responses to drought could be movement from a drought-affected area to a non-drought-affected area.
Employment income, farming issues, as well as health and the little red typeset is the things that we will be focusing on today, and community factors. So Matthew's going to be talking about the results. But the other point to make, before I leave you, the other point to make is the results we're presenting today are adjusted percentages, or adjusted means, and they're adjusted through regression modelling. What we're trying to do is take away factors such as age, gender, Indigenous status, education, away from the estimates of the impact of drought.
We also tried to control for state differences and remoteness differences. The results you'll be seeing today are adjusted for those. Thanks.
Dr Matthew Gray:
Thank you, Ben. I get the fun part of talking about the results. I was looking out the window and I'm not quite sure whether I'm pleased it's sunny or disappointed it's not rainy. Makes this very relevant but it would be nice if it rained. I think one of the things when we started doing that study was just before we interviewed, we went to areas that were drought affected and not drought affected several months before we started interviewing. That happened around winter.
One of the things that concerned us was that there would - well, it didn't concerned us but it was a concern to the study - is that it really would start raining and that we'd be interviewing all these people as to drought recovery. Sadly, we're not. It's generally got worse. Certainly when we interviewed in November 2007, some people had had some rain which had stopped and other people might have been in a situation where they weren't quite sure. But we certainly managed to be interviewing people at a time when drought was continuing and long term was very severe.
It's good that Philip Hughes is here because Philip has done quite a lot of work on the impact of drought and some of the spiritual aspects and so on. So he might be able to, in the discussion, sort of flesh out some of our fairly bold findings from a statistical analysis, which often don't really get a human face to what's going on. So our analysis is trying to get a sort of causal impacts of drought.
But one of the risks of that is that you lose some of the human impact and the impact it has on families. One of the things about the expert panel, in terms of drought that's just come out today, is that it really does have what you might almost call testimonial type evidence where they did lots of community meetings and so on, which makes a very good start. As Ben said, one of the key issues is trying to differentiate what's impact of drought versus what's the impact of long-term economic decline, loss of young people from areas and so on.
If you go to the area where's there's a drought and people say things are very hard, there's always that question as to whether it's really the drought or other factors. Defining drought, as Ben said, is very difficult. We used two measures; one, which is the rainfall measure which originally I thought that would be very uncontroversial - did or didn't it rain? But actually it turns out it's much more dis-equal than that and we've also experimented with other measures around soil moisture and so on. But the results are similar so we're not presenting them here today. We can talk a bit about it if you're interested.
One of the conclusions is that how you measure drought really matters. That creates real challenges, I think, for policy and the way in which policy should respond.
To start with in the presentation I'm going to talk about economic impact on farmers because that's the group who you expect to be most affected by drought. So one of the things we asked - and if anyone has any questions as we go along with technical clarification, I'm happy to answer them. But perhaps we can save a detailed discussion to the end. One of the things we asked farmers is what's been the impact - this is the areas of drought, where the farmers said they were in drought - what's the impact of drought on your farm productivity?
As you'd expect, and the [unclear] drought only and the bottom is for drought plus other natural disasters. So people said drought plus other things. What you see is that one [unclear] had no effect, 6% said little effect. But the rest said one in five reduced to below average. One in three reduced substantially and a bit over one in three had the [unclear] lowest point ever or eliminated completely. Their patterns are pretty similar, plus drought plus other natural disasters so the main point to take from that is what we're really picking up is the impact of drought impacting on production, not other factors.
We asked the farmers in drought whether they thought their farming property would be economically viable if current weather conditions continued. We asked both about short and long term and this is combining those who said neither the short or long term, it wouldn't be economically viable.
The first thing to note is - so we've got the two definitions. The left hand panel as you look at it is the rainfall definition and the right hand panel's our social definition. So severe drought, below average and above average. Most of the graphs are this type of format. The social definition which is current drought, drought in the last year, drought in the last three years and no drought in the last three years. So they're currently in drought and these people are recovering from drought, and these are people who have been recovering for a bit longer.
