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City of Canning
Key highlights
The Client
City of Canning
Their challenge
The City of Canning wanted a clearer understanding of what residents value most and how those priorities should influence policy, planning and investment decisions. They also needed a way to track whether those decisions were improving community outcomes over time.
The approach
Through Community Views, Informed Decisions gathered large-scale insights into community experiences and priorities for a higher quality of life, complementing these with demographic, economic and housing data to provide a complete evidence base for decision making.
Results
The insights informed Council policy and budgeting decisions, including the City’s “Better Budget”, and now serve as an organisation-wide reference for representing community priorities and monitoring liveability between the 2023 and 2025 studies. The results will also guide the development of future plans such as the Council Plan and Strategic Community Plan.
City of Canning partners with Informed Decisions to inform policy, budgeting and monitor community outcomes
The City of Canning partners with Informed Decisions (.id) to better understand what matters most to residents and how those priorities translate into lived experiences across the community.
Through Community Views and the Living in Canning survey, the City gathers large-scale, representative insights into community values, liveability, wellbeing and future needs. These insights provide Council with a direct understanding of what residents prioritise and how they experience their local area.
To deepen this understanding, the community insights from Community Views are complemented by demographic, economic, housing and population forecast information provided through the Informed Decisions platform. Together, these insights help Council connect residents’ lived experiences with broader trends shaping the community.
This combined evidence base enables the City to represent community priorities with confidence when making policy, investment and advocacy decisions.
Turning community insights into policy, advocacy and budgeting
The first Community Views study, conducted in 2023, provides Council with a clear set of insights about what residents value most in their local area and where experiences of liveability are strongest or under pressure.
Rather than treating the research as a standalone report, the City embeds these insights into strategic planning, policy discussions and advocacy. The findings also inform the City’s budgeting process.
Through the Living in Canning survey, residents identify priorities such as community safety, parks and leisure, transport improvements and environmental sustainability. These priorities directly shape the City’s “Better Budget”, ensuring that spending decisions reflect what residents say matters most in their community.
As Mayor Patrick Hall explains when announcing the budget:
“This is a responsible, community-first Budget. We’re maintaining and improving the services people rely on every day while investing in the kind of city we want to leave for future generations.”
By layering Community Views insights with demographic, economic and housing information, Council can interpret community feedback in context. This allows decision makers to understand not only what residents are saying, but how those views relate to broader changes occurring across the City, including population growth, housing pressures and shifting life stages.
Checking in to monitor progress
In 2025, the City commissioned a second wave of Community Views to check in on the earlier insights and understand how perceptions of liveability are evolving.
This repeat study allows Council to monitor whether policy decisions, infrastructure investment and service delivery are influencing how residents experience their local area. It also highlights emerging pressures so they can be addressed early.
The latest results show that overall liveability in Canning remains strong, with an Overall Liveability Index of 65.4, significantly above Australian and metropolitan benchmarks. Residents continue to prioritise feeling safe, access to the natural environment and strong local amenities as key contributors to quality of life.
The longitudinal approach also highlights where change is occurring. Experiences with public transport improve between the 2023 and 2025 surveys, aligning with the reopening of the train line and the introduction of a new bus network.
An organisation-wide resource for representing community priorities
Today, Community Views provides the City of Canning with an organisation-wide resource that is understood and endorsed by leadership.
The insights give teams across Council a shared evidence base when developing strategies, evaluating initiatives or advocating on behalf of residents. By complementing Community Views insights with demographic, economic, housing and population data, Council has a more complete picture of the community.
This ensures that decisions are informed not only by how the population is changing, but also by how residents experience those changes in their daily lives.
The City continues to use the Views platform as an ongoing reference point for representing community priorities and monitoring change over time, ensuring that resident perspectives remain embedded in decision making across the organisation.
Four key takeaways
Strong liveability, well above national benchmarks
The Overall Liveability Index was significantly higher than both the Australian and metropolitan averages, indicating that the community generally experiences Canning as a highly liveable place, despite emerging local pressures.
Public transport is delivering tangible benefits to the community
Reliable and efficient public transport was both highly valued and very positively experienced, with experiences improving since 2023 in line with the re-opening of the train line and introduction of the new bus network.
Housing affordability will represent growing pressure
Affordable, decent housing was not among the highest-priority liveability attributes for most people, but declining experience since 2023 and housing market trends suggest it is likely to become a more influential pressure on liveability over time.
Future liveability will be shaped by intergenerational change
Forecast population growth at both younger and older life stages highlights the importance of supporting residents to enter, remain, and age within the same community over time.
What could this look like for your community?
Community Views is an independent, robust and repeatable community survey that helps local councils and other organisations to credibly, comprehensively and efficiently represent their community’s views and needs in policy and advocacy. Book an introduction to Views, and the full suite of Informed Decisions tools, to find out what's possible for your community.