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Rockhampton: a Shared Evidence Base for Action
Key highlights
The Client
Rockhampton Regional Council
Their Challenge
Rockhampton faces increasing pressure around safety, housing, health and community wellbeing. Council needs to make confident planning, policy and advocacy decisions for a growing regional centre.
The Approach
Rockhampton Regional Council commissioned Informed Decisions to deliver a Community Views survey. The survey captures residents’ lived experience and priorities.
Survey insights were then integrated with objective evidence on the region’s demographics, population outlook, economic drivers and housing dynamics to form a single, connected evidence base.
This enabled clearer identification of priorities - and more confident decision making across planning, investment and service delivery.
Results
A reliable and integrated evidence base that clarifies Rockhampton’s priorities, reduces organisational risk and strengthens Council’s ability to explain, defend and act on decisions.
Key takeaway
In increasingly complex environments, councils need an integrated understanding of their communities to support their most important decisions.
By combining spatial and objective data with lived experience from Rockhampton’s Views, Council can focus on what matters most to the community and act with confidence.
Growing complexity
Rockhampton is a major service and employment hub for Central Queensland, supporting a diverse population and a wide regional catchment. While the region has strong foundations, Council was navigating rising expectations alongside growing pressures related to safety, housing affordability, access to health services and long-term community resilience.
Council needed to understand:
- what residents value most when it comes to quality of life
- where lived experience is strong and where pressure points are emerging
- how priorities and experiences differ across age groups and local areas, and
- how to support long-term planning, policy and advocacy with a shared, trusted evidence base that connects people and place.
In partnership with Informed Decisions, Rockhampton Regional Council delivered Community Views 2025, capturing resident values, experiences and future priorities through a large, representative survey of more than 800 residents, weighted by age and local area.
Importantly, Community Views was designed to complement, not replace, Council’s existing evidence. It added community priorities and lived experience to an established understanding of demographic change, population futures, economic conditions and housing dynamics.
Rather than relying on individual datasets in isolation, Council now draws on a fully connected evidence base that brings together:
- current and projected demographic and population change
- local economic structure, performance and employment conditions
- housing supply, affordability and market dynamics, and
- community values, lived experience and perceptions of quality of life.
Together, these datasets provide a shared picture of Rockhampton, linking how the region is changing with how those changes are being experienced by residents.
What Rockhampton Learned
Safety is a critical pressure point
Feeling safe emerged as residents’ highest priority, yet experiences of how safe people felt lagged behind how important they felt safety was to them. This highlighted safety as a key area for targeted, place-based responses and community-focused action.
Housing affordability requires close monitoring
While .id’s quantitative housing data shows that Rockhampton remains relatively affordable in comparative terms, it also indicates that property values and rental costs have risen sharply in recent years.
Rockhampton’s Views provides important context on how these changes are being experienced across the community, highlighting that younger residents and renters are most acutely affected by challenges in accessing affordable, decent housing. This not only underscores the importance of housing affordability for more vulnerable groups, but also signals potential barriers to attracting and retaining younger people looking to build a life in Rockhampton, with implications for workforce sustainability and long-term economic growth.
Improved access to health services is a priority
Like safety, Rockhampton’s Views survey shows that residents place a high value on access to quality health services when considering what makes a place a good place to live.
However, residents report relatively poor experiences of accessing health services locally. This is particularly significant given the region’s high incidence of chronic illness, alongside the growing role of the health care and social assistance sector in Rockhampton’s employment base and economic output.
Together, these factors point to a strong alignment between community need and economic growth, reinforcing the importance of coordinated planning as demand for health and related services continues to increase.
Community connection underpins wellbeing
Residents who reported living in communities with a strong sense of connection were more likely to feel safe and to describe their health and wellbeing more positively. This alignment highlights the importance of social connection as a foundation for individual and community wellbeing. It also reinforces the role of place-making, local activation and inclusive public spaces in creating environments where people feel connected, supported and secure.
Investment in these areas can therefore deliver benefits that extend beyond social outcomes, contributing to improved health, safety and liveability across the region.
From Spatial Insight To a Core Decision Platform
By integrating community priorities with a deep understanding of demographic change, population futures, economic conditions and housing dynamics, Rockhampton Regional Council has moved beyond fragmented insight to a core operating platform for confident decision making.
The value lies not in any single dataset, but in the way decision makers can group evidence bases together to reduce uncertainty, clarify priorities and support decisions that can be clearly explained, defended and revisited as conditions change.
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.
Image credit: @Caroline Brundle Bugge via Canva Pro