As Australia’s frontier was developed by its newest settlers, its prosperity grew, as did its standing in the modern world and, at Federation, two-thirds of the country’s people lived in the regions.
Then in the 1950s, as technology evolved and society changed, there was a population shift. Our coastal cities grew and grew, and today Australia is one of the most urbanised nations in the OECD, with two-thirds of the population residing in a handful of capitals. But is this the best and right path forward for Australia? At the Regional Australia Institute (RAI) our economic modelling says not.
In 2019, the RAI published the paper Regional Population Growth – Are We Ready?,1 which looked at the economics of alternative Australian settlement patterns. At its core it examined our country’s projected population increase over the coming 40 years within three hypothetical situations: Base case, a status quo scenario formulated on Australian Bureau of Statistics and state government projections of expected population growth concentrated in existing major metropolitan areas; concentrated regional growth, where some expected growth in major metropolitan areas is diverted towards proximate regional cities; and dispersed regional growth where expected metropolitan growth is diverted towards both regional cities and more distant communities.
