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In this chapter, the authors explore entrepreneurial change in Stanton, a rural small town in New Zealand. This once-prosperous place has suffered economically and socially as its past core industries have vanished, and it can now be considered as a depleted community. Yet in recent years, the town has seen a rejuvenation, in part due to the endeavours of Sue, a high-profile entrepreneur from outside the town who has set up several businesses in the town and indeed in other small towns in the region. Theoretically, the authors take an entrepreneurial identity perspective in examining how Sue’s arrival has changed the town; the authors examine how her entrepreneurship was perceived as legitimate. The authors use a qualitative methodology based on semi-structured interviews. The authors contribute in demonstrating how an ascribed entrepreneurial identity can not only enable but also hinder change in this community, generating confidence and emotional contagion around entrepreneurship, and also uncertainty and resentment. In doing so, the authors challenge the universality of entrepreneurship benefits.

This chapter examines narratives and representations of rural Australia deployed by political actors. At both federal and state levels in Australia, political parties tend to focus their attention on metropolitan electorates in their public discussions, particularly during election campaigns. This has led to accusations from minor parties and independents that rural areas are ignored by governments based in capital cities. The Nationals, for example, presents itself as the party whose primary motivation is to protect the interests of rural voters. Rural sites are political spaces shaped by particular types of narrative and rhetoric. Engaging with how the ‘rural’ is represented through rhetoric and image is useful for understanding how crime is positioned. This chapter uses rhetorical political analysis and representation to understand how political ideas about rurality are expressed through language and imagery. The political context outlined in this chapter is one factor that affects the nature and complexities of rural crime and responses to it. Rural Australia is at its own political crossroad, reflected in the emergence of competing narratives for the bush, defined here as a contest between ‘rural centrism’ and ‘rural populism’.

On one level, motor vehicles might represent the possibility of unfettered freedom, escape (from government authority) and autonomy through providing work and leisure opportunities. On another level, in remote places, ‘hybridised’ and ‘Indigenised’ vehicles have been appropriated to speak to economic and cultural realities of everyday life. This chapter considers how night patrols may articulate expressions of decoloniality by enhancing Aboriginal social capital or what we refer to here as ‘collective efficacy’. It draws upon a subset of the findings from an evaluation of Indigenous Youth Programs in New South Wales to examine the effectiveness of night patrols operating in nine communities across the state. While the patrols were universally endorsed by the communities they served, some services were functioning at a high level while others had experienced periods of dysfunction and inactivity. The factors that impede effective service provision for night patrols in some communities were compared with other communities where services were functioning well. The chapter argues that night patrols can build and harness collective efficacy providing more than mere community policing functions.

This chapter examines some key themes raised by the intersection of the urban, the rural and the penal against the backdrop of the Australian ‘rural ideal’. But the chapter also seeks to look critically at that ideal and how it relates (or does not) to the various lifeworlds and patterns of settler development that lie beyond the Australian cityscape. Attention is directed away from the singular focus on the rural/urban divide to stress the importance of North/South in understanding patterns of development and penal practices beyond the cityscape in the Australian context.

The way crystal methamphetamine or ‘ice’ use in rural Australia has been represented for national television audiences provides rich evidence of the intersections between media, crime and rurality. This chapter explores these connections through a framing analysis of three Australian television news and current affairs features about this topic. It investigates how concepts such as ‘fluidity’ and ‘boundedness’ operate in relation to the representation of ice use and drug-related crime in rural and regional communities. This raises questions about how certain images and associations come to circulate through media as well as their potential to evolve and change over time or to even be contested – sometimes by the very individuals and communities who serve as the subjects of stories about such problems in society.

True to form, it is no surprise that ‘public interest entity’ (which, by EC requirement, must include all listed companies but other entities only at the discretion of individual member states) has been defined in the United Kingdom in the minimal permissible way – it excludes large privately held companies, mutuals, large professional partnerships and so on – about all of which the public has a real interest – as the current financial crisis has clearly shown. Think, for instance, of the need to widen choice in the audit market.