Bernard Salt’s Regional Super Consumer Now Spends $250 Billion

Two years after Bernard Salt told a Boomtown breakfast that regional Australia had 10 million super consumers, CommBank iQ priced 2025 card spend at $250 billion. He was speaking to 160 guests in Sydney’s Barangaroo on August 14, 2024.

The demographer called the next 10 years “the time of the regions.” National media plans have not moved with the same force. Boomtown marketing lead Francesca Ryan said in August 2026 that 37 percent of Australians live outside the capitals while about 18 percent of national advertising and marketing money is aimed at them.

Bernard Salt Called the Next Decade for the Regions

Salt, founder of The Demographics Group, told the room that Australians have spent a century chasing lifestyle and quality of life. Peak growth, he said, was coming from people aged 20 to 40 who were leaving the cities for lifestyle towns.

He named the Gold Coast and Tweed Heads, the Sunshine Coast, Geelong, Warragul-Drouin, Morisset-Cooranbong, Busselton and Ballarat. The portrait he sold was a household with a mortgage, more than one car, a bigger grocery basket than a city household, and weekends spent on the house itself.

In big, bold, round numbers, 10 million people with the spending power of a first world nation, 4 million households. This is regional Australia, and according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, this is a market that will surge and blossom over the next 10 years.

Bernard Salt, demographer, Boomtown breakfast, Barangaroo

Brian Gallagher, then Boomtown chair, used the same breakfast to score the sales campaign. Members of the collective, he said, had lifted their share of the national advertising dollar to 17.6 percent. He pointed to work with Analytic Partners that showed up to a 32 percent lift in ROI when campaigns used regional media.

Gallagher also said local stories still pull attention, and that local outlets give brands a safer place to run. Boomtown had, by then, put five years of campaigning for regional media behind that pitch, after launching around 2019 when regional titles were taking about 10 percent of national budgets.

What the Super Consumer Buys

Salt’s buyer was not a farmer in the wheat belt. Boomtown’s own figures around the breakfast put about two-thirds of regional workers in white-collar jobs and only 2.4 percent in farming. Disposable income, the collective said, sat close to the city average.

The household he described was specific. After 30 years of rising GDP per person, wealth had gone into a 550 square metre block, four bedrooms, two bathrooms, two children and two incomes, with Bunnings and Harvey Norman as the shopfronts. “German kitchen gooseneck tapware” had become “the new silverware,” he said.

THE 2024 PORTRAIT

• The home: More likely to be owned than a comparable city household, and more hours go into keeping it up.
• The cars: More than one vehicle, because distances are longer and there is rarely a train.
• The trolley: A larger grocery basket, and more of the rest of the shop done online.
• The table: Food tastes that Salt called cosmopolitan, pulled from city life into regional kitchens.

That was the speech. The 2025 card data put numbers on the same habits, and the gaps are wider than the breakfast language.

THE 2025 SPEND GAP

CommBank iQ built those figures from anonymised transactions of 17 million Australians across the 2025 calendar year, covering 30 measured categories for Boomtown. Regional New South Wales spends about $1,000 a year on the home, almost double Sydney in that category.

A $250 Billion Ledger, Measured in Groceries and Hardware

The bank’s brighter-perspectives note, posted on August 31, 2026, called regional Australia a $250 billion regional spending market and 35 percent of national consumer spend. In several everyday categories it is closer to half the till.

Regional Queensland is the largest state slice at $76.2 billion a year, with about half the state’s people living outside Brisbane. Regional New South Wales follows at $73.7 billion, with 34 percent of that state’s population. Makenna Ralston, chief executive of CommBank iQ, said regional Australia is a third of the economy and, in many categories, the most valuable third.

Cruises are the sharpest skew: regional buyers account for 41 percent of national category spend, and the city side of that market is shrinking. Online travel agents and bookings in the regions grew 17 percent year on year, two points faster than in the capitals, and make up 31 percent of national spend in that channel. Pet spending has risen more than 30 percent nationally since 2022, and regional households sit above the city average there too.

Ryan said the report should kill a stale picture of regional buyers as a lesser version of city ones. They still want holidays, cars, jet skis and home projects, she said, and in many of those lines they spend more. Streaming, up 18 percent year on year and led by 25-to-44-year-olds, is the simplest answer to the claim that regional Australia is offline.

Millennials Will Not Go Back to the Hour-Each-Way Commute

Salt’s engine for all of this is a generation moving through peak pay. He told the breakfast that millennials would pass through the highest-income age, 43, over the following 10 years. In the interview after the event he put that generation at 6 million people, with more than 1 million already shifting to lifestyle locations, at an average age of 33.

“The millennials were in the city, eating smashed avocado, living that inner city lifestyle,” he said. “That’s great if you’re late 20s, early 30s. What happens when that entire generation in their late 30s with rising income, want their forever home? Where are you going to buy your forever home in this market?”

Work from home is the hinge. Census figures Salt cited put the long-run share of people working from home at about 5 percent for 30 years. In the 2021 census it jumped to 21 percent. He expected the 2026 census to settle near 15 percent, not a return to 5. About 10 percent of the workforce, 1.4 to 1.5 million people, were already choosing where to live, he said.

