understanding the sea change...
Sea change is the phenomenon of people moving from traditional population centres (in particular, large cities) to smaller communities most often occupying quite peaceful and charming coastal nodes.
Sea change is often about a change of life, a change of focus, it is about reassessing one's priorities and making a change for family or lifestyle reasons. It often represents a reduction in income, moving from perhaps stressful but high paying employment to a less stressful but also less material and moneyed lifestyle in a rural retreat.
This phenomenon is often witnessed amongst baby-boomers, people who have spent perhaps the major part of their life accumulating assets and income, and who have found the attraction of rural communities, which in an age of robust tourism people have tended to visit more and more, to be preferable to maintaining a more pressured and urbanised lifestyle in the cities.
It is also a product of modern civilization, where people have perhaps come to question some of the basic principles of society, to question materialism as an end in itself, and who want to do something that is less material and more basic, and this has driven people in these communities to arts and crafts and other pursuits.
And yet the changes being visited upon rural coastal communities is not just a result of this phenomenon. Over the past five to ten years we have witnessed historically low interest rates. At the same time baby boomers have suddenly found themselves with an increased disposable income. Their children have left home. They already have many of life's needs, including the family home. And middle class Australia is as wealthy today as it has ever been, indeed a recent report states that we are four times as well off now as fifty years ago. And the move to rural communities has seen land prices rise considerably.
So people have understood that by choosing to buy in coastal communities is an investment not only in personal lifestyle but in capital for the future. Low interest rates also enable other investors to put money into these communities, to redevelop them, to exploit them for the purpose of profit.
And governments at the same time have provided tax breaks to make property investment even more attractive. There is a tripling and quadrupling effect. The property market has never been so buoyant, whether it be in the city or the country. And more people not only want but can afford a piece of the pie.
This means certain rural communities are faced with considerable growth. This growth can place enormous demands upon the infrastructure and planning of these communities. And let us remember that many people have come to these communities because they are attractive places to be, it is usually in this instance the natural environment that is so attractive, that draws people to these places.
Which results in a conflict. There is a conflict between those who want to continue to enjoy the benefits of lifestyle and the environment, and those who want to maximise their profit and capital gain in the market place.
Somehow rural communities faced with this dilemna must find solutions. They must balance the need to encourage growth with adequate planning to protect the environment and provide the social infrastructure that is expected of a modern culture.
People's aspirations are high. They not only want their environment, but they want their profit too, and they still want to enjoy the social infrastructure benefits modern society affords, but which in larger communities are met by a large population in a small space, whereas in rural and coastal communities we often have a much smaller population base stretched out over a wide area. The cost of providing social infrastructure in this instance is high.
Many people who have come to these communities, particularly those who came ten and twenty years ago, do not necessarily have high incomes. They have chosen a lifestyle that suits them. They bought in when it was cheaper to do so. They may be retired or only work part time, or have chosen a lower income than they were once used to or could still achieve in the cities.
And as their piece of paradise develops and grows the pressures of infrastructure costs become a burden. The difficulties faced in this instance are well documented. To provide the type of social infrastructure a growing community needs and expects costs money, and sometimes growth itself is the best way of bringing in that money. But then people see that there are real costs associated with that growth, that their piece of paradise is being eroded in other ways.
This is the challenge facing our community, to balance growth and development against the environmental impact of growth and change, it is the task of our local government instrumentality to provide a framework in which growth can be accommodated whilst protecting our most valuable resource, our natural environment.