For many months, pollsters, strategists and social researchers have warned the prime minister about the frustration and expectation brewing among Australians and the danger in disappointing them. With three sentences tucked into a half-hour speech on Thursday, Anthony Albanese signalled he’s got the message.

Since last year’s landslide election result, those who take the electorate’s temperature in detailed chats over sandwiches or Zoom have detected an unmistakable sentiment emerging among voters: the system – especially the tax system – doesn’t work for them any more.

This isn’t just among those on lower incomes. The so-called middle-class report feeling besieged. Month by month, that sense only worsens.

Until now, Anthony Albanese has seemed disinclined to propose dramatic reform.Alex Ellinghausen

Underpinning it is a belief that no matter how hard you work, even if you’ve followed the traditional playbook and studied at university or learnt a trade or gone out and got yourself a stable job to try and save for a home, put a bit extra away and have something to hand on to the kids, you can’t get ahead. The system not only doesn’t help, it works against you. And a government with a whopping majority is doing nothing about it.

In uncertain times, when people conventionally crave stability, advocating change seems risky. Until now, Albanese has seemed disinclined to dramatic reform. But in the background, that’s been changing as more and more evidence suggests this cost-of-living crisis defies those conventions. On Thursday, it changed in public.

“Providing stability and security amidst uncertainty does not mean standing still while the world changes around us,” Albanese declared in an address to the National Press Club scheduled at short notice. “Because if people feel like the country is not working for them, if they’re putting in the effort but not seeing the reward, if planning for the future feels like a luxury, then government cannot provide stability just by keeping things as they are. There is no security in maintaining a status quo that doesn’t work for people.”

Surging support for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party is the strongest sign these aren’t just passing gripes. Albanese has now jettisoned his much-vaunted political caution, talking openly and directly about the need for system overhaul.

It’s notable that another major-party figure has started saying similar things. Federal Liberal frontbencher and leadership aspirant Andrew Hastie demonstrated he has also heard the complaint, in remarks on the ABC’s Insiders program last weekend.

“A lot of Australians feel like the system is rigged against them,” Hastie said, using words so close to what is coming from a range of different focus groups it suggests he’s got access to specific research. “They don’t feel like aspiration matters any more. They don’t see reward for their effort. A lot of them have lost hope completely of ever owning their own home.”

Hastie described a collapsing world order, the consequences of which “people feel and live every day”.

Freelancing in a way that stunned his own colleagues and certainly some in government, the MP from the resources state of Western Australia said events since February 28, when the United States and Israel attacked Iran, had left him prepared to countenance a windfall profits tax on gas exports.

“I just think we need to overhaul the whole system,” he said. “We either fix the system, or it’s torn down by people like Pauline Hanson.”

For all the valid criticism of Hanson and her party as just amplifying grievances with no solutions, Albanese and Hastie acknowledge by their statements the need to recognise the grievances are legitimate and show they’ve been heard.

Where Albanese broke with Hastie was in addressing another powerful driver of anxiety and pro-Hanson sentiment: the lament that things aren’t how they used to be. Hastie has tried to harness that, calling for a return to subsidised manufacturing and decrying the loss of the car industry in particular.

Albanese asserted that the response to uncertain times must be reform, not retreat, and while Australia couldn’t go back to the old days, it could aim to replicate the sense of prosperity and opportunity of earlier eras. But that was impossible using “an economic model designed in a different time and built for a more predictable world”.

“Any party or leader who promises otherwise, anyone who pretends that the solution to housing or jobs or wages or health is somehow to recreate the 1950s or ’60s, or whatever time they imagine everything was hunky-dory, is simply not being fair dinkum with the Australian people.”

Albanese’s new front-foot politics comes just over a month before his government needs to put words into action in the federal budget.

