There is a cruel irony - for much of eastern Australia, at least - in the timing of the COVID-19 outbreak and its regulatory consequences.
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Just when businesses in regional areas emerging from drought and/or catastrophic bushfires were looking for an upturn in tourism to start generating some much-needed revenue, the boom has been lowered.
Large parts of inland NSW haven't recorded one case of the dreaded infection yet, so it's hardly surprising that they're not throwing out the welcome mat just now.
'Stay - at - home', intoned a headmasterly Scott Morrison, on the eve of the Easter break - a time which normally would have seen a mass exodus from the city.
Nowhere is more in need of visitor dollars than the Blue Mountains, where I live, but our local paper last week carried the front-page headline 'Stay away: Easter pleas to visitors'!
If nothing else, the COVID-19 crisis is giving city dwellers a new perspective of their rural hinterland: that god-forsaken territory where it's seemingly always too dry or too wet, where farmers habitually whinge and where you can't get a decent latte.
Now they are seeing the bush in a different light, and recognising that one unique feature that rural and regional Australia has to offer is space - room to move, and clean air to breathe.
There's a new appreciation also of the crucial importance of farming and farmers, as the global pandemic awakens people to the things that really matter - like a secure food supply, reliable water and energy.
And speaking of food supply, it's surely time the Murray-Darling Basin Plan was paused, to allow precious water to be diverted from environmental flows to general security irrigators in the southern Basin now facing their third straight year of nil allocations.
As Southern Riverina Irrigators' chairman Chris Brooks has argued, in an open letter to the prime minister, irrigation in the southern Basin is vital to the nation's supply of food staples - in normal seasons, the source of some 60 per cent of what we eat.
But thanks to the drought and inflexible water allocation priorities, the region has lost half its dairy farms and 95pc of its former rice production, with flow-on effects to local food processing industries.
Our irrigation schemes last century were not founded on an economic textbook premise that water should be reserved for its 'highest value use', although this has become the modern catchcry.
Rather, they were based on the principle of developing former pastoral land for intensive food production, settling people on farms and in the process, creating new, vibrant rural communities.
Now, those worthy objectives have been lost sight of, as water flows instead to the horticultural plantations of deep-pocketed corporations, or to the lower lakes in South Australia to evaporate.
