Our food, our energy, our minerals and our water all come from beyond the city limits.

The health of the bush shapes the prosperity of the capitals where most of us live.

When regional towns thrive, they anchor supply chains, create jobs, and sustain the social fabric that keeps communities connected.

When they decline, we feel it in higher food prices, slower exports and a loss of the cultural diversity that defines our national story. 

Our friends at the Australian Bureau of Statistics divide the nation into three “remoteness areas”: Major cities, regional Australia, and remote Australia.

Two of these three, the cities and the outback, dominate the headlines. 

Australia is the most urbanised country in the world in the sense that we have the highest share of the population living in just the five biggest cities (disregarding city-states like Singapore, of course).

Housing stories, cultural stories, sporting events, big rock concerts all tend to be big-city stories. Yet thanks to Steve Irwin and Crocodile Dundee, the international perception of Australia is still one of the wild and remote outback. 

But what about the middle child of remoteness areas – what about regional Australia? 

At the last count (June 2025), 25 per cent of us (seven million people) lived in an area the ABS classifies as regional. In 2001, that share was 28 per cent. 

We keep concentrating more of our population growth in the big cities. In the process, regional Australia continues to lose relative importance, at least politically, as its share of voters shrinks. 

Overall, regional Australia still grew over the past 25 years, but at a lower rate ( 29 per cent) than the major cities ( 50 per cent).

Despite two decades of regionalisation efforts, we turn evermore into a big-city nation. 

Successive federal governments........

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