Majority of migrants are choosing to move to the cities within five years of living in regional Australia, according to a new study by the Australian National University (ANU). 

According to the study, more than 60 per cent of migrants end up moving to the cities despite the government’s policies encouraging them to settle down in rural areas. 

"What we found was that the big capital cities - Sydney, Melbourne and Perth and to a certain extent Hobart - were quite good at keeping people but the places everywhere else lost people on average," ANU demographer Bernard Baffour said.

"The data showed recent government attempts to attract migrants to rural and remote Australia are not working. What we are seeing in the data is that the opposite is happening,” Mr Baffour added. 

The Australian government has already introduced measures to entice migrants to regional areas, such as two new visas for skilled workers to live and work in regional areas. 

However, Mr Baffour expressed the need for policymakers to review the existing policies. 

“You can’t just send people out to these areas and expect everything to turn out well – you’ve got to think a bit harder,” Mr Baffour said. 

Some regional areas in need of labour or particular skills had high levels of unemployment, poor infrastructure and high rates of crime. 

Mr Baffour added that to keep the migrants in the regional areas, “there needs to be economic opportunities, there needs to be social opportunities, there also needs to be education and infrastructure”. 

“Some of these areas have huge population turnovers. Within a five-year period more than half of the population had moved,” Mr Baffour said. “Rural and remote areas continue to face population decline while cities keep growing.”

The ANU study encompassed two research papers, which analysed over 35 years of data. 

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