The Iran war makes that task diabolically more difficult, smashing the already volatile economic forecasts on which the whole thing is built. The sharp rise in fuel prices – eased only temporarily by $2.5 billion in excise relief – will cause a nightmarish spike in inflation. Any flow-on increase in job losses means more spent on unemployment benefits. But the public demand for a shake-up, for things to be different in future, will not adjust for any of that. The need to cut spending and boost productivity to grow the economy also remains.

For a month or so now, there’s been public speculation that the government may curb housing investment concessions available through the capital gains tax discount and negative gearing. It’s notable that despite having nixed this talk in the past, Albanese hasn’t shut it down.

Contrast this with how he handled another issue last week. Special Minister of State Don Farrell had talked up the prospect of increasing the size of parliament to reduce constituent numbers per MP and enable better representation. As soon as the opposition started running a government-out-of-touch narrative, Albanese killed it. That proves he’s no less inclined to assert authority when he judges something politically dangerous. But on rumoured changes to housing concessions, nada.

His Press Club language of “intergenerational equity” only boosted the speculation. Albanese endorsed aspiring to “a home of your own” and “the oldest and greatest Australian aspiration of them all - passing on greater opportunity to your children”.

The prime minister even nodded to the existential political imperative beneath.

“That is how we bring people with us,” he declared, adding: “It is also where we want to go.”

He called this budget a response both to an urgent challenge and great opportunities and the government’s most important and ambitious, saying the Australian character “demands that ambition too”.

It’s not just the Australian character demanding it; it’s Australians themselves. Having now confirmed he’s heard them, he’s just raised the stakes.

Karen Middleton is a political journalist and an author.

Jim Chalmers has been the federal treasurer since the Labor government was elected in 2022. In May, he’ll hand down his fifth budget, a task given a significantly higher degree of difficulty because of recent events in the Middle East. I spoke to him on Tuesday.

Fitz: Treasurer, good to chat. Are we in deep shit?

JC: No, I don’t think so. But we’re being tested by these events from the other side of the world. I think we can get through it if we all work hard together, but it’s going to be a tough period, there’s no use beating around the bush about that.

Jim Chalmers says his focus is on the Australian people, and “they didn’t choose this war, but they’re paying for it”.Alex Ellinghausen

Fitz: “Events from the other side of the world.” I know that Trump’s barking mad, and I suspect that you know that Trump is barking mad. But in your public commentary on him, are you comfortable saying that he’s not just a danger to shipping, but a danger to the world economy, or do you have to use weasel words?

JC: [Jocularly] Well, if those are my options, I think I’ll take option C! But, more seriously, the way I come at this is my focus is on the Australian people, and they didn’t choose this war, but they’re paying for it, right? And Australian families aren’t assembled around the table in the Situation Room, working out how this war plays out, but they are assembled around kitchen tables working out how they’ll pay the price for it. So from an economic point of view, the end of the war can’t come soon enough because it’s punishing Australians for a series of decisions that they didn’t take.

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Fitz: You say, however that despite the straitened circumstances – Hormuz Strait? – you’re still going to put out an ambitious budget on May 12. Is your ambition in the realms of extra expenditure, more cuts or structural reforms?

JC: We’ve got three main focuses. There’ll be spending cuts, as there have been in all of our budgets. And there will be tax reform. We’re still working through a big menu of options on tax reform, and we’ll whittle that down over the course of the next few weeks in the usual way. But we’ve also got to lift the speed limit on the economy ... to make sure the economy can grow quicker with lower inflation as we come out of this oil shock. And so there’ll be plenty of ambition in the budget. It’ll be about resilience and reform, not resilience or reform. The best way to understand the budget is it obviously will be about the pressures that people are under in the here and now because of this war in the Middle East, but it will balance that against some of our obligations to people in intergenerational terms.

Fitz: On that subject, it is surely clear to all that my Boomer generation – through a cosmic quirk or fortuitous timing – is generally generationally wealthier than both our parents and our children. It seems obvious to me the correct government policy is to do things like increase our tax on our untaxed income from super to maybe reduce the taxes on the next generations to even things out a bit. Is that obvious to you?

