Holiday spots eye more funding
Popular WA holiday spots such as Busselton, Margaret River and Mandurah could be in line for a bigger slice of hundreds of millions of dollars in Federal Government funding under possible changes to the way their populations are counted.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics is considering adding additional questions to its 2016 census to better count the population of towns or cities where many residents may be absent for long periods, including fly-in, fly-out workers or those with holiday homes only occupied for part of the year.
Such a change could have big implications because census figures decide how much funding local government areas get from the Government under its financial assistance grant program.
In 2014-15 the program is worth $2.3 billion nationally, with $282 million earmarked for WA.
A University of Adelaide report commissioned by the National Sea Change Taskforce, a group representing Australian coastal councils, suggested the populations of Mandurah and Busselton would have been 14.6 per cent and 17.5 per cent bigger respectively if all properties were occupied the night of the 2011 census.
City of Mandurah chief executive Mark Newman said the city's high holiday home ownership and big FIFO workforce meant there was potential for its population to be underestimated.
"The city would support the ABS including an additional question in the census to capture a more accurate picture of the population of coastal towns," he said.
Task force chairman Barry Sammels, also City of Rockingham mayor, said changing the census to identify property owners who were not full-time residents would "go a long way to addressing the issue".
"The census is done in the middle of winter in the middle of the week and we don't think that gives an accurate reading for a lot of these coastal councils," he said.
"We've got some members whose shires or cities' populations are 30,000 but grow to 90,000 during the summer, long weekends, public holidays."
Any change would have to be approved by the Government.
