Regional Australia can only be the engine room of Labor's ambitious "Future Made in Australia" plans with supercharged investment and better long-range planning to address lagging infrastructure and essential services in the bush.
The comments from the National Rural Health Alliance and Regional Australia Institute followed Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's announcement on Thursday of an interventionist green industry policy to safeguard sovereignty and the national interest with taxpayer-funded incentives to advance local manufacturing and the clean energy industry.
Hydrogen, green metals, solar power, emerging renewable sources and technologies form the future of the country under the plan, with new industries to be overwhelmingly targeted in old coal producing areas and across regional Australia.
The NRHA and RAI said while they welcomed industry and people moving into the regions, they warned that "there first needs to be a foundation for that growth."
The organisations called for national and local strategies to be created that would allow the three tiers of government, grassroots organisations, industry and economic, health, education and housing experts, among others, to work collaboratively and holistically.
NRHA chief executive Susi Tegen said while rural Australia wanted the government's plan to work, "we cannot keep plonking different initiatives on top of older initiatives that are not working."
She said regional, rural and remote Australia was currently not seeing the financial or structural rewards of bringing in more than two-thirds of the nation's income and placing 90pc of the nation's food on the table with just 30 per cent of the population.
The situation is illustrated by a current $6.5 billion under spend in health care funding in regional Australia per annum, where people are dying statistically 16 years earlier than in urban centres while, every year, $850 less is being spent on health services per person in the regions compared to metropolitan areas.
"Rural Australia has kept the nation out of two financial crises and the impacts of COVID, the reason we have financial surpluses is because of our minerals, agriculture and regional tourism," she said.
"The regions punch well above their weight but we are already overstretched in health, housing, education. How are we going to sustain it?" she said.
"We encourage transition industries, but that will create more demand on services, plus a major increase of migrants, plus fires, floods and droughts.
"This needs to be more than an announcement. We need federal and state governments to double their efforts, regional people don't need any more man-made failures, they get enough already."
Mr Albanese said in a speech yesterday that the green energy revolution would require investment in more than just manufacturing.
"Securing jobs, attracting investment and building prosperity has never been a polite and gentle process where every nation gets a turn - it's always a contest, a race," he said.
"Our challenge and our great opportunity lies in anticipating change, shaping it and making sure it delivers for our people."
As Australia moves towards its goal of net zero by 2050, it means shifting away from old reliable energy sources such as coal and gas that have dominated and supported a number of communities for decades.
Regional Australia Institute chief executive Liz Ritchie said the Prime Minister's once-in-a-generation announcement presented both opportunities and challenges for a regional Australia slated to play a critical role in a renewable energy transition that will fundamentally alter how the nation's economy operates.
"They are where new, key renewable energy projects will, and are being built, and where thousands of workers will be based to build and operate these initiatives," she said.
"However, if the regions are to support this new phase in the Australian economy it is vital further investment and support is provided.
"To fill the job vacancies available in our regional communities, we need to ensure that workers have somewhere to live. To build more houses in our regional communities, we need skilled tradespeople. To have more skilled tradespeople, we need to ensure our regions have the education facilities to deliver that training.
"We cannot look at these issues in isolation, they must be addressed holistically."
The RAI has previously called for a National Population Plan to model high-growth scenarios and their implications for planning and industry development and the hand-in-glove pull this would have on infrastructure and service provision.
Queensland is set to be at the forefront of the transition with the development of pumped hydro, wind farms, solar and hydrogen manufacturing.
Recent RAI research into the net zero transition reported that regional leaders stood ready to embrace decarbonisation, but needed better information from state and federal governments on how the local communities would be impacted and its plans for bespoke, place-based programs and policies to ensure "individual regions' ideas, strengths and concerns are addressed."
