At the Regional Futures Forum in Albury last month, one of Australia’s most respected demographers made the case that the regions aren’t a footnote to the national story… they are the story.
“We have what the rest of the world will increasingly want over the next half century. That makes us a valuable commodity. It makes regional Australia a particularly valuable commodity.”
There is a map Bernard Salt keeps returning to. It appeared in The Australian about six months ago, and it does what the best maps do: it tells a story that statistics alone cannot. In blue, population growth. In red, population loss. Plotted across the Australian continent from 2001 to 2024, the picture is striking, and deliberately uncomfortable.
“Get up high from outer space,” he told the audience gathered at the Regional Development Australia Murray-hosted event last month. “Look down on the Australian continent and say, ‘what have you done with this, in the 21st century?’ “
The answer, in Salt’s telling, is that we imported five million people and added three million more, and then clustered nearly all of them along the coast. Meanwhile, 120 local government areas covering 53 per cent of the Australian continent have been quietly losing population: around 3,000 people a year, including 2,000 workers.
This was not a lament. Salt, one of Australia’s most respected demographers and social commentators, does not trade in laments. It was a provocation and, more than that, a call for the kind of national ambition he believes Australia has the capacity for but too rarely exercises.
A Nation in the Right Place at the Right Time
Salt opened his keynote, titled Regions Reimagined, with a question he said every young Australian should be asking themselves: is this country a good bet?
His answer was unequivocal. Drawing on new data from the United Nations, Salt outlined the concept of “peak humanity” – the projection that the global population will reach its maximum of just over 10 billion people in approximately 50 years, before stabilising. From the current eight billion, that is a 25 per cent increase. And a 25 per cent increase in the number of human beings on the planet means, roughly, a 25 per cent increase in demand for food, energy, resources and space.
“Which countries on the planet deliver food, energy, resources, commodities, space?” he asked. “That’s us.”
The implications for regional Australia, in Salt’s framing, are profound. The nation already controls the resources of an entire continent – a claim, he noted with characteristic dry precision, made by just 28 million people. The International Monetary Fund‘s most recent GDP per capita rankings place Australia at number 11 in the world, up from 24th just 30 years ago. And the trajectory, Salt argued, is no accident.
“Someone has put a rocket under Australia,” he observed. That rocket has been fuelled by globalisation and by selling coal, gas, iron ore, food and resources (principally to China) over the past three decades. The wealth has flowed into housing, superannuation, quality of life and travel. We have become, quietly and almost without noticing, one of the richest nations on earth.
“I am outrageously ambitious for our country,” Salt said. “I see this as an opportunity. I see it as an opportunity for regional Australia.”
The question he put to the forum was whether we are being ambitious enough about what comes next, whether we are genuinely prepared to act on the position we now occupy, or whether we will allow the moment to pass.
The Agribusiness Gap
Central to his argument was a pointed critique of Australia’s failure to build a globally scaled agribusiness enterprise. Salt presented the 10 most valuable publicly listed corporations in the United States by market capitalisation. Eight of the 10 are technology companies, each founded within a single generation. America, he said, has a grassroots belief in entrepreneurship that allows it to create a global business in 30 years.
He then presented the Australian equivalent. BHP anchors the list, the world’s largest mining company. But where, Salt asked, is the Australian equivalent in food and agriculture?
He pointed to Fonterra, the New Zealand dairy cooperative formed by the merger of the country’s North and South Island dairy boards in 2001, purpose-built to sell milk to China at precisely the moment China’s appetite for it was growing. New Zealand, with five million people, had the strategic imagination to consolidate. Australia, with its fragmented state-based dairy boards, did not.
“We would not see the bigger picture,” Salt said. “We have the assets, we have the capabilities, but sometimes you need the vision.”
The story he told about a wheat-belt town three hours east of Perth, crystallised the point at a human scale. A farmer there operates a million-dollar harvesting machine to bring in a wheat crop worth US$20 million, and has three weeks to do it. When that machine breaks down during peak harvest, a diesel mechanic cannot be found. The workforce simply isn’t there.
Salt’s proposed solution was characteristically practical and expansive in the same breath: approach the mayors of surrounding towns, go to Chicago and meet with the head of distribution at John Deere, and negotiate to make the region a dedicated training and mechanics hub for the Western Australian wheat belt. Think bigger, he urged. Stop importing the technology and the expertise. Build it here.
“We need outrageous ambition to actually set the agenda in this discussion about where we want Australia to be in the next generation,” he said. “We are not thinking big enough.”
What the Red Bits Are Telling Us
The population map Salt presented is not, he was careful to say, a story of failure. It is a story of preference – and preferences, once understood, can be worked with.
“The Australian people are talking to us through this map,” he said. “They’re telling us about their preferences, their obsessions, their priorities, their values. These people are obsessed with lifestyle.”
