Elsie Adamo
REGIONS Rising, an event hosted by the Regional Australia Institute (RAI), is coming to Mount Gambier to help policymakers with regional housing.
The event will be a forum for people in the region to hear about how things are being done well in other regional areas of the State, and how Mount Gambier and the Limestone Coast fits into the bigger picture.
Chief economist of the institute Dr Kim Houghton will be attending the event in Mount Gambier.
It is the second in a series of conferences on housing.
“Our first one was in Bendigo where we released a report called ‘Building the Good Life’ which is our discussion paper on regional housing,” Dr Houghton said.
“There is less analysis in this one and more examples of what communities and businesses are doing to address regional housing shortages in their own areas, and most of the examples will be from South Australia.”
Dr Houghton said it would be a fantastic opportunity for locals to hear how things could be done differently.
“There is some interesting stuff being done by business and by communities of different sizes in different parts of regional SA so we will be hearing from them,” Dr Houghton said.
“And most importantly from my point of view, what regions are doing without waiting for Government to fix things, they are just getting on with it and doing it themselves. “
As the region suffers from a housing and rental shortage, Dr Houghton said it is important for policy to dive deeper into the reasoning behind why it might be happening.
“We will be releasing a bit of new research which unpacks a little bit further how many different types of housing markets there are in regional Australia,” he said.
“It shows that there are five different regional markets depending on things like rate of population growth, rate of price growth or rental availability.
“There are different factors affecting different types of regions and what we will be hearing from at the conference is how people have addressed those factors that are relevant to their region.”
The event will be held on the morning of Tuesday, May 10, with in-person and online tickets available.
More information can be found on the RAI website.
