Turning around a shrinking heartland

Australia’s heartland has been steadily losing residents for more than 20 years.

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It is a concept many Australians understand but few if any have seen mapped, until now.

It is the great Australian Red Zone, a community of 138 mostly remote local government areas that have lost population thus far in the 21st century. In June last year the Australian population was estimated by the ABS at 26.6 million, up eight million over the preceding 23 years.

This growth was largely confined to the centres, suburbs and edges of capital cities and to nearby lifestyle (sea-change, tree-change) zones.

However, across a series of contiguous local government areas stretching from Western Australia’s Kimberly coast to the western slopes of the Great Dividing Range, embracing 53 per cent of the Australian land mass, the resident population dropped from 571,000 in 2001 to 502,000 in 2024, a net loss of 70,000 residents, or 12 per cent.

About 2 per cent of the nation lives in this so-called Red Zone; it has been losing people at a rate of around 3000, or half a per cent, per year for more than 20 years.

This is important because this Red Zone is pivotal to Australia’s export success (and prosperity); it delivers essential services including healthcare (registered nurses for example), logistics (such as truck drivers), retail services (shop assistants) in support of local mining, grazing and cropping activities.

The big question is whether continued population loss from the Red Zone threatens the viability not just of local communities but also of local farming and mining enterprises.

In contrast, the Blue Zone comprises a far more familiar concept, that of Lifestyle Australia. This region comprises the mostly coastal and capital-city communities served by 395 local government areas whose collective population increased by 43 per cent (or eight million) over 23 years to reach 26 million. Australia doesn’t lack population growth; it lacks dissemination of much-needed skilled workers and others to the Red Zone.

I wonder what contribution the Red Zone’s 2 per cent of the Australian population (and a lesser proportion of the workforce) makes to the GDP. This is a key metric that should be made available to the mayors of the 138 LGAs comprising the Red Zone!

A further 14 local government areas positioned within the Blue Zone lost population over these years. Population losses in these (pink) municipalities are likely to be riven by factors such as farm-aggregation and changed local employment circumstances.

Worker and broader population losses in the Red Zone, on the other hand, are likely to result from structural, local issues such as poor soils making farming more marginal, as well as insufficient water supply or perhaps the fact that local mineral reserves are now all but spent.

The biggest single population loss from the Red Zone applied to the City of Broken Hill, down 3388 residents or 16 per cent over the 23 years to 2024. The Shire of Walgett in NSW, which includes the opal mining community of Lightning Ridge, lost 3292 residents or 20 per cent of its population base over the same time frame.

The rural NSW city of Broken Hill has suffered the biggest population loss in the century to date. Picture: Getty Images

Australia’s growth areas are well documented. Indeed there are five municipalities that have regularly added no less than 10,000 net new residents every year thus far this century: Brisbane, Gold Coast and Moreton in southeast Queensland, and Wyndham and Casey on the edges of Melbourne.

It is fair to say modern Australia is dominated by Blue Zone population and culture. Most job opportunities and population growth, most federal electorates, even Australia’s popular culture is city orientated including, for example, The Castle (1997), Moonee Ponds’ Edna Everage, inner-city hipsters and cafe society. There simply isn’t the same romanticism, humour and focus about life in remote and rural Australia as there is in city living.

Perhaps this is part of the problem in retaining local residents and workers; the joys and the challenges of life in remote Australia need to be better promoted.

Indeed, it’s time to refocus on, or at least to widen our perspective as to what constitutes modern Australia. The city-based, the lifestyle-zone-based, quality of life enjoyed by 26 to 27 million Australians is in (large) part enabled by the prosperity delivered from remote but subsiding communities.

The great challenge is to ensure communities in remote Australia and especially across the Red Zone can continue to deliver services to local businesses and residents.

Australia’s Red Zone is vast; it stretches 3744km from west to east. It is thinly populated. It requires rail, road, port and airport infrastructure to be built and maintained. Locally based workers also need local schools for their kids as well as shops, healthcare, maybe even church services.

Local farmers require access to fuel depots, machinery repair, grain and livestock transportation facilities. These are the jobs, these are the workers, that make the Red Zone work for the benefit of all Australians.

The infrastructure and property development industry has a role to play in ensuring mining and farming activities in remote Australia can continue well into the 21st century.

And yet perhaps because of its scale, its thin population base, its geographic location “out the back” of each state capital, Australia’s Red Zone is scarcely noticed or appreciated in popular culture.

I must say I am confronted by the scale of the Red Zone and how close it extends to our capital cities. There’s a relatively thin band of tree-change living (and farming) that separates city-based Australians from our nation’s shrinking interior.

I say it’s time to invest in the communities that deliver ­export wealth such as the mining, ­livestock and cropping activities that dominate the Red Zone, ­arguably the heartland of today’s Australia.

Perhaps the 138 Australian ­municipalities that have lost population across the first quarter of the 21st century should get together and form an association of common interests that deals with common problems including, for example, the retention and attraction of labour and of essential services.

Perhaps the Australians of our shrinking interior might like to create a platform that presses for support, that compares ­strategies, that puts the case as to why we need more people, more workers in remote and regional Australia.

It’s time to get to know and to embrace the great Australian Red Zone.

Bernard Salt is founder and executive director of The Demographics Group; data by data scientist Hari Hara Priya Kannan