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JC: Well, we made some changes in super, which were pretty contentious, but we’ve landed them now. They basically do as you describe, which is make the tax breaks at the top fairer so that we can fund some more super for people on lower incomes, particularly younger people. And that is a bit of a hint at the sorts of options that we’ll work through, not necessarily in super, but in some of these other areas. We’ve been pretty upfront in saying there are intergenerational issues in our economy, in our society, and in our budget as well. We’ve taken some steps on housing and tax and superannuation, but we’re interested in seeing if we can do a bit more on that front. We want people to be wealthy, but we want to make sure, and I know you feel this very deeply, having known you for a long time now, we want to make sure that the generations that come after us do even better than we’ve been able to do. So part of that is making sure the tax system, or the economy more broadly, doesn’t make that impossible.

Fitz: Sure, but throw me a sausage. Give us a hint what the headlines will read the morning after your budget, beyond the Herald-Sun’s usual “CHALMERS’ LATEST SHIT-HOUSE BUDGET, STINKING UP THE JOINT!”

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JC: [Uproarious laughter] Ideally, the headlines would reflect this balance that we’re trying to strike, helping people now and setting the place up for the future, and that will mean some hard decisions. I hope that people recognise that we’re working through a series of very complex, substantial issues in the near term and in the longer term, but ...

Fitz: But treasurer! With the greatest respect, they are wonderful motherhood statements, but give us some nitty-gritty! Are you going to lift tax on superannuation? Are you going to reform capital gains tax? In what realm will the headline read?

JC: Well, we haven’t landed the thing yet, we haven’t made all the decisions, but ideally if we can land some of those decisions, if the headlines reflected that this is a tax reform budget, I’d be pretty happy.

Fitz: You wrote your PhD on Paul Keating, Labor’s most renowned reformer, but after four years in office, all you’ve done is tinker. Will Jim Chalmers be remembered for economic reforms that change Australia?

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JC: I think that there’s been more economic reform than we get credit for, but there’s always more to do, and I’m ambitious about doing more. But we don’t come here, as the PM says, just to occupy the space. We’re here to make a difference, and in my part of the shop that does mean economic reform. If we get these decisions right in the next five or six weeks, then people will see more economic reform in the budget.

Fitz: But forecasts show the federal government will be in deficit for the foreseeable future. Do you really think the Commonwealth should live beyond its means for that long? How are you comfortable with that?

JC: Oh, we’re always looking to get the budget in better nick, and we’ve actually already engineered the biggest ever nominal improvement in the budget since Federation. Since the time we’ve been in office, we got the debt down, delivered a couple of surpluses, and found a whole bunch of savings, more than $100 billion in savings. But there will be more savings in the budget in May.

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Fitz: In terms of your proposed tax reform, you got some surprising support this week from none other than Liberal Party leadership aspirant Andrew Hastie, on Insiders. He said: “This is a new era. We need to overhaul the whole tax system. We either fix the system or it’s torn down by people like Pauline Hanson.” He said the Liberal Party can no longer be “the first line of defence for corporate Australia”. It’s been said that he was uttering “truth bombs”. Are they?

JC: I was a bit surprised by that interview. Almost everything he said was at odds with what Angus Taylor’s been saying. So, obviously, there are some kind of internal issues there that will no doubt play out. But I don’t think that our political opponents have a coherent view about any of this. From day to day, one person will say something completely different to what the other guy said the day before, just gives you a sense of the disarray that we see among the three right-wing parties. But I try not to get distracted by that, I was interested in what Andrew had to say, but I’ve got bigger fish to fry when it comes to the big decisions we’re making.

Fitz: Yes, but would it be fair to characterise what he said as indeed truth bombs?

JC: I think that’s how he’d see it. He’s doing his best to differentiate himself from his colleagues in that regard. If his view is that the tax system is not as fair as it can be, then obviously I share that view. If his view is that Australians are paying a hefty price for this war in the Middle East, well I had that view before he popped up on Insiders. But I think it was a political strategy by him playing out there.

