One person moves to Victoria every five minutes, but unfortunately for regional Victoria, most people, according to current population figures, settle in Melbourne.
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Current projections estimate Melbourne will have a population of eight million by 2050, while the whole of regional Victoria will amount to two million.
And 86.7 per cent of overseas settlers in Victoria currently chose our capital city.
That’s according to data supplied by a local taskforce aimed at addressing the yawning population gap.
The Greater Bendigo Region Population Policy Taskforce, part of a broader Victorian Coalition taskforce, has been established to guide the state opposition’s long-term policy for population growth in regional areas.
State Member for Kew, Tim Smith, said housing affordability would be a significant factor in encouraging decentralisation across Victoria.
“The question is do we have a public transport network to support people that want to live in Bendigo but work in Melbourne,” he said.
“We’re not thinking of something that doesn’t happen in the rest of the world. We have to look at ways of drastically improving our public transport network to enable that sort of a commute to Melbourne from regional centres like Ballarat, Bendigo and Geelong.
“We don’t want to see Melbourne to continue to expand forever, we need to use what we’ve got (infrastructure) in the regions.”
Making Bendigo an educational centre of excellence, akin to regional towns like Oxford and Cambridge, UK, that boast two of the most successful universities in the world, was a proposal suggested at the meeting.
A number of stakeholders, including representatives from the City of Greater Bendigo and La Trobe University, were present on Monday.
City of Greater Bendigo strategy manager Trevor Budge said the current city-centric population and policy trend was “worrying”.
Decentralising government departments to create jobs was another suggestion during the meeting.
Member for Northern Victoria Luke O’Sullivan said 77 per cent of Victoria’s population lived in Melbourne, which was unsustainable.
“Victoria is leading the nation for population growth, adding 127,500 people in 2016. More than 90 per cent of those people are living in Melbourne so we have to look at what regional areas can offer,” he said.
Bendigo had the second highest rate of economic growth in regional Victoria last financial year, but lagged behind much of metropolitan Melbourne where growth outstripped that figure by up to 10 times.
Bendigo’s gross domestic product increased by 0.4 per cent in 2015-16.