The first thing is that irrespective of whether or not you're in drought, if you look at the rainfall definition, somewhere between ... percentage reporting being not economically viable. The higher the bar, the worse the outcome, is something between 50 and 60% of farmers say that they don't think their property is viable in the short or long run if these current weather conditions continue. So that's, I think, pretty important from a policy point of view. There's going to have to clearly be either change in [unclear] economics are signing, prices and so on, technological change or restructuring across the industry. That's happening clearly.
One interesting thing is if you look at the social definition - the current drought - there's a much stronger relationship. Now, the social definition ... what's the difference between social and rainfall? There's some overlap, as you'd hope. But the social definition, or are you in drought [unclear] might be another way of describing it, might be because they're more giving a response that is tailored to their particular circumstances, the impact to them, the area and depending on whether they've got access to irrigation water and so on.
The other possibility, of course, is that people are finding things hard and looking for a reason to give. So they're more likely to perceive as being in drought. I mean, I'm actually a bit sceptical about that really. I think that people generally know in this country whether or not they're in drought, particularly as farmers. But just generally speaking, if something is sort of general community consensus, are we in drought or not? I mean, that's my experience is that people have a pretty good idea. If you look at what farmers say, 70% say not. And of those not in drought in the last three years, once in three say they're not economically viable in the short or long term.
Now we presented this work somewhere else - or Ben did - and one of the things that people said, oh yeah, but they're all hobby farmers. There's so many hobby farmers. So this graph shows percentage of ... it's a bit complicated but I'll try and translate it. The percentage of household income usually derived from the property - so very low - to 100%. This is a cumulative percentage. What that shape means is that the majority of these people are saying the majority of their income comes from the property. To give some figures, over half - or 55% or 54% - said that 75% or more of their income came from their property. What was the other figure, Ben? The other one was less than 50% of their income coming from the property was 32%.
Now one of the things that goes on is that there is a lot of off-farm work. So if a drought eliminates your output entirely, then the off-farming - the farming becomes a tiny proportion of your income. The majority is coming from the off-farm income. So I think, and we had a look at the size of properties and so on and, yes, there are probably some people who are very small scale farmers but that's not what's going on here. These are people who are what you would conventionally think of as a farmer on the whole.
Okay. So we've established that, as you'd expect, there's lots of other people have the drought as having a very big impact upon farm output. Financial wellbeing - so one of the things about looking at financial wellbeing - we look at a range of measures. One is your income - your household income. Because what your household income means depends upon the number of people trying to live on it.
So you can adjust the household income for the number of people. The more people, the more money you need to achieve the same living standard. So that process is called equivalising household income and that's what we present here. These are not actual incomes. These are equivalised incomes. A lot of what we do - we present analysis for farmers - farm workers or farm managers - and employed but not in agriculture. The reason for doing that is farmers are the most directly affected and farm workers. But employed not in agriculture we'd be looking at some of the flow-on affects to the broader regional economy. A lower number means a lower income - equivalised income.
So in severe drought, the farmers - the average equivalised income is about 34,500. If you go to the above average rainfall - the right hand column - it's about 38,000. The impact of the drought - this is adjusting for sort of differences in age and family composition and so on - is about $4000, in an equivalised income. This is using the rainfall measure. A finding we don't understand is for farm workers in severe drought, their income is high. We don't understand this. I mean, the number. We'll come back to talk about that in a minute. Employed not in agriculture is a bit lower. It's not statistically significant but there's not a really clear pattern.
If you look at the same question but you look at the social definition of drought - so this is people who are, say, currently in drought, drought in the last year, drought in the last three years, no drought in the last three years and, again, for farmers or a farmer who's employed but not in agriculture - you get massive income effects. So, for farmers, their income, in equivalent terms, is around $20,000 a year, less if they're currently in drought compared to no drought in the last three years. Then you can say, for those who had drought in the last year you can see the lag in incomes recovering. It's a nice three years to some effect, although not statistically different, and then no drought in the last three years.