Fitz: You think the “bomb” part of the truth-bomb was aimed squarely at Mr Taylor?

JC: Yeah, I think he’s lobbing a few at Angus. I think it is probably dawning on a lot of the Liberal Party that they were probably doing better under Sussan Ley than they are under Angus Taylor. So, again, not my concern, but I wonder whether they’ve got some buyer’s remorse.

Fitz: What is more damaging to working people, inflation or unemployment?

JC: I don’t think you can split them. We want to get inflation down and keep unemployment low, and we want to keep the place ticking over. That’s really the troika that we care most about: growth, inflation, unemployment. The reason I focus a lot on unemployment, probably a bit more than my recent predecessors, is because that’s the people-facing part of the economy. And as a Labor treasurer, I’m sort of obsessive about what our decisions mean for real people in real communities, including the one that I represent.

Fitz: And yet if you hit the accelerator to reduce unemployment, doesn’t that then risk higher inflation?

JC: In its simplest form, that’s the balance that people talk about. It’s a bit more complex than that. But for a pretty substantial period, not that long ago, we had inflation coming down very substantially, even though unemployment was still in the high threes and low fours. So it’s possible to have faster growth and low unemployment with lower inflation. Our job as a government is to make sure we lift the speed limit on the place so that we can get more growth and more unemployment without it adding to inflation.

Fitz: Can you tell me something nice about Tim Wilson, your shadow treasurer?

JC: He’s up and about. I kind of like that. I don’t mind a scrap. But so far he’s had an absolute shocker. I mean, he got sprung betting against Australia on the sharemarket. He got the fuel excise wrong. He behaved like this kind of bizarre karaoke clown in the parliament. And I think he’s kind of fizzed out a bit quicker than the norm. He’s got a very healthy opinion of himself. But I try and not dismiss any of my opponents. I’ve had three opposite numbers in less than 12 months. He’s probably the most extreme of all of them, and the riskiest.

Fitz: Bloody, hell. If that’s the nice thing you’ve got to say, I’d hate to see what you’d say if you were going to have a go!

JC: [Laughs]

Fitz: Given the recent rise of One Nation in the polls, who is their strongest voice when it comes to economics? And as you look from the bridge of our Ship of State and navigate the economy, are One Nation views indeed showing up on your starboard quarter and worth altering course for, at least politically?

JC: I think what One Nation is trying to do is to pick up on, and pick at, the very real concerns and frustrations people have about the pressures they’re under in their household budgets. And I don’t lightly dismiss the views that people raise in communities about that pressure and how they respond politically to that. But I don’t detect a lot of answers in what One Nation is peddling. They’re trying to make people angrier, trying to divide people, and they spend none of their time trying to work together with people who want to solve the issues in our economy.

Fitz: All right. We’ve already seen the impact of AI on job losses. You’re about to meet [on Wednesday] with the head of Anthropic, the international mob focused on ethics in AI. How can we ensure we don’t make the same mistakes with AI as we made with social media, which was we didn’t regulate and we’re now trying to retrofit it.

JC: It’s really important. Yeah, we’ve got to try and capture the big economic upside of AI at the same time as minimise the risk to people, and that means working closely with the AI companies. We’ve got a lot of skin in the game here. This can go really well or it can go really badly. We have choices about the obligations that we put on companies when they build data centres, for example, we’ve got a role to play in protecting copyright and content creators. We’ve got a role to play in making sure that workers are included in this, that people can be beneficiaries of it, rather than victims.

Fitz: Property prices are falling in Sydney and Melbourne. Is that a good or a bad thing?

Chalmers and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. “We talk about rugby league a lot, as you would expect!”Alex Ellinghausen

JC: We want to see more affordable options in the market. We don’t target an aggregate average, what we try and do is to make sure that more people, particularly more first home buyers, can get a toehold in the market. And so the 5 per cent deposits policy is about that; building more homes is about that; trying to make sure that there are affordable options for people. We’re making some progress there, but we’re playing catch-up. It’s one of the big intergenerational issues in our economy, access to housing. And so we want people to have more choice and more options, and that means making more homes available to people who are looking to buy their first one rather than their 10th one.

