Australia's regional cities and towns: modelling community opportunity and vulnerability

Economic restructuring over the last decade or so has created a wide diversity of positive and negative outcomes for regional cities and towns across Australia, evident through change in a range of socio-economic measures over the decade 1986–96. This paper develops and applies a multi-variate model to categorise community opportunity and vulnerability by identifying a typology of large regional cities and towns in Australia with populations over 10,000. Cluster analysis and discriminant analysis are used for a set of variables which measure both changes over the decade 1986–96 and static measures at the 1996 census of population, industry and occupation mix, income distribution, and social housing disadvantage. Spatial patterns in the performance of large regional cities and towns on the dimensions of change are identified and analysed, and some regional policy implications are raised.