Growing Local Businesses – How?
Business diversification is seen as a method to reduce the dependency on 'commodities' in regional areas. While this is easy to say, it has proved difficult to do.
Government policy in the regional development space appears to be chasing the diversification objective with a heavy emphasis on a 'silver bullet solution' from outside the region. This is certainly the flavour of projects aimed at offsetting the loss of productive water under the Murray Darling Basin Plan.
Would we have more success by looking inside the region at what is already here, rather than putting most effort into 'hunting for big game' elsewhere?