Demographic Change, Differential Ageing, and Public Policy in Rural and Regional Australia: A Three-State Case

This paper takes a differential demographic change in six rural settlement cat-egories within rural and regional Australia as the starting point for the measure-ment of differential ageing using a Relative Ageing Index which compares ageing in sub-populations with the national norm. The spatial units employed are 412 rural communities, approximated by social catchments each consisting of a country town and its surrounding dispersed population. The study covers the period from 1981 to 2006 and includes the rural areas of New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia, excluding major cities, peri-urban areas, and the remote rangelands. It examines demographic change and differential ageing in a selection of the rural settlement categories recommended for further analysis in the report of the ‘Demographic Change and Liveability Panel’, one of three advisory panels established in 2010 by the then Commonwealth Government seeking to develop a sustainable population strategy for Australia. Ageing pro-files are produced for the whole study area, for the individual rural settlemen