IT’S not generally considered an attractive trait, but it’s hard not to feel a little smug living in Bathurst right now.
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The latest figures provided to Bathurst Regional Council by economic consultants ID Consulting pretty much confirm what most of us already knew – that Bathurst is a great place to live, learn, work and grow a family.
Still, it’s nice to see the data there in black and white.
ID Consulting have been providing economic data to council since 2001 and that has been a time of great prosperity in our region.
Even so, they say the figures for the three years from 2013 to 2015 are the best we have seen so far.
Just consider the figures: At a time when many people are fleeing the country for the big smoke, Bathurst’s population in 2015 had grown to 42,231 – up 1.39 per cent on a year earlier.
Jobs growth in Bathurst from 2014 to 2015 was two per cent – 25 per cent higher than the state average of 1.6 per cent.
Even better, the number of unemployed people in the Bathurst region fell by almost 2000 in just three months at the start of this year as the unemployment rate fell from 6.27 per cent in December 2015 to 5.39 per cent in March this year.
As former prime minister and treasurer Paul Keating once said, that’s a beautiful set of numbers.
But the numbers do not tell the whole story.
As has been said so many times before, the key to Bathurst’s economic strength – and what sets our region apart from so much of regional NSW – is its resilience and diversity. Unlike so many regional cities that rely heavily on mining money – with economies that rise and fall on the vagaries of stock markets and commodity prices – Bathurst’s economy has many strings to its bow.
Indeed, the ID Consulting report found that jobs growth in the reason could be attributed to a number of sectors, including education and training, wholesale trade and accommodation services.
If one sector is ever doing it tough in Bathurst, there are jobs in other sectors to keep us going.
That might mean we don’t see the dizzy heights associated with a mining boom, but nor do we suffer the terrible troughs of a mining bust.
Why would you want to live anywhere else?
