Cook’s vision for the future: WA’s big regional towns are about to get bigger

West Australian Premier Roger Cook wants the state’s regional population share to double to ease pressure on the Perth metro area.

The target is open-ended, but Cook said he envisioned large regional centres like Bunbury, Port Hedland, Karratha, Albany and Geraldton eventually developing into major regional hubs, similar to big cities in far north Queensland.

WA Premier Roger Cook wants to see the state’s regional centres grow.Credit: Trevor Collens

“My vision for the state is that we see significant decentralisation of the state’s population into our regional centres,” he said.

“I look at Queensland and those big towns like Mackay, Rockhampton, Townsville, Cairns, where you’ve seen significant urban areas around those large regional cities – in Western Australia we haven’t achieved that, and it really should be something that we aspire to.”

Cook revealed this aspiration ahead of Western Australia’s population clock ticking over 3 million on Thursday morning, capping off an extraordinary three years of post-COVID growth driven mostly by overseas migration.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated about 570,000 lived regionally in WA – about 20 per cent of the total population share.

If that share doubled today, it would mean more than 1.1 million people living outside the Perth metro area.

WA’s largest regional city is Bunbury, with a population of about 92,000. In contrast, Queensland has five urban areas outside the capital Brisbane with populations of more than 100,000, including Townsville, Cairns and Mackay.

Perth has borne the brunt of the WA’s population explosion, with 81,318 new residents moving to the city in the 2022-23 financial year – a growth rate of 3.6 per cent, the highest rate in the country.

It is this extraordinary growth that continues to put pressure on the state’s housing industry, environment, infrastructure, schools, and health system.

Cook said the continued diversification of the state’s economy would help the push for decentralisation, which would help address Perth’s urban sprawl.

“It may not happen in my time, but it is an important goal to make sure that we decentralise the state’s population so that we just don’t see the continued growth of the big urban fringe in Perth,” he said.

“You’ll continue to see the strong growth in Bunbury, but I’m anticipating large growth in Karratha, Geraldton and Hedland as well as part of that at that diversification of the economy.”

Cook said the government would need to expand education and health services in major regional centres to ensure residents had all they need.

“As a state government, we’re going to have to do more to make sure that there are larger schools providing more in terms of the courses that are available, so kids don’t leave those regional centres when they go to high school,” he said.

“You have to make sure that the hospitals are operating at a level which gives people confidence to grow their families in these areas, so this is all part of that important economic growth story.”

One of the state’s most distinguished property and housing experts, Professor Steven Rowley, buys Cook’s argument for decentralisation, but questioned the open-ended nature of the population target.

“If it is 100 years then it is feasible, if it is a decade it most certainly is not,” said the director of the Curtin Research Centre’s Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute.

“Major changes would need to occur in WA in order to see such a shift in patterns of population growth and these changes would require massive investment from government and the private sector and considerable buy-in from the public.”

Rowley said the main barriers associated with the growth of any city were housing, infrastructure, and employment – and the latter two would need government investment and incentives to materialise.

He said delivering housing to regional areas was also difficult due to the state’s lack of building capacity and various challenges presented by building in the regions.

“Preparing suitable land, delivering the infrastructure to service that land and then subsequently the population (health, education etc) is extremely expensive and requires long-term planning and financial commitment,” he said.

“It is not as simple as unlocking land for housing development in regional areas, there need to be jobs to support the population as well as the services necessary for modern life.”

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