Fitz: How are you getting on with Albo, and as a matter of interest, when you find yourself in a Canberra restaurant with him and five cabinet colleagues, would you say, “Could you pass the salt, please Albo”? Or would you say, “pass the salt, please, prime minister”?

JC: Definitely “Albo”. And sometimes even in the formal settings, we all slip into that: “Albo” or “Anthony”. It’s because we’ve known this bloke for so long. He’s only been the PM for a sliver of that time. Most people are pretty casual with that, and I think that’s what he likes and what he expects. I am tight with Albo, and we work together really closely. And, most weeks, we meet and talk multiple times, trying to land some of these big issues in budgets and elsewhere, to try and do the right thing by people. We meet one on one. We talk about rugby league a lot, as you would expect! And, you know, we’re tight with Jodie too. Our wives, Laura and Jodie, are tight. And so, yeah, it’s a terrific working relationship. I’ve got so much respect for him and the job that he does. And you know, I enjoy trying to do a job for him.

Fitz: Speaking of having dinner, I can’t help but notice you look like a different man. You were telling me the other day, you’ve dropped at least two stone in three months or so. I’m hoping it’s because you’ve been working night and day on economy and budget, not anxiety?

JC: I’ve dropped almost 17 kilograms now, which, if I’m honest, Fitz, I’m proud of because I was just way too heavy at the end of last year. I think, like almost every Australian, you wake up on Boxing Day and you think, I’m probably heavier than I need to be. I know you’ve been through that transformation too, and so I want to be in the best nick I can be to do a great job for people, and that means making sure you’ve got enough energy. And so for me, probably 90-95 per cent of it was sorting the food out, but some lap swimming as well, which to this point hasn’t really been my thing.

Fitz: And grog? How much grog have you had in the last three months?

JC: Zero. I haven’t had any grog for six years.

Fitz: Can I claim credit for that?

JC: You can. I think I was telling you before, Fitz, that book that you wrote about slimming down, giving up grog and getting fit really did have a big influence on me. I thought it was a cracker. I turned 48 the other day. You want to get on top of things before it’s too late. You want to set a good example for your kids on this front. And for me, just before New Year’s, I really just decided to try and get on top of things, and I’m proud of the progress I’ve made. I thought if I got into slightly better nick, then I would be in a better place to kind of deal with the rigours of the day.

Fitz: Good luck to you, and thank you for your time.

Welcome to the regions where you can afford four bedrooms – and a pool

There’s a new migration trend: the under-35s are fleeing big cities for centres where they can buy a house with enough space for children.

Lucy SladeProperty reporter

Apr 2, 2026 – 5.00am

Six years ago, Katie Barter, 38, and Edward Martin, 39, were living in a tiny, mouldy two-bedroom semi-detached house in Sydney’s inner west, which had cost more than $1 million. When Martin got a new job in Melbourne, they decided to settle in Geelong instead of trying to buy in Australia’s second city.

The pair swapped their Sydney semi on a 300-square-metre block for a rambling old house in the coastal Victorian city, about 65 kilometres from Melbourne, which they are rebuilding to have four bedrooms. It cost just under $1 million for triple the land size of their Sydney home.

“[Geelong] has really great lifestyle features like the surf coast, it’s so stunning. You can pop into Melbourne in an hour, so it really has the best of all worlds, and property is just so much more affordable,” Barter says.

“You can work your money harder, and then you’ve got more capacity to do other things, like we bought a caravan, which we wouldn’t have been able to do in Sydney.”

Barter works at Geelong’s council and Martin works at Melbourne Airport, which has about the same commute time as his Sydney drive because there is less traffic coming from the south-west. And the region has good schools for their five-year-old son, George. “It’s not really country life. It is like a city here, you’ve got one of everything that you need,” Barter says.