Farm workers; there's no real clear pattern there, which is more what you would expect. And employed but not in agriculture you can see the income is a bit lower. It's around $4000. So that's a flow-on effect in terms of the regional economy, so people working in shops and running shops, all that kind of thing. There may be loss of jobs from the household. If you're running a business, your profits drop, and so on.
Now, if we look at financial hardship. Measuring income is very difficult for farming families. You can get huge variations in income from year to year. Another way to look at this, though, is to look at the experience of financial hardships. People were asked a series of questions like, because of a lack of money, would you have to go without means, have to sell something, not pay utilities bills, seek help from a charity, that kind of thing. So quite severe hardships really. Most of who, I think, would think, yes, that is a sign of real hardship. This is people who have one or more financial hardship. This is the rainfall definition and so you can see that being in severe drought you get a greater level of financial hardships - 29% versus 34%. Bu that 24% for above rainfall is actually really high. That's much higher than what you get in the city, just generally speaking.
So that's one of the key points, is that there are high rates of financial hardship. Its not just drought. There's actually high underlying level of financial hardship. If you look at the social definition you get a really big difference - 30% versus the current drought versus 18%. So if we do it with farmers, farm works employed, but not in agriculture, you'd say the biggest effect is the farmers. And which measure is this? This is the rainfall measure. What you see is what you'd expect, not with that income result, which I don't understand, you get financial hardships, you get the pattern you expect.
So the income for farm workers or farm managers .... I don't understand what's driving that. I don't know. We'll do more work on that. If you look at financial hardship you'd get the pattern you'd expect. And employed but not in agriculture and not in financial hardships. So even though there was a drop in income, it's like a threshold. Families can absorb a drop in income up to a certain point without going into actual financial hardship. Once you get beyond that threshold, it will translate into financial hardship. That's our interpretation of that.
This is the social definition. It's a similar pattern generally. The differences are much more pronounced for farmers and farm workers and for employment but not in agriculture. You do get some difference between current drought and drought in the last year and the others. So there probably are some flow on effects but they're not really of the same magnitude as for farmers.
We asked everybody in areas in drought, how does your financial position compare to three years ago? Has it improved, stayed the same, got worse or got a lot worse? What we recorded here is people think it's got worse or a lot worse in the last three years. Again, if you look at the survey of families with young children - just to give a benchmark of families with young children - the overall majority between 2004 and 2006 said their financial position has improved over those two years. Maybe in November 2007 there were some economic ... although the economy was pretty strong in November 2007.
This isn't, I don't think, what's happening now. There might have been some effects but not very big. These are really quite high rates of things getting worse. What you see in the rainfall definition, even in above average rainfall, one in three say they're worse than they were three years ago. It's an effective drought. But when you go to the social definition you get a really big difference again - 40% of those currently in drought. Now, some of those people were in drought three years ago, and you could do it again by whether you're a farmer or a farm worker employment non-agriculture. You get the pattern you'd expect, which the effects are greater for farmers.
One of the important questions is whether there are flow-on unemployment effects of drought. Because, if you're a farmer, you're by definition employed, we've calculate the overall employment rate in the different areas and then we've calculated the employment rate excluding farmers because to lose your job as a farmer you have to lose the farm, in which case you're not a farmer. So it's a bit tautological.
I think that the first thing to say is there's not really a clear pattern here. The main one is for the rainfall definition in above average rainfall, excluding farmer employment where it's 80% and then you can see that it is lower whether they're in drought. So there is an effect. Interestingly, when you use the social definition, there is no overall relationship. One of the things that's important to say is that in a lot of regional areas, the non-farming economy's very strong. So there are, in some areas, a lot of farmers who go for some periods a year and work on mines, big infrastructure projects. On the [unclear] Peninsula in South Australia, a lot of people from there would go up to ... they go to [unclear] and can make really quite substantial money and they perhaps wouldn't be doing that if ... the [unclear] Peninsula's had a very tough time with both drought and fire. They perhaps wouldn't be doing that if their farms were more viable.
