There is more to regional policy than big, well meant dollars and buzz words

Despite the current uplift in spending on, and interest in, regional Australia, we continue to lack a sophisticated debate about regional policy in this country.

Policymakers still fail to ask the right "prior questions" about regional development – what is regional policy for? What can it reasonably achieve? Who is responsible for regional development? What drives regional growth and decline? When and where should governments intervene? At which regional scale should policies be enacted?

Spending on infrastructure is a classic example. How do we know that spending billions on regional infrastructure is better than (say) supporting innovation and entrepreneurship in regions?

The answers to these questions are not straightforward, of course. If they were, governments would have nailed them already. But we can do better than simply funding a regional development committee in every region but giving it no real power, or giving every region an infrastructure project every year or so, or banging on endlessly with buzz words like "localism". Addressing these questions properly might even give regional development a better name.