Regions ready to fire
BENDIGO and Adelaide
Bank boss Marnie Baker has called on governments to fully open parts of rural and regional Australia to help kickstart economic recovery from COVID-19.
Ms Baker said regional Australia had a hugely important part to play in the recovery from the pandemic, which had exposed a weakness in having 40 per cent of the country’s population living in Sydney and Melbourne.
“The population density in our capital cities doesn’t work well in a health crisis,” Ms Baker said. “There’s a lot of regions right across Australia that haven’t recorded any cases at all.
“I think there is a real opportunity here to kickstart the economy by opening up a lot of those regions first … and not waiting.”
Speaking on the Regional Australia Institute’s first “Regions Rising” webinar series last week, the Bendigobased managing director of the country’s fifth-largest bank said that while the pandemic had inflicted devastating impacts on many people and businesses, the social and economic changes that had accompanied it would ensure regional Australia bounced back stronger than ever.
“Big careers and big businesses do not have to revolve around big offices in big cities,” she said.
With the rise in people working remotely, that had never been more evident than in the past few months.
“It’s really clear to me that you don’t have to live where you work anymore, you can live where you love,” Ms Baker said.
She called on businesses to follow the lead of the Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, which is headquartered in Bendigo, and relocate or build a presence in the regions where people were commonly driven by resilience, innovation and a can-do attitude.
Ms Baker also called out city-centric decision-making, arguing that more of the nation’s leaders, whether they were in government, business or the not-for-profit sector, needed to come from rural and regional communities.
“It’s important that regional people are central to informing and shaping debates and the decision that are going to impact them,” she said.
“We see too often our city counterparts make the decisions and believe they are making the decision that are right for the regions without that input from the regions.”
Ms Baker was joined on the webinar titled “Regional recovery – what are we learning?” by the federal Minister for Regional Health, Regional Communications, and Local Government, Mark Coulton.
The forum was hosted by the Regional Australia Institute CEO Liz Ritchie.