People often choose to live in Australia’s diverse regional, rural and remote communities because the lifestyle is good for their wellbeing. However, it can sometimes be hard to live outside the city, particularly when events like drought, fire or flood impact your community, or when there’s limited access to some of the things you need for your wellbeing, like health services, or the right type of jobs. 

To survive and thrive, regional communities need to be able to provide a good quality of life for their residents. It’s easier to do this if your community has a shared understanding of what’s important for their wellbeing, and can monitor how wellbeing and the things that influence it are changing. This can help support decision making about how to invest often limited resources to best support wellbeing.

However, many rural communities don’t have easy access to the data they need to monitor wellbeing. Many nationwide datasets have limited information about what is happening outside the city, and don’t enable you to ‘drill down’ to see what is happening in your local government area. A lot of the local data that is available focuses on the economy and population characteristics – not on whether people have a good quality of life.