She says many young families, and couples wanting to start a family, are moving to Geelong – a pattern being repeated across the country. The “impossibly unaffordable” housing in the cities has created a new migration trend of 25- to 35-year-olds moving to regional centres, where they can afford to buy a house with enough space for children.

Every capital city bar Perth has registered falling births over the past five years, but the regions are experiencing a baby boom.

Sydney’s births declined 9.4 per cent between 2019 and 2024, the highest fall of any capital city, followed closely by Melbourne with an 8.2 per cent decline. Meanwhile, the rest of NSW had a 3.6 per cent increase in births, and regional Victoria increased 9 per cent, KPMG analysis finds.

Over that same period, births in Geelong grew from 3450 to 4120, an increase of 19.4 per cent, the highest gain of the biggest regional cities in the country. But the boom is also evident in Newcastle, Wollongong, the Hunter region, Gold Coast and Queensland’s Sunshine Coast.

Peter Kilby was living with his wife, three children and a dog in a two-bedroom unit in Sydney’s inner-city. Life had become too much of a squeeze for the project manager and midwife. With house prices in Sydney suburbs rapidly outpacing wage growth, they faced what is becoming a common dilemma for young families.

“We had to move one way or another. It was either move out to western Sydney, where we could afford to buy a house and then spend two to three hours a day commuting to work, or just move out to the country where we could commute very little,” Kilby says.

They chose the latter, selling their Waterloo unit for $1.23 million and buying a four-bedroom house with a pool and separate garage for $677,000 in the NSW central west town of Cowra.

The Kilbys sold their two-bedroom unit in Sydney’s Waterloo (above) for $1.2 million and bought a four-bedroom house with pool in Cowra.

The decision wasn’t easy. It meant Kilby would have to leave his role as division head at a large commercial glazing company, but he was born in Cowra and grew up in the country. Lucienne, his wife, is from Sydney so it was a bigger adjustment for her.

“The beginning felt like a big fall from grace for me because I’d worked so hard to get where I was, and then I was basically at the bottom of the barrel at a new company,” he says.

Kilby ended up starting his own glazing business, Insight Glass Solutions, and is working on several government projects. More than three years later, Kilby says he is financially better off than he was in Sydney.

Peter and Lulu Kilby in their new place in Cowra. They’re now in a better place financially than they were in Sydney. Brent Young

“The way of life out here is a lot nicer, and it’s a lot better to bring kids up, in my opinion. We were on Botany Road in Waterloo so you couldn’t even walk out your front gate without me getting collected by an Uber Eats rider on an electric bicycle. [In Cowra] there’s other kids in the street so they’re out riding their bikes in the afternoons. They love it.”

Kilby says his family probably would have stayed in Sydney if they could have bought a house close enough to his work in Alexandria, but “with a young family and not being born from money, it just wouldn’t have been an option”.

KPMG urban economist Terry Rawnsley says regional Australia is definitely having a baby boom, and house prices are the reason.

“There used to be a stereotypical view. You meet a nice guy, you get married, you buy a house, you have some kids. That’s really a lot more complicated now that you might take longer to meet a nice guy. You might not marry, you might actually have kids and then get into the housing market later,” Rawnsley says.

“But the main thing is that first birth age. It’s hard to have four or five kids when you’re starting at 31. Part of the reason why birth rates are dropping is that we’re having fewer kids, and many more are having two, and then you’ve got this whack of women also having none.”

Like every developed country apart from Israel, Australia’s birth rate, at 1.48 births per woman, is well below the rate of 2.1 births required to replace the population. The median age of women giving birth is 32.1 years; 50 years ago, it was 25.9 years.

Redbridge polling finds 48 per cent of 18- to 34-year-olds delay getting married and 54 per cent delay having children because of their finances.

“It comes back to the housing affordability ... it’s more affordable to buy a home to house one child than five children. You can overlay birth rates with where the housing affordability is taking place,” Rawnsley says.

