Collocation in regional development – the Peel Education

The development of collocation of services in regional Western Australia (WA) is an important strand of WA’s Regional Development Policy. The intention of this initiative is to foster working relationships amongst stakeholder groups, with a view to ensuring regional WA communities have access to quality services. The benefits attributed to successful collocation, from a state perspective, are a potential to: • increase the number and quality of services delivered in regional communities; • reduce capital and operational costs at a local, state and national level; and • foster superior services in some of the smaller communities. By clustering compatible services in smaller communities such as Peel, there is the potential to add value to the existing services and help ensure the survival and hopefully ‘thrival ’ (Ellyard 1998) of that community into the future. As the Deputy Premier1 explained in 1999: The promotion of regional areas as desirable places to live, work and invest is extremely important and so too is the provision of the necessary resources to enable regional communities to determine their own destiny more effectively. (Cowan 1999) The state government Collocation Initiative encourages government agencies, service providers and regional communities to look at opportunities to share resources such as accommodation, infrastructure, utilities and staff in the delivery of related services. Some small communities experience a tension between local desires for lifestyle, smallness, community connectedness and global economic imperatives which seem to drive them to become parts of larger units and to respond to external economic influences