As Australia moves through another federal election campaign, a quarter of a million new voters in the nation’s outer suburbs remain largely invisible in political discourse. These are not marginal communities in the cultural or economic sense; they are the nation’s most dynamic zones of growth, diversity, and aspiration. Yet successive governments continue to ignore the fundamental injustices embedded in how we plan, fund, and imagine these places.
The suburbs on the edge of our cities are often reduced to pejorative shorthand: dormitory suburbs, car-dependent sprawl, cultural voids. But this narrative is outdated and harmful. It shifts attention away from the systemic failures that underpin suburban disadvantage and fuels a policy culture that treats outer suburban growth areas as an afterthought. In reality, these places are where the future of Australia is being forged. We need to start treating them accordingly.
Since the last federal election, the population in outer metropolitan Growth Areas has surged by nearly 550,000. Australia’s 29 Growth Area councils (which meet the greenfield residential land use and more than 2 per cent population growth rate criteria) have absorbed one-third of the nation’s total population increase, despite comprising only 6 per cent of local governments. These areas are disproportionately young, diverse, and aspirational.
Infrastructure and service planning have not kept pace with population growth. Greenfield developments stretch across paddocks without adequate provision of schools, transport, health services, or community hubs. The result is a deeply inequitable geography where access to basic services is defined by postcode rather than need.
According to data from RMIT’s Australian Urban Observatory, residents in Growth Areas have:
- 37% lower access to public transport;
- 48% lower access to healthcare services;
- 21% lower access to education;
- 68% less access to sports and leisure facilities;
- 44% lower access to arts and cultural facilities.
These disparities affect convenience, entrench disadvantage, constrain opportunity, and diminish wellbeing. The communities being built in these areas are not failures of imagination or ambition. They are failures of public policy.
The 2025/26 Federal Budget offered some welcome cost-of-living relief but failed to confront the deeper structural inequalities affecting outer suburban Australia. While funding was allocated to major transport projects like the Western Freeway in Victoria, rail corridor preservation in southwest Sydney and Kwinana Freeway in Western Australia, there was no continuation of the Thriving Suburbs Program, a critical initiative that provided funding for community infrastructure in high-growth areas.
Despite their comparatively small number, Growth Area councils received a third of total Thriving Suburbs and Urban Precincts and Partnerships (uPPP) funding, a testament to the programs’ need and effectiveness. Yet more than $360 million in shovel-ready community infrastructure projects remain unfunded, while the blind spot in local government funding continues to widen.
It is tempting to see this as a question of resource distribution. But this is a deeper issue about how we value communities. Our national urban policy, with its noble aims of liveable, equitable, and sustainable cities, needs to be accompanied by a dedicated, long-term investment framework that includes growth areas at the centre.
Outer suburbs are not a policy problem to be fixed. They are central to the solution. They are the mainstay of Australia’s housing supply, absorbing much of the growth driven by migration, affordability pressures, and post-pandemic lifestyle shifts. If managed well, they can model sustainable, inclusive urban development for the rest of the country.
But this will require a shift in how we think about suburban life. It means rejecting the false dichotomy between inner and outer city. It means funding libraries, sports grounds, arts centres and healthcare clinics with the same urgency as roads and rail. It means acknowledging that liveability is not a luxury but a right.
The invisibility of these communities in national debate is not due to their lack of voice. Local governments in Growth Areas are doing the work: planning, advocating, innovating. But they are too often left navigating complex challenges with threadbare resources. One-off grants and project-specific funding cannot substitute for a coherent, long-term national strategy.
Australia’s Growth Areas are now home to more than 5.6 million people. That’s around one in five Australians. These are not fringe places, they are the present and future of our cities. One in four Australian children now grows up in an outer metro suburb. The decisions we make today about their schools, their streets, their hospitals and their community centres will shape the nation for generations.
Elections are moments for reflection. They offer a rare pause in the machinery of government to ask: who are we governing for? If outer suburbs are seen merely as electoral battlegrounds rather than civic priorities, the injustice will persist. But if we choose to listen to these communities, we may find not just votes, but a roadmap to a more just, liveable and inclusive Australia.
Climate risk is another pressing and too-often ignored reality facing Australia’s outer suburbs. These areas are already feeling the direct and indirect impacts of climate change, from extreme weather events to heat stress, flooding, and infrastructure disruption. The very system of human-made structures that supports these communities from homes and roads to libraries and recreation centres is at risk.
Growth area councils are on the frontlines. They manage key infrastructure and oversee planning approvals for new development. And yet, federal and state adaptation strategies too often overlook these councils, despite their crucial role in climate resilience. Embedding climate risk and adaptation planning into land use policies, building codes, and infrastructure decisions is no longer optional. It must become business as usual, with decisions grounded in accurate, usable climate data.
We consistently advocate that new communities should not be established in areas identified as high-risk under future climate scenarios. Yet, this precautionary principle is still not fully embedded in planning systems. The populations of growth areas tend to be younger, more culturally diverse, with a higher proportion of First Nations residents, and are disproportionately more vulnerable to climate shocks. This makes climate justice inseparable from social justice in these regions.
Equally urgent is the need for data and classification systems that better reflect the nature of outer suburban development. The current use of the "Rural Residential" category by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) fails to capture the complexity of low-density settlements on the urban fringe. These areas are often conflated with remote or agricultural settlements, which obscures the realities of suburban expansion and misguides service delivery.
The National Growth Areas Alliance recommends the development of a ‘Metropolitan Accessibility’ classification, similar to the ARIA+ system or the Ring model to track variations in service access and economic opportunity across metropolitan zones. This would provide policymakers with a more nuanced understanding of the accessibility gaps within Greater Capital City Statistical Areas and enable smarter, more targeted responses.
These seemingly technical reforms have far-reaching consequences. When data is inaccurate or incomplete, planning becomes reactive rather than strategic. By revising classification systems to reflect the lived realities of Growth Area communities, we can better design the infrastructure, services, and policies needed to support them.
There is also a clear opportunity to draw on international best practices in infrastructure funding. Countries around the world have implemented federally led, place-based funding models that address the intersecting challenges of population growth, biodiversity protection, and infrastructure delivery. These models are integrated, collaborative, and designed to deliver long-term benefits. They demonstrate the power of funding systems that are not only coordinated across tiers of government but also responsive to the unique needs of rapidly growing urban peripheries.
Australia could improve its current approach by establishing multi-year funding commitments to ensure greater planning stability, developing clear prioritisation criteria for high-impact projects, and embedding continuous evaluation to track outcomes. Integrated funding frameworks that centre long-term community needs, rather than short-term political wins, would significantly enhance infrastructure delivery and public trust.
Most importantly, these models emphasise active community engagement and cross-sector collaboration as essential to successful infrastructure investment. By tailoring international strategies to the Australian context and actively involving local government and community stakeholders, we can ensure our infrastructure investment is both equitable and sustainable. The benefits would be far-reaching: stronger economic resilience, improved liveability, and communities empowered to shape their own futures.
The outer suburbs are not broken. But our planning systems, funding frameworks, and political narratives are. Recognising the dignity of these communities means meeting them where they are, not with charity, but with commitment. Not with platitudes, but with policy.
Bronwen Clark is CEO, National Growth Areas Alliance.The National Growth Areas Alliance represents local governments in Australia’s fast-growing outer suburbs—home to over five million people. Spanning 29 LGAs across five capital cities, NGAA advocates for fair funding and policies to address rapid population growth, greenfield development, and chronic infrastructure underinvestment in these emerging urban communities.