That obsession, Salt argued, runs as a consistent thread through Australian life from the post-war years to the present. The three-bedroom brick veneer was a better quality of life than an East End tenement in London. The sea change and tree change movements of recent decades are refinements of the same fundamental drive. Bunnings and Harvey Norman, he observed wryly, are among Australia’s most prosperous retailers for a reason.
But lifestyle preference alone does not fully explain the hollowing out of the interior. Salt noted that Australia has not established a new town in its interior since Roxby Downs in 1976. We want the resources of the interior – the minerals, the grain, the beef – but we have organised our economy around flying workers in and out rather than building the communities that would sustain them. Fly-in, fly-out is not a regional strategy. It is an absence of one.
The 120 red-zone local government areas contain around 500,000 people. That’s roughly two per cent of the national population living across 53 per cent of the continent. Salt’s challenge to the mayors of those communities was direct: why don’t all 120 get together and declare that they are in an existential crisis? There are organised clubs for coastal-change councils and peri-urban councils, he pointed out. There is no coalition for municipalities facing demographic contraction. He believes there should be, one that meets in Canberra, makes its case to the nation and refuses to let the conversation be quietly buried in departmental reports.
“I want to see the red bleeding stopped,” he said. “Or at least the worker outflow stopped. The Australian people should get behind it.”
A Demographic Tailwind and What to Do With It
It was in the demographic section of his keynote that Salt deployed one of his most striking contrasts. Alongside his chart showing Australia’s population growth profile over the next decade, positive across almost every age cohort, he described the equivalent chart for Japan: “It goes negative, negative, negative, negative, negative.”
“Which country would you rather be in?” he asked. “Which country offers you the best opportunities if you are an aspiring entrepreneur? Which country offers the best opportunity if you prefer to live in the regions?”
The answer he gave was Australia. Not because the challenges are trivial, but because the underlying structural conditions – demographic growth, resource wealth, geographic position, political stability – are as favourable as anywhere on earth.
The cohort that stands to reshape regional Australia most immediately is the millennial generation: seven million Australians aged in their late twenties to early forties, the children of the baby boomers, now moving through the life stage at which the inner-city apartment loses its appeal. Four bedrooms, a front garden, a backyard, a dedicated workspace. These things cannot be found in North Fitzroy or Bondi at any reasonable price.
“I’m going to reinvent myself,” Salt said, ventriloquising the millennial calculus. “I’m going to turn up to Wagga. I’m going to turn up to Albury.”
This migration of skills, entrepreneurship and spending power into regional centres is, he argued, one of the most significant structural opportunities the regions will see in a generation.
He brought that analysis to bear directly on the RDA Murray region – nine municipalities, around 150,000 people, growing at approximately 1,200 a year. It is a lifestyle region in the most straightforward sense: the river, the snowfields and the broader landscape are doing real work in drawing people in. But the age profile tells a more complex story. Younger residents continue to leave for cities, as they do across regional Australia. What is more notable is the pronounced inflow of people in their sixties and seventies. The aged care and NDIS sectors in Albury-Wodonga are almost certainly growing as a consequence, Salt argued, and ought to be the subject of deliberate strategic planning rather than reactive accommodation. And with international students increasingly visible in the city’s streets and cafes, the demand for student and worker accommodation is one Salt would not leave to chance either.
A Nation That Must Choose
There was a philosophical dimension to Salt’s keynote that moved beyond economics and demographics into something closer to civic responsibility. Australia claims sovereignty over an entire continent. It controls the resources of that continent. It is, by measured ranking, the 11th richest nation on earth. And yet it concentrates its people, its investment and its imagination in a narrow coastal strip and largely turns its back on the interior.
“At some point from 1788 to today, people populated the interior,” Salt said. “Saw that as an opportunity. Built towns. Previous generations. We are conceding it.”
He stopped short of prescribing exactly what should be done, because that was not his role in the room. His role, and he plays it with authority, is to hold up the data and ask the harder question underneath it: what kind of country do we want to be? The arable land of the planet is already fully planted. The global demand for grain will need to rise by 25 per cent in the next half century. Australia’s agribusiness sector has the land, the know-how and the logistical reach but not yet the scale, the ambition or the political will to meet that moment.
Peak humanity is coming. The demand for Australian food, water, space and resources will only grow. The regions that produce these things are, in many cases, quietly contracting. And Australia, despite its extraordinary wealth, has not yet built a single global agribusiness enterprise commensurate with its agricultural inheritance.
Salt left Albury with no tidy resolutions on offer. What he left instead was a framework – expansive, data-grounded and quietly urgent – for understanding what is genuinely at stake in regional Australia, and what it might look like to respond with the seriousness the moment requires. The data, he made clear, is not waiting for us to catch up.
“I see this as a national opportunity,” he said. “It should be on a national agenda. It’s that important.”
The Regional Futures Forum was hosted by RDA Murray in Albury on 26 and 27 March 2026.
Article: Liz Ginis, Communications & Marketing Manager, RDA Sydney
Images: Courtesy Bernard Salt, The Demographics Group