From the Chair - September 2021

Welcome to the first newsletter for Regional Cities New South Wales, our new quarterly bulletin to keep you up to date on the work of the alliance.  The newsletter will provide you with an overview of our key policy work, recent advocacy and a snapshot of what’s ahead.

Despite the ongoing challenges with COVID-19 our alliance keeping focused on our mission to build productive, liveable and connected regions. Despite the lockdowns, our Board has been extremely busy working with key stakeholders on some of the critical issues for regional cities in New South Wales.

Since we re-signed the Memorandum of Understanding with the New South Wales Government, we have met with both the Premier The Hon Gladys Berejiklian MP and the Deputy-Premier The Hon John Barilaro MP to advocate for the needs of New South Wales (NSW) regional cities.

These meetings have been very timely as regional cities are on the agenda with many Sydneysiders. The Australian Bureau of Statistics has revealed the March quarter to 2021 had the highest migration to regional Australia on record – 66,300 people.  The attractiveness of regional cites is set to continue with 1 in 10 Australian workers likely to increase their pattern of working from home to 2-3 days per week according to Infrastructure Australia (IA) research. 

However, the shift to regional Australia has severely impacted the availability of housing, with regional Australia’s annual rental growth hitting 11.3% in June 2021, the highest annual growth since Core Logic’s rental index commenced in 2005.  Our board has been working with the Regional Housing Taskforce to investigate potential policy solutions to overcome the shortage of affordable housing.

There is much work to do to meet this demand and my colleagues from Regional Cities NSW are focused on working with the NSW Government to achieve this.