Why communities need people, capacity and delivery funding, not another planning session.
If you’ve lived in a regional town for long enough, you’ve likely been ‘consulted’, likely more than once.
You’ve filled in the survey, sat through the community workshops, and told someone with a clipboard that the town needs housing, childcare, a doctor who stays, and something for young people to do.
A few months later, a glossy document is on the Shire website, and then, not much happens. A couple of years go by, and then someone comes back to ask the same questions all over again.
We’re not short on plans.
Regional WA has no shortage of strategy. The Shires have their strategic community plans. Regions have growth blue blueprints. Tourism strategies, housing strategies, economic development strategies, youth strategies, and then here are the plans to review those plans.
Most of them say roughly the same thing, because the problems haven’t changed. Housing, workforce, childcare, health, connectivity, keeping young people around - we know.
Planning is not the hard part; doing is.
Strategy gets funded because it is easy to fund.
A (good) strategy should contain a start date, an end date, a consultant who specialises in the area and a deliverable. It’s tidy, it fits neatly into a grant submission, and it looks like progress.
The delivery is messier. It needs someone on the ground, for years, building important relationships, chasing approvals, following up with businesses, and keeping the momentum going once the launch excitement fades. That is the stuff that is harder to fit in a funding application, so it often doesn’t get funded at all.
So we end up with a plan written by someone who doesn’t live here, handed to people who don’t have the hours to enact it.
Consultation fatigue is real.
Every round of consultation leans on the same small group of people - the volunteers, business owners and committee members who are already holding the town together. They turn up because they care, but every time a plan sits on the shelf gathering dust, a few more of them stop turning up.
That’s the hidden cost of strategy without delivery. It doesn’t just waste money; it wears down trust.
What would actually move the needle?
Fund people, not just paperwork. An ongoing local role that sits in the community for longer than a single grant cycle.
Fund the delivery alongside the planning. If a strategy gets funded, the first stage of making it happen should too.
Think in years, not in rounds. Real change in a small town takes longer than twelve months.
Use what already exists before commissioning a new plan. Look at the last three and ask what got done, and why the rest didn’t.
Back local people to lead. The best plans are written by the people who will still be here when it’s delivered.
The plan is not the progress.
Small towns don’t need to be told what they need; we’ve told you, repeatedly, in surveys, workshops, and submissions.
What we need is the capacity to act on it.
A strategy document has never built a house, opened a childcare centre or kept a business on the main street. People do that, it’s time we funded them.
