Planning for Fewer People

Small towns in the North West and Central West of Queensland need to plan for a future based on fewer people, a University of Queensland professor will tell a regional forum at Richmond on Thursday, May 9.

Bob Stimson, Professor of Geographical Sciences and Planning, and Director of the Centre for Research into Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures, says that by around 2021, six of the shires in those regions will have populations of under 500 people. Fifteen out of 19 of the local authorities will have populations under 2000. Even the populations of the bigger places—like Mt Isa and Longreach—will have stabilised or declined slightly, while significant growth will have occurred only in the Flinders and Mornington Shires.

But while the rural and remote localities in outback Queensland will be losing people, many of those places should continue to do quite well economically.

“The big issue for those communities to grapple with is to plan for futures involving fewer people employed in mining, pastoral and agricultural industries where levels of productivity per worker are increasing. Many of those who are left will be doing quite well,” Professor Stimson will tell the Richmond forum.

“This scenario is quite common across rural and regional Australia where fewer people are needed to produce high levels of output from the resource industries. But it does put into question the long-term survivability of some of the smaller towns.”

Professor Stimson will tell the forum that over the last decade only Burke Shire and Cloncurry have attracted national shares of private and public sector investment in non-residential construction at rates above their shares of national population. Most of the local shires in the Central West and North West regions have been attracting investment shares running at under 40 percent of their population shares.”

“Most of the communities in those regions are generating significantly higher levels of household income tax revenue relative to the levels of commonwealth benefits households receive,” Professor Stimson will tell the forum. “This means those communities have relatively low levels of household dependence on transfer payments, particularly when compared to many of the rapid population growth towns in coastal areas of Queensland and New South Wales where dependency levels are much higher.”

There is a need for the shires of North West and Central West Queensland to collaborate to undertake strategic economic and community development planning. “Every community needs to be involved to develop plans that are realistic and feasible to achieve,” Professor Stimson will tell the forum. “From time-to-time all communities need to take stock of the trends that are impacting them in terms of population, employment and investment, and to consider in detail the full range of risks—both external and internal to their region—that will affect the opportunities and place constraints on the type of future that communities can expect to achieve.”

“That might involve planning for decline rather than planning for growth.”

Professor Stimson will tell the forum that part of the future for rural and regional Australia might be policy to facilitate the voluntary movement of some people out of small towns in decline in order to relocate to large regional centres where their quality of life—in terms of job opportunities, access to services, education for children, and provision of health services for the elderly—will be better.

Media: For further information, contact Professor Bob Stimson (mobile 0411 020 627) or Jan King at UQ Communications (mobile 0413 601 248).