Places Rory’s Ramble

Both sides of government have been trying to find a solution to the problem of getting people to live in peri-urban areas.

COVID-19, with its new regime of working from home, often well outside the city, may be proving itself a solution.

Back in the late 2000s, then-Planning Minister Justin Madden was famously critical of McMansions, referring to them as ‘housing obesity’, and calling for an end to them.

“At a time when we need to minimise our consumption of energy and water, many of us are living in houses that consume more power or water than we need,” he said.

Then the Global Financial Crisis hit and solved the Planning Minister’s conundrum. Post-GFC, people started to accept, and build, more modest homes on smaller, more affordable blocks.

You can draw property activity parallels with the current COVID era and efforts to get people to better utilise the infrastructure of peri-urban towns, to entice people to work in these towns –in particular, enticing immigrants to Australia to work in periurban cities and towns.

The Government has been trying to encourage people to live in peri-urban areas for a long time, and now COVID-19 has solved that problem. People are seeing they don’t need to go to the office.

Last year, the Federal Government tried to increase incentives to get professionals such as doctors and engineers to live and work in regional cities.

Those policies have had limited success. Certainly, in the case of Geelong – where the NDIS, Worksafe and other government agencies have been decentralised – they have made a positive impact on growth.

Sometimes a force majeure event, such as COVID, is a much stronger incentive than all the government policies to awaken people to the benefits of regional living.

While demand in Melbourne has oscillated since March, areas like Bendigo and Ballarat have seen a surge in sales. People are realising they can participate in meetings and service clients in their own home via Zoom, Teams and many other platforms. Employers are accepting the workability of home offices and are considering post-Covid options.

In regional cities such as Geelong, the secret is already out, families are flocking there in droves. The Armstrong growth corridor is out-performing some Melbourne corridors. Two of our own staff, and one of our planners, have purchased at our Armstrong Geelong community as first home buyers.

Rory Costelloe Executive Director, Villawood Properties

Our media buyer is selling up in Brighton to live the dream in Clunes, and plans to just train to Melbourne a day or two a week.

As I mentioned last article, there is presently a lull in immigration. When we have a vaccine available and feel safe again, I believe the Federal Government will open the floodgates to large-scale immigration to boost the economy.

It’s very important a portion of these immigrants be offered incentives to work in peri-urban and regional areas so that growth is enjoyed across the country.

KPMG’s chief economist Dr Brendan Rynne says net overseas migration gives us a demographic dividend that enables us to reinvigorate our population with younger people into the workforce.

KPMG says that without a vaccine in the next two years, Australia’s population in 10 years could be 28 million – rather than the 29 million the Australian Bureau of Statistics expected before COVID-19 struck.

It argues this would hit the economy to the tune of $117 billion over the period and boost the age of the workforce. This equates to an $80 billion drop in household disposable income —$2800 a person.

This underscores yet again the importance of looking after our peri-urban and regional areas and their economies with incentives targeted to attract more migrants.