We’re looking for local councils to work with us

As part of the RAI’s 2019 Shared Inquiry Program, we are looking at population attraction and retention across mid-sized towns in regional Australia (those with populations between 5,000 and 50,000 residents).

While jobs, cost of living, and family considerations are often a reason for leaving the city, we are interested in finding out what makes people settle in one particular regional town or city as opposed to another.

High demand in regions for professionals and highly skilled tradespeople mean that workers and their families can increasingly choose where they’d like to live. Research shows that these people are attracted to places that they assess as ‘liveable’. This means that the liveability of a town is becoming increasingly important in any attempts to increase or maintain populations.

The RAI is looking to work with councils that have focused on population attraction and worker retention in their communities. Specifically, we’re looking for councils that have used evidence to develop and action population retention and/or worker attraction strategies or to target particular kinds of potential residents (such as families or professional workers). This work can be at the community, Local Government Area (LGA) or regional level.

We’d like to use this information in two keys ways:

• We’ll highlight best-practice lessons for a ‘policy toolkit’ that we are building as part of the Mid-Sized Towns Inquiry Theme; and

• We’ll look at these strategies and actions in the context of the population flow in and out of your LGA between 2011 and 2016 and share our analysis with each participating LGA.

If you think this work fits with your local area, please contact the RAI. Or to find out more, please call us on 02 62603733. You can also email Kylie Bourne, Lead Researcher, [email protected].