As is well known, house prices have rapidly outpaced wage growth for years. The average couple looking for their first home cannot affordably buy an entry-level house in any Australian city as wage growth has been overtaken by price gains. It is a big deterioration in conditions from just five years ago.

In Sydney, the median price of homes in 55 per cent of suburbs is more than nine times higher than median incomes, with experts classifying it as “impossibly unaffordable”.

Sydney’s median house price is $1.76 million, while Geelong’s is $710,000 and Cowra’s is $440,000. Regional house prices rose 14 per cent, while combined capital house prices grew 9.6 per cent in 2025, Domain’s data shows.

Loan market mortgage broker Zane Southwell says young people are increasingly moving to regional areas such as Cowra for more affordable housing.

“Regional areas often offer many job opportunities, including positions in the public sector, such as hospitals, police and teachers, and the private sector, like manufacturing and agriculture. The commute to work might be only 10 minutes, or less,” Southwell says.

“Historically, regional areas seemed to be home to older Australians, with younger demographics moving away to bigger cities, but we are now seeing more people choosing to stay so they can afford the home and lifestyle they want.”

The Regional Australia Institute has found that Generation Z (aged 18 to 29) are the most likely cohort to consider moving from a capital city to the regions in the next five years, flipping previous trends where retirees were the most likely to move.

The institute and Commonwealth Bank’s December quarter regional movers index shows the number of capital-city residents moving to regions outnumbered those making a move in the opposite direction by 31 per cent.

Sunshine Coast in Queensland’s south-east is the local government area attracting the highest net migration from capital cities, followed by Geelong in Victoria, Gold Coast in Queensland, Moorabool in Victoria and Lake Macquarie in NSW.

Regional Australia Institute chief executive Liz Ritchie says cost of living and housing are now the main reasons for people to leave the cities.

“It’s like a dream come true for people like me, who grew up in regional Australia, to see that it’s having its time in the sun,” Ritchie says.

“We would love to see the leaders of industry come out and be incredibly supportive of flexible and remote work because of the impact that it could have on regional Australia, notwithstanding that there are businesses that already have these policies, such as Telstra,” she says.

“Regional Australians continue to report higher levels of wellbeing than our city counterparts, and so therefore, happier, healthier, more productive people, which is producing more babies, which is good for our nation’s intergenerational challenges, therefore good for Australia.”

This trend is capturing the attention of the Albanese government, which added a $93 billion Newcastle-Sydney high-speed rail proposal to the national infrastructure body’s list of priority projects in March, despite scepticism about its viability.

Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute researcher Nicole Gurran says fast rail is critical for giving people choice in where they want to live and work.

“You need really strong connections to the major capital cities, so regional airports become really critical, and certainly trains. The regular train service between Geelong and Melbourne was a real game-changer,” she says.

Gurran says plans need to be made for population growth, otherwise affordability will erode in regional areas too.

“It’s really clear that people want to move to regional areas, but the housing stock is not diverse enough. The rental markets aren’t big enough … so you get this inability to cope with population growth.”

Without access to the bank of mum and dad, young parents feel as if they have no choice but to move.

Back in Geelong, mayor Stretch Kontelj says several kindergarten and maternal health projects are underway to accommodate the influx of young children and babies who have been arriving since COVID-19, when city dwellers began moving due to remote work and attractive lifestyle benefits like world-class surf beaches.

“Greater Geelong is a wonderful place to raise children, and I’m proud to welcome so many new families to the region,” Kontelj says.

Barter would agree. “In Sydney, you need to have generational wealth and kids are a status symbol because how the hell do you actually afford a child in Sydney and a house for multiple kids?”

Dezi Freeman has been shot dead by armed police on Monday morning near Porepunkah after more than six months on the run.

Police were tipped off that he was believed to be hiding in a container on a property, according to unconfirmed reports.

He was shot dead at about 8.30 am, three police sources have confirmed to this masthead.