The other thing is, of course, the increasing rate of female labour force participation. A lot of farmers have wives and partners that are employed. That also can provide a buffer for the family.
If we look at family wellbeing, we look at a range of things. We looked at the financial impact but if you look at the family relationship impacts, it's a very ... cut to the chase. The flow on effects are not there from the financial to the family wellbeing that you would perhaps expect. I'll talk a bit about that at the end.
So if you look at couple relationship stress, which was quite a sophisticated well-established measure we used, overall about 16% of people in a couple said they had what you might class as couple relationship distress. But, again, what you see is there's not real clear pattern. Being in current drought is slightly high at 17% versus 14%. I mean, yes there is an effect but it's pretty small.
Relationship separation - actually the rate of relationship breakdown is lower in severe drought affected areas with drought below and above average but, again, that's over a three-year period. So 2% higher over a three-year period. It's not insignificant but perhaps that's adversity. People stick together during adversity. It's later that the effects might appear.
Mental health problems - nothing for the rainfall definition. Actually, the rates of mental health problems are quite low compared to what you would get in the city sample, just the general population sample. But if you use the social definition there's a big effect - 12% having what you call mental health problems. This is quite serious mental health problems, isn't it Ben? It's not a clinical diagnosis but questions over a phone would put you in a screening of you should perhaps look a these people to see if there was a clinical mental health issue and 7% in no drought in the last three years. So that's mental health, which, I guess, is what you would expect.
Same with [unclear], financial hardship [unclear] mental health rates but it doesn't necessarily, at this stage, in this sort of survey, translate into family distress, at least as we could measure. Communities and services - we asked some questions of community social cohesion. Again, something Philip's done a lot of work on. To be fair, our measures are a bit crude in this area. I mean, it's a 25-minute survey. There's a limit to what you can do.
This is what you might essentially call low community cohesion. There's perhaps some effect from severe drought. If you look at closure of key services in the last three years - that's things like schools, hospitals, what else, medical practice, that type of thing - you can say that severe drought, 38% ... again these are really high rates of loss of key services over a three year period. Thirty eight percent said in severe drought they had [unclear] above average.
If you go to the social definition, 41% versus 29%, which is quite a substantial difference. So what's going on here? It's quite a complicated story. [unclear] doing more work. One thing is resilience and adaptation to drought. People we interviewed were people in the areas so they're what you might call stayers. So perhaps the people most affected have left. Other household members are movers. We find that in drought affected areas it was more likely that somebody else had left the household. The person we interviewed was there but somebody in the household had left. We'll do future work on that. These findings of general adaptation may underestimate the effects of drought.
So our conclusion is there's a significant impact of drought on family finances, in particular, farmers. Over one third of farmers report farm production at the lowest level ever, or completely eliminated. There are financial flow-on effects to the other members of the community, employed but not in agriculture. Adaptation may limit the social impact [unclear] smaller impacts on family wellbeing than the financial. But maybe they will appear over time, and maybe this sort of large scale telephone interviewing can miss some effects that are really there. But this type of study is well established as being suitable for finding these types of effects.
In terms of our future directions, we're going to incorporate mobility in labour demand at a regional level, [unclear] technical issues and try and sort of translate using an [unclear] approach [unclear] impacts on numbers of people. So some of the things here might look like quite a small impact - four or five percent difference - but if you translate that to population terms, it's really huge in the number of people affected. So you can kind of underestimate the impact.
I think the key messages are defining drought is difficult and that measurement mattered. We get much more pronounced effects using the social definition. The largest impacts have been economic, as you'd expect, and large effects on household income and financial hardship. There are some negatives in social impacts, but not in terms of family relationships.
So I think that is only going to be an issue, especially with projections on climate change, it's going to become more and more important. We're hoping that this analysis and further analyses will start to provide stronger evidence based around how one input into the various sort of reviews over a number of years as to how as a society and government we should be responding to the impacts of drought but more broadly around regional and rural policy. Thank you.
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