but he might have a plan for them
There are other parts of Australia, I live in one
Tamworth: the country music capital of Australia where it’s -
BLOODY HOT
Well, that's true - but houses are much cheaper here
You can get a four-bedroom house in Tamworth for 350 thousand bucks
But just how easy is it to just pack up and leave a capital city for a regional centre?
Lets rewind a bit
I’m from Sydney and I hate Sydney
It’s expensive
It's congested
And you can't buy a bottle of wine after 11pm
I’ve genuinely thought about leaving how do I go from here
to here
Apparently there’s a man with a plan
Yeah we got you some smashed avo
I figured it was was either that or buying a house
Cheap shot. Back to the plan.
What are you guys doing to bring people out here?
Developing jobs, massive tourism country music, midway between Sydney and Brisbane
aircraft industry, huge rural hinterland, mining to our north
we've got a global economy buying more and more of our product at higher and higher price
people moving out of Sydney and they are - heaps
Okay that last bit we can vouch for
Meet Karina and Marc - early 30s, two kids, moved from Sydney 2 years ago
We had a little boy and living in a two-bedroom unit is just crazy he wanted to get out
and run around.
For them the move was about lifestyle
Just in this last year we’ve been on two family holidays, one overseas, which we never would have done if we’d been in Sydney
They say Tamworth has everything they need
It’s got the hospitals, shopping centres, plenty of activities, sports, two golf courses
yep that’s important
And Tamworth is set to grow
Directly across is gonna be a reserve and over from that they’ll be all news blocks the same size as these ones here
around about 2000 square meters
I always say to my friends how many set of lights do you think I drive through to get to work
And they're like aw, four or five
None. No sets of lights
Sure, getting in the car is definitely easier here but there’s a catch top all this
Karina is from Tamworth. She grew up here and her parents live 15 minutes away
That was a huge drawcard
See, that’s the thing. We looked at 10 different case studies for this story and eight of them already had family in Tamworth
So 80% of people moving from the city to Tamworth, kinda from Tamworth.
I dunno, does that count
It’s really hard to move out of the city when your family is there so how would you encourage something like that?
There’s always gotta be a first mover
And we found them
Meet Marc, Heather and their two
Jedis
The force is strong here: it pulled them away from their Sydney families to a much bigger house
We renovated the kitchen, through here's the lounge room, this is the master bedroom, this is one of our spare bedrooms
The boys bedroom, one of the other guest bedrooms, the backyard you always think that you'd love to have
Would you have had something like this in Sydney do you think?
Nope, absolutely not
How did the move come about you ask?
I approached my boss and he was pretty flexible with a work arrangement idea of trying to relocate to a regional area
so I took him up on that offer of trying to get out
Wait a minute
Go back
There!
The door opened up for Mark when he was offered a transfer. He does the exact same job here that he did in Sydney: for the exact same pay
Do you think if you hadn't had that offer, would you have still moved to Tamworth do you think?
I don't think we were really thinking it at that stage
We weren't thinking of moving to a regional area
Jobs are another huge drawcard
The regional average is sitting at about 5.2 unemployment but if you go out to west Tamworth it hits about 17%
If you want a job in this town, you’re gonna get a job.
Where though?
We analysed Seek.com.au for Tamworth jobs and found almost 500
But around one third them weren’t full time: also most jobs were in these categories
but good luck finding work here if you’re in these industries
Or, say, this industry
I'm wondering if you guys would have any jobs available here?
I'm not sure
Does anybody work in this town?
Helloooo
There's no one here
It's probably for the best really
What about people like me who are TV presenters, would you consider opening an SBS bureau here in Tamworth?
In the end if you don't want to decentralise and the ultimate position is everything would end up in the same town, it would have to.
There's always a government policy that talks about -
Right, that's a no
Truth is, the big draw cards of any place is jobs and/or families
But not everyone can find those things outside of the cities
It's actually not that easy to just pack up and move but the thing is, for a lot of people it's not that easy to stay either
Now I don't know what the answer is but I suspect it's a little bit more complicated than 'move to Tamworth'