Australian musician Paul Kelly once sang, “have you ever seen Sydney from a 727 at night?” — a line that captures something timeless about perspective: distance revealing connection, and light revealing complexity.
By contrast, “have you ever seen Canberra from a Saab 340B Plus in the rain?” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. But through the low clouds and the drone of the turbo prop, the view still offers perspective of its own — one that reminds me how deeply our cities and regions are connected, even when we can’t always see the full picture.
This week I have the privilege of heading to Canberra to join my counterparts from Australia’s other capital city Committees to advance a national agenda for cities, a framework called Six Priorities for Our Urban Future.
It calls for long-term investment, better planning, and smarter coordination across our urban places.
As one of the framework’s authors, I’ve been grappling with a familiar challenge: how to articulate the value of our cities in a way that goes beyond the convenient, (fundable) sound bites and click bait that dominate national policy debate. Among the recommendations one idea stands out — and it’s one we too often overlook: the indivisible nature of cities and regions.
Because while we often talk about “cities” as engines of innovation and “regions” as the producers of resources and food, the truth is that they exist in a single, living ecosystem. The idea that one can thrive at the expense of the other is a fallacy of political proportions.
The framework’s introduction reads:
If we want a stronger, more resilient economy, the future of our capital cities must be at the heart of the reform agenda. This is not about cities versus regions, or state versus state. The prosperity of each fuels the prosperity of the others.
We need a whole-of-system approach, where reform is nationally consistent but locally executed — with States and Territories not competing with one another, but where a collaborative Australia competes successfully with the world.
It’s tempting — especially in political and media discourse — to frame the nation as a contest between urban and regional Australia.
We hear refrains like “we won the cities” or “the regions are paying for the cities”. We see policies and narratives rolled out that divide rather than connect, each framed as a zero-sum contest for attention, funding, or political reward.
This framing is not only inaccurate, it’s corrosive. It feeds a narrative of scarcity and resentment. It positions our communities as competitors for the same finite pot of policy oxygen when in reality they are mutually dependent parts of the same organism.
Sadly, this division is reinforced by the structures of politics itself. Our local government areas, electorates and ministerial portfolios are drawn along lines that make sense on a map but not in the lived experience of our people.
For those who live and work across Greater Hobart, this is obvious. A family might live in Brighton, work in Glenorchy, study in Sandy Bay, and spend weekends in the Huon. To suggest these places belong to opposing “interests” is fiction, yet policies of exclusion, perceptions of elitism, and fears of being left behind continue to feed that divide.
When people ask me to define “Greater Hobart”, I don’t start with boundaries.
Greater Hobart is a regional capital, deeply entwined with its surroundings. Its vitality draws from the mountains, coasts and towns around it. Its workforce, food, energy and culture flow in and out daily from regional Tasmania.
In this sense, Hobart is not a city in isolation but the civic and economic heart of a regional ecosystem. One that depends as much on the prosperity of Southern Midlands, Brighton, New Norfolk, Huon and Sorell as it does on Salamanca, Rosny, or the CBD.
The lived experience of our community is already borderless. Our policy frameworks simply haven’t caught up.
What if we stopped thinking of cities and regions as competing silos and started treating them as a total ecosystem — a network of interdependent supply chains, skills, and stories?
Imagine an approach where:
This isn’t a matter of sentiment; it’s one of productivity. Our future prosperity depends on how well we integrate these systems.
Economic growth, climate adaptation and social wellbeing will all hinge on our ability to design policies that let value flow between cities and regions, not just sit within them. Yet the electorate boundaries and short-term incentives of our political system often make that integration difficult, if not actively undermined.
If we start from the assumption that our economy is a living supply chain, we can design better policy around it. That means understanding where value is added, captured, or lost, and ensuring our regions and cities each play their part in strengthening that chain.
For example:
The goal is not to centralise or decentralise, but to synchronise – to design policies where value circulates through our shared system of cities and regions, lifting the whole rather than concentrating advantage, or disadvantage as the case may be.
Part of the prompt for this piece was a recent podcast featuring Suzanne Mettler of Cornell University, co-author (with Trevor E. Brown) of Rural versus Urban, which charts the widening divide across the United States.
The warning signs for Australia are clear. If we fail to act, the relationship between our cities and regions risks fracturing — socially, economically and politically.
We’re already seeing early symptoms: mistrust, polarisation and competing narratives about who benefits and who bears the cost. Rebuilding that relationship means shifting from a politics of division to a practice of connection. It means talking less about who wins and more about how we grow together.
The task ahead is to develop a new policy paradigm where place-based approaches support both cities and regions as co-dependent partners in national prosperity.
That means reframing how we think about infrastructure, housing, innovation and culture — not as siloed portfolios but as interconnected levers in a shared system.
It means valuing vibrancy as much as volume, opportunity as much as output, and creativity as much as capital.
For Tasmania, this approach isn’t theoretical — it’s essential. Our geography makes the interdependence of city and region impossible to ignore. Our future success depends on acknowledging it, investing in it and celebrating it.
As we gather in Canberra to advocate for stronger cities, it’s useful to remember that every Australian city functions as part of a regional system — and every region depends on its cities for reach, markets and opportunity.
The task now is to make that interdependence work better in practice. That means aligning planning, investment and policy so that infrastructure, housing, education, and industry decisions are joined up — not competing for priority or funding.
For Greater Hobart, this isn’t an abstract exercise. We can demonstrate how a regional capital can lead renewal in its own backyard:
If we can show that a city and its regions can grow together – practical, measurable and mutually reinforcing – we can help shift the national conversation from competition to collaboration.
Because ultimately, the challenges we face are shared: productivity, housing, climate, belonging. And the best solutions will come from the places that understand how connected those things already are.
Cam Crawford is Chief Executive of the Committee for Greater Hobart
