Australians are on the move - big time

Regions are, therefore, increasingly at the mercy of individual decisions about location, and these are fed by the state of the local economy and the capacity of places to provide a platform for wealth creation.

What does all this mean for regional development? What, if anything, can communities and regions do to reduce churn, in particular, to retain the new people who come? And what does continuing churn do to a community's social capital, propensity to collaborate, desire to invest, and so on?

This would be another column in itself. But briefly, there are two ways of looking at high population churn. One is, to use a phrase I learned from my old sheep farming buddies from Western Victoria, that a certain "hybrid vigour" enriches local economies and communities, providing new ideas and innovation as well as a desire to get involved in the community. The other is that it is hard to create the social capital we need for our communities with such high turnover. Potentially, it is hard to newcomers to find the way into a community so as to be able to contribute collaboratively. Does this mean that the place ends up being "run" by a relative few who, consciously or not, exclude those who might otherwise make a valuable contribution. Research in rural communities in the USA shows that in-migrants value civic opportunity highly.

And what this means for people attraction strategies is definitely worth further investigation. Many of these marketing campaigns are undertaken simply because "everyone is doing it", or through a misplaced belief of regional leaders and practitioners that simply selling a region's lifestyle will sway potential movers to make the big leap.

Paul Collits is an Associate Professor at the University of Southern Queensland's Fraser Coast campus and Research Director for the Economic Development and Enterprise Collaboration