Well, I can't read all of everything here, but I'll try to make sense of it and give you my opinion.
I discovered the new 'Rural Zone Immigration' stuff quite some time ago, but I don't think anybody found my post because FDU was being 'fixed' at the time.
The new scheme doesn't apply just to rural and 'the bush' but also to Regional towns and cities. Here is my post (it's near the end of it).
http://www.francedownunder.com/forum/vi ... ight=#8189
Maybe this can help clear up some misconceptions.
First, Rural/Regional Zone is much more than 'the bush' - particularly in the case of my city. It can refer to just about any city which is not a capital city, from what I can tell. It's a very wide classification indeed.
Ok, summary of my article for those who haven't time to read the whole thing, is that my city, Ballarat, is one of the leaders in the push to get skilled immigrants in on the "Rural Zone Visa"
but one of the first things it has to deal with (somehow) before it can start working, it seems, is to get Melbourne UN-ZONED REGIONAL/RURAL!
Incroyable, but Melbourne has for a long time been classified as a regional migration centre, rather than a city one, so many of the skilled migrants coming to Victoria who could have settled in my city, where there are some skill shortages (not sure exactly which ones besides Engineering) are instead going to Melbourne.
My city has 80,000 people and a lot of advantages, especially in certain areas of employment (par exemple it has a very big IT centre now beside its university, which also has about 100 foreign students, an exchange agreement with a Uni in Paris, students from country areas and Melbourne too.
With the recent completion of a new IBM centre, experts are predicting we will have 1000 IT workers in Ballarat in that area (Greenhill Enterprise Centre, IBM Centre, Mt Helen) by the end of this year.
Melbourne housing prices continue to rise, and the Fast Rail project should be finished in 2005, linking my city to Melbourne in 65 minutes, and these are factors influencing many Melbourne people who are now relocating (with encouragement incentives and a lot of promotion from Steve Bracks, Victorian Premier) to my city.
Many of these live in Ballarat but commute by train to Melbourne each day.
Immigrants could do the same thing, without having to do the troublesome thing of having 2 houses, one in the bush and one in the city, etc (once the problem of the Regional Migration tag has been removed from Melbourne or something else done to fix the situation) My city hopes that soon it can have some of the migrants it needs and would like to have.
Basically, that's the story. There are many other cities classified in Victoria alone which are Rural/Regional, like Geelong, near Melbourne, with about 180,000 people, Bendigo, 80,000 people, which would of course have far better work prospects than tiny bush or isolated country towns.
Hope this helps.
Kate