General News
31 October, 2022
Restoring integrity to regional funding
THE Government will deliver two new regional programs in the 2022-23 October Budget to invest in much-needed community infrastructure.
There is $1 billion in the Budget over three years for two new regional programs.
The Growing Regions Program will provide new opportunities for regional local councils and not-for-profit organisations through an annual open, competitive grants process.
The regional Precincts and Partnerships Program will provide a strategic, nationally consistent mechanism for funding and coordinating larger-scale projects that transform a place, to benefit communities in regional cities and wider rural and regional Australia.
Government will consult on the guidelines to ensure best practice transparency and consistency of process, as well as a fairer distribution of funds to ensure people can have confidence in the new programs.
The Building Better Regions Fund (BBRF) Round 6 will not proceed.
The ANAO found the BBRF grants favoured National Party electorates and were not awarded based on merit but based on rules that were not made clear to all applicants.
Similarly, the previous Government’s Community Development Grants (CDG) program started as a closed fund for 2013 election commitments, but it was kept yearly. It was a ‘grants’ program that community organisations could not apply for.
The Federal Government will close the CDG program, and no new projects will be funded from it.
The Australian Government will provide a pathway for those CDG projects properly accounted for up to the PreElection Economic and Fiscal Outlook to be funded through new election commitment programs.
All contracted projects will be honoured, and a further 82 projects that date back to 2016 and that are yet to be contracted will have six months to finalise negotiations before the program ends.
