Monday, November 10, 2014

The North's growing disadvantage - increasing poverty, lower life expectancies

Depressing, I suppose, but I should have expected it. We already knew that the lowest income areas in NSW or indeed Australia had a particular concentration in Northern New South Wales. Now we learn from Data of death: Remote NSW life expectancy as bad as North Korea's that life expectancy is just as bad. Indeed, five of the worst ten NSW LGAs are in the North, eight of the next twenty. 

Just in case you think that this is only an issue in the west, Tenterfield has the 10th worst life expectancy, Cessnock the 12th.Many things contribute to this result. However, there is little doubt that diminishing services, reduced economic opportunities and growing poverty are major factors.

I wouldn't mind as much if we had at least a measure of control of our own destiny. Then it would in part be our own fault. But we don't. There is very little we can do to address the problem in a direct sense. We just have to put up with it, at least for the moment. .

2 comments:

Jack Arnold said...

The Notional Party you have to celebrate a 19th century future under clouds of CSG fumes and coal dust while drinking polluted smelly water that catches fire on the first spark continues to betray aussie farming families by preferring to represent the best interests of their political paymasters, the CSG and mining industries.

The 21st century boundaries have expanded to now stretch from the Hunter to the Queensland border and west to South Australia.

This area includes about 13 NSW electorates about 10 Federal electorates,and so is larger than Tasmania (4 Federal electorates) has more population than South Australia and fewer social security recipients than the Northern Territory (48% of the population).

The present NSW Bared LIARbral COALition government is currently selling-off public assets in our urban regional centres to build motorways in metro Sydney as a political buy-back to win the 2015 NSW election after all the corruption among LIARbral politicians discovered by ICAC recently.

During the past decade we have seen first-hand how Independents get things done for their communities. Thank you Tony Windsor (Tamworth & New England), Peter Draper (Tamworth) and Richard Torbay (Northern Tablelands) for putting the best interests of the voters ahead of the preferred developments of foreign owned corporate CSG & coal mining corporations.

Jim Belshaw said...

Good morning, Jack. Sorry for the very slow response. On the Notionals, did you watch Heather Ewart's first report?

New England however defined is big enough to look after itself and deserves the chance.