SUNRAYSIA certainly hasn’t stood still during the coronavirus crisis.
Developments have forged ahead across the region, with many businesses taking the positive approach to the forced lockdowns by renovating and upgrading their facilities.
Many pubs, cafes and restaurants have undergone attractive makeovers as owners, who may have been putting off projects for years, decided to take advantage of the shutdown period.
And other major developments around town have not hit the pause button, which has kept trades in work and the local economy ticking over.
This week, Buronga welcomed the opening of its much-anticipated IGA supermarket, with a crowd of shoppers turning out for the official opening on Wednesday.
The project had been six years in the making for director Steve Saunders and wife April and will be a great addition to the growing Buronga and Gol Gol communities.
We have seen the biggest car yard in north-west Victoria recently open on Fifteenth Street, housing developments are continuing to go up all over the place and construction has started on a major three-storey inner city development.
For all the doom and gloom the virus has heaped on the world, it seems Sunraysia’s approach has been to keep moving its economy forward.
That developer confidence is not misplaced.
A new report revealed that regional Australia attracted more people than it lost to capital cities during the last census.
The report unpacks population trends around the country, taking in national census data from between 2011 and 2016.
The research places an emphasis on millennials — people aged between 20 and 35 at the 2016 census date — because the cohort is likely to have young families, be working at early to mid-career levels or in trades, and is also increasingly likely to buy residential property in regional areas.
“Like all Australians who moved between 2011 and 2016, the mobility of millennials reflects a ‘voting with their feet’ to find the mix of work and lifestyle that they value,” Regional Australia Institute chief executive Liz Ritchie said.
RAI’s Big Movers report examines how COVID-19’s aftershocks may affect regional population trends, as a growing number of millennials look to regional areas over capital city living.
“While 178,961 millennials moved to capital cities from regional Australia, more than 200,000 moved between regions,” Ritchie said.
The research also found most people who left a city for the regions stayed within their respective states.
Then, there is the return-home factor.
Many young people who grew up in Sunraysia have returned from the big cities during these lockdowns. They have been working or studying from the comfort of home.
It has served as a reminder of the lifestyle here compared to the big cities.
And some may choose to never go back.
They say the health of a town or city can be judged by the numbers of cranes in the air.
In Sunraysia, things are still looking up.
