The main driver of homelessness in Australia is housing costs – post-COVID rents, house prices and interest rates are all much higher. To house everyone, the housing system needs a major overhaul.
The shift to remote work has led to a population boom for towns close to Australia’s major cities. That boom threatens to change what makes those towns so appealing.
Can we now work from anywhere with an internet connection? We interviewed workers who left the city but held onto their jobs to see how they fared. One year on, some had no regrets. Others moved back.
Look beyond the fanfare about large infrastructure projects like Hells Gate and what we are left with is a largely business-as-usual budget for regional Australia
Community-run centres in regional and remote Australia are having positive impacts on students who were historically under-represented at university and at high risk of dropping out.
Regional NSW, home to a third of the state’s population, is still waiting for the promise of faster train travel to be delivered. Other states improved their regional services years ago.
The majority of country press audiences prefer to read their local paper in print than online. In fact, many said they would stop reading their papers if they went digital only.
The transition to 100% renewable energy will require a lot of land – mostly in regional Australia. This presents big challenges, and opportunities, for the farming sector.
Are regional cities like Toowoomba about to become hot property?
Porgo, Wikipeida
The pandemic has driven Australian workers and their employers to embrace the option of working remotely. And that has opened people’s eyes to the possibilities of living in regional Australia.
Rural patients’ self-reliance means they often wait until it’s too late to visit hospital, while the closing of state borders has restricted the movement of some fly-in fly-out health workers.
Australia lacks a coherent national approach to planning where settlement and growth happens. It’s time to take stock of our cities and regions and work together to improve outcomes across the nation.
According to the Australian Newsroom Mapping Project, there have been 200 contractions of news operations since March. But ‘news deserts’ were a growing problem long before coronavirus.
Small newspapers across Australia are closing or going digital-only in the economic fall-out from the coronavirus pandemic. This is what we need to do to save them.
Attraction and retention: the key issues to get more immigrants to settle in regional Australia.
Flickr/Toowoomba Region
Migrants who’ve settled in regional Australia find jobs, get on with the locals and feel safe. So the government wants to know how to encourage more migrants to move there.
Tongans gathered in the Sunraysia centre of Mildura to celebrate the Tongan team’s victory over Lebanon in the Rugby League World Cup in November 2017.
A greater focus on the well-established migrant populations and second-generation youth is crucial when planning for the social and economic well-being of rural and regional areas.
Newcastle, Australia’s second-biggest non-capital city. Research confirms just how important a local newspaper is to a local community.
Darren Pateman/AAP
Professor of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and Deputy Dean Research at Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, The University of Melbourne