By KATE BANVILLE
THERE are renewed calls for funding to flow to regional areas as Australia’s housing squeeze tightens its grip and forces pressure across government to do more, and quickly.
With the housing issue particularly nuanced, the Caller wanted to better understand the complexities through a regional Queensland lens.
But even when drilling into it, the potential solutions will be different depending on your geographic location, according to government lobbyists.
The Regional Australia Institute (RAI) has called for 40 per cent of the federal government’s $10 billion National Housing Australia Future Fund to go directly to regional areas.
The call, which was met with little support from within parliament, was among a suite of new policy, investment, and innovation recommendations from the National Regional Housing Summit recently held in Canberra.
“Look, it isn’t an easy one,” RAI chief executive Liz Ritchie (pictured) said.
“Because our sense is that there’s a reluctance to carve out percentages, that there’s a sense of enabling competition to play its way through the process which is alarming and concerning for us because invariably, some of our regional constituents probably won’t be able to compete in ways that others with larger resourcing can.
“So all we can continue to do is highlight that when it comes to that particular fund.”
There was also the proposal to see a town planning taskforce established, which would travel to under-resourced local government areas across regional Australia to fill skills shortages blamed for delaying development.
“The mobile planning squad was really well received (by attendees),” Ritchie said.
“I think understanding that solving the skills challenge in the short term will relieve some of the bottlenecks.
“This is something that was put on the table and will be seriously considered.”
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Further detail, including where the allocation of funding would come from or how staff resourcing would be achieved is yet to be worked out.
However, Ms Ritchie argued that without new approaches, the housing issues across Regional Australia would continue to be a “chicken and egg scenario” with communities unable to fill employment vacancies and grow local infrastructure.
In regional and remote areas, house prices are hitting record levels and getting closer to the city market, with median values over $605,000, RAI analysis shows.
“It’s why the Institute prosecutes a broad and holistic strategy to rebalance a nation through our Regionalisation Ambition Plan, for which housing has a strong place.”
Crunching the numbers on ambitious political policy
Economist Peter Faulkner, who resides on the Cassowary Coast in Far North Queensland said achieving drastic changes to the National Housing Australia Future Fund would be a particularly hard sell to the government, with competing political ideologies and elections at play.
“If this is a population versus accommodation balance then there’s an issue in the metropolitan areas as well, because there’s a lot of people there,” he said.
“So you can’t simply say, ‘Oh, we’re going to solve the problem in the regions – that’s clearly not enough.
“Apart from any other reason, most of the voters live there so that’s not going to happen.”
Despite his lack of enthusiasm for this particular idea, Faulkner praised the event’s organisers for continuing to maintain political pressure on the issue.
“As somebody who lives and works in the regions, anything that highlights the region’s is a positive,” he said.
“Most of the recommendations that they talk about [in their discussion parer] are opportunities for positive policy change.
“Most of them you can’t disagree with so the issue really is how is any of this possible?
“That is the question.”
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Local councils carrying the financial weight of future proofing communities
Pointing to numerous case studies presented at the national summit, Ritchie said local councils were coming up with creative solutions to meet their unique needs.
One of those highlighted was the council-led home building grant worth $20,000 to attract new residents to the Quilpie Shire.
“Certainly from a Queensland perspective, the CEO of Quilpie (Justin Hancock) did a beautiful job in advocating for his region,” she said.
“And opening the eyes of other decision makers and leaders at the conference around some of those very unique challenges that only rural and remote communities face because of the way financing is set up.”
The question of exactly which level of government is responsible for housing is becoming increasingly unclear given the issue continues to be managed differently across Shires, yet with the assistance of local government, state government, and federal government funding and grants.
Richie also flagged a proposal voiced by Shadow Housing Minister Michael Sukkar (pictured), following widespread acknowledgment by delegates that it was council’s who were currently carrying a big chunk of the financial burden and town planning responsibilities.
“[He said] we need to bypass the state [government] and hand the money where it’s most needed to local governments,” Ritchie told the Caller.
“And, you might call that controversial but I think the point he was trying to make is that the money needs to go to the hands that need it.
Faulkner said the role of council and its financial responsibilities was largely misunderstood within the community, arguing residents “couldn’t have it both ways with cheap rates as well as ample infrastructure”.
“As one example, the Cassowary Coast has phenomenally high rates and genuinely quite low service levels,” he explained.
“Part of the reason is we have incredibly high rainfall, which means we have more bridges and culverts per capita than anywhere else in the country and they have to be maintained so that’s a huge expense.
“We have a very large geographic footprint, which means we have a lot of roads, many of them unsealed which means there’s a lot of road maintenance and sewerage maintenance and water maintenance, and all of the infrastructure that comes with having a very widely dispersed population.”
Ritchie said about 350 people attended the one day event both in person and virtually, including delegates from the Australian Local Government Association (ALGA) as the national voice of local government.
Roughly 18 of Australia’s 537 councils were represented in person on the day, according to the event’s official attendee list.
“It was really brought home through the vast attendance base how diverse and nuanced the markets are,” she said.
“And so, you have to target those right solutions to the right places.
“You can’t just say “we’re going to bring forward a national grant system”, because it will have perverse outcomes.”
THE STATE OF THE REGIONAL HOUSING MARKET
* The median value of all dwellings in regions jumped by 54 per cent to $605,780 between March 2020 and December 2023, compared to a 29 per cent increase to $832,193 in the cities
* Rental vacancies are worsening, dropping to 1.2 per cent in September
* While capital city rents fell between 2020 and 2021, the height of COVID-19 lockdowns, regional rents continued to increase
* Flats or apartments make up just two to three per cent of the total housing stock in some regions, compared to 42 per cent in metro areas
* Monthly building approvals continue to decrease, a similar trend to the capital cities
* Population movement to the regions is almost 12 per cent above pre-pandemic levels
* The regions gained 166,000 new residents in the latest Census period
Source: The Regional Australia Institute’s national regional housing summit discussion paper