General News
14 November, 2025
Country mayors to hear that “the bush is carrying nation”
Bush shires like Warren and Bogan are carrying the Australian economy, but simply aren’t getting anything like that back in government services, new statistics reveal.
By David Dixon
Disparity between the value that regional areas provide to the country, compared to spending on their communities, is only growing, and Warren Shire Council’s mayor, Greg Whiteley says rural Australia has had enough
The subject, he revealed, will be a major topic of discussion at the upcoming NSW Country Mayors Association conference at state parliament in Sydney this week (November 14).
Cr Whiteley revealed that a recent visit by one of Australia‘s top demographers, Bernard Salt AM, highlighted the issue of how Australia is riding on not just the sheep’s back, but also broad-acre cropping, and mining, industries that are all concentrated in inland areas.
“Bernard Salt – he was here for a fundraiser – told us that the average GDP per Australian, is about $65,000 but, for areas here and west of here, including Nyngan. Narromine, it’s double that,” Cr Whiteley said.
“If you go to the federal government’s own REMPLAN, you see that Warren has 2573 people, with 1011 jobs, and our total GDP is $459, 912,000, that works out to about USD $120,000 per person,” he added. Yet for all that, he said that country councils are being starved of funds as both federal and state governments continue not just increased cost-shifting of services and responsibilities to local government, but actual cuts to revenue over time.
“Federal government financial assistance grants, for instance, which are based on complex formulas to do with population, area of roads, economic base, used to be about one per cent of the GDP, now they are only about half-a-percent.
“That’s a trend that has only occurred in the about the last 15-years-ago… these are costs that we’ve got to cover, that we simply can’t recover from our ratepayer base,” Cr Whiteley said. He said the regions are not just simply being short-changed compared to metropolitan areas – where governments think nothing of spending billions to fund a new road network or a vanity sporting stadium project – but also to how much heavy-lifting western NSW does for the state and nation. “It’s everything, we’re carrying this country, and we’re simply not being recompensed with anything like what we deserve,” Cr Whiteley said.
“It’s the one issue, year after year, that comes up at the Country Mayor’s conference,” he concluded.
Read More: Nyngan