As a regional Australian, your challenge is to look past this noise and focus on the policy. Policy can seem mysterious, but it’s simply what governments choose to do (or not do) and how they make things work properly.

Government policy matters because it shapes your life. How fast you can drive, the tax you must pay and whether there is a local doctor in your town.

It decides whether a bridge gets built, how our kids are educated and who we welcome from overseas to help our communities grow and succeed.

The Regional Australia Institute is focused squarely on how we can influence better policy for regions. Regional policy is the combination of decisions governments make for the places and communities that you live in.

Good regional policy brings together a lot of areas. Health, education, infrastructure, employment, planning, immigration and business regulation need to work together and respond to local opportunities.

Because Australia is diverse – Alice Springs is not like Dubbo, Byron Bay or Parramatta – regional policy is hard.

With regional Australia entering another complex period of growth and change, good regional policy is going to be very important.

Be assured, there should be good times ahead for many regions as new tourism, agriculture and mining investment, as well as strong population growth brings new opportunities.

In some other places things will be tougher and we will need to support communities through challenging times: enduring drought and natural disasters; closures of mines and power stations; helping people out of poverty and into better work. Government doesn’t control the economy or the weather, but good regional policy will help the good times and the bad times be much better for you and your community.

There are a number of signs in regional policy that you should look for. First is a bit of humility and openness.

It would be great if government knew everything and could just fix the problems, but they don’t, particularly when the policy doers (public servants) are mostly based in the largest state capitals or Canberra, which are distant and very different from most regions.

Our work shows that governments that recognise this and open their policy to ideas from regional people who live the problems and opportunities will do better and build trust. We also need levels of government to work together in regions.

No level can get regional policy done on its own. The “blame game” is a turn off because it is bad policy.

Finally, a commitment to spend existing government money wisely for real local benefits rather than adding more cash to a struggling system is essential.

We are an independent, apolitical organisation, but we also work closely with government through our Shared Inquiry Program for Regional Policy.

Through this work, we can see governments of all political persuasions beginning to shed old models of doing business and starting to work in new ways.

The Regional Partnerships model which opens government to regional leadership and decision making in Victoria; the move to developing regional and city deals at the national level, putting regional policy at the centre of government in NSW, local decision making in the Northern Territory and the long standing Regional Development Committee model in South Australia are all examples of governments having a crack at this type of policy.

Right now, a lot of regional people have lost faith in governments. Too many political cat videos are part of it, but the deeper issue is a lack of confidence in the future and how you and your community will fare.

It’s also because the old model of big national policy change (float the dollar, end tariffs, sell government assets, introduce the GST) is finished.

After decades of this model, we are better off, but we are also divided individually and geographically.

Good regional policy targets this directly by solving problems locally and better including regions in both decision making and national economic success. Policy matters for your community’s future.

We are encouraging governments to change to a new way of doing business that can do better for every region.

I ask you to look through the noise, and challenge governments to deliver something different and better for the future.

​Jack Archer is chief executive of the Regional Institute of Australia.