I don’t think that it’s going to increase enough for Australians to say, you know what, I’m going to go back to commuting an hour, if not more, each way, five days a week. I just don’t see millennials buying into that. They won’t submit. They’ll die before they submit to going back to the way things were.

Bernard Salt, demographer, interview after the Boomtown breakfast

He waved away a jobs scare as the thing that would drag them back. Unemployment was 4.2 percent in July 2024. The last non-Covid recession, in 1991-1992, took the rate just over 12 percent. Salt said a slowdown might push unemployment to 5 or 6 percent, not three times higher, because the flow of young people into work has been thinning since the 1970s.

Cultural fashion, he argued, follows the headcount. Sea Change made the coastal move feel like television in the late 1990s. The inner-city years made baristas and small bars feel like the centre of the country. The next version, he said, is a barista in Bowral or Warragul, because millennials are the largest group and “whatever you do becomes fashionable.”

Sunshine Coast, Geelong and the Lifestyle Strip

Casual talk still treats the Gold Coast as the whole story, the place Melbourne and Sydney people name when they say they are leaving. Salt’s list is wider and less glamorous, which is the point. Warragul-Drouin, Morisset-Cooranbong, Busselton and Ballarat sit on that list beside the two Queensland coasts and Geelong.

The Centre for Population’s read of ABS figures for 2023-24 put the Sunshine Coast, Geelong and the Gold Coast as the fastest-growing regional cities, at 2.4, 2.3 and 2.3 percent. In 2024-25, Caloundra on the Sunshine Coast grew 3 percent, the fastest rest-of-state SA3, with the Sunshine Coast Hinterland at 2.7 percent. Regional Queensland was again the fastest rest-of-state area, at 1.4 percent.

That is not the same as regions overtaking the capitals. In 2024-25 the combined capitals grew 1.8 percent, adding about 325,000 people, while rest-of-state areas grew 1.1 percent, about 95,000 people. Overseas migration still lands mostly in the cities, about 85 percent of the national net inflow. The cities also posted a net internal loss of about 30,000 people to the regions, down from 34,000 the year before.

CommBank’s Regional Movers Index, read with the Regional Australia Institute, still has the same magnets on the board. The Sunshine Coast and Greater Geelong still lead net internal inflows, with the Fraser Coast rising into third. Sydneysiders accounted for 54 percent of net capital outflows in that report, Melburnians 38 percent. In the June quarter of 2024, CommBank counted 27 percent more people moving city-to-region than the other way.

Salt was precise about the geography he meant. “It’s the movement to the near regions, just beyond the edge of the metropolitan area and to the major regional centres,” he said. “That’s a market worth pursuing.” Inland wheat country was not the pitch. The forever home on the metro fringe was.

The 18 Percent Gap in National Media Plans

Boomtown exists because that geography has never had a matching share of national media money. Gallagher’s 17.6 percent in August 2024 was the scoreboard after the first five years. Ryan’s “around 18 percent” in August 2026, set against 37 percent of the population, is the same gap with a new chair and a new ledger.

Andrew “Billy” Baxter, who followed Gallagher, put it as a half-sized spend for a third of the country. Nathan Patrick, Nine’s commercial director for regional, took the Boomtown chair from 10 August 2026. The collective’s members still span regional television, radio and print, including SCA, WIN, Seven, ARN, ACM, Nine’s regional network, News Australia and Imparja.

THE BOOMTOWN CLOCK

1. 2019: Boomtown launches as a joint sales pitch; regional media is taking about 10 percent of national budgets.
2. August 14, 2024: Salt tells 160 guests in Barangaroo that the next 10 years belong to the regions; Gallagher cites a 17.6 percent share and up to 32 percent extra ROI.
3. January to December 2025: CommBank iQ measures $250 billion of regional spend across 30 categories.
4. April 2026: Boomtown and CommBank iQ publish the Spend Snapshot, with Andrew Baxter still in the chair.
5. August 10, 2026: Nathan Patrick becomes chair; Ryan restates the gap as 37 percent of people and about 18 percent of ad money.

The missing dollars are not a mystery about reach. They are a habit. For years regional airtime was the line that got cut when a schedule had to shrink. Gallagher’s old complaint, from before the breakfast, was walking into agencies and hearing that regionals were “not on the schedule” even when he used the product being advertised.

How Far the Extra Return Can Stretch

Analytic Partners’ Jo-Ann Foo, writing in September 2024, gave Boomtown its favourite comparison and the limit that sits under it. At the spend levels of a typical Australian advertiser, regional television returned an average ROI 32 percent higher than a metro buy, and regional press 33 percent higher. For every dollar in regional TV, she wrote, the extra return against metro was about 32 cents.

She also said those gaps sit on a yield curve. Returns look high in part because so little money goes into regional markets in the first place. The finding, in her words, does not mean brands should pour large new sums into the regions. Incremental reach in a few priority markets, where viewing is still high, is the move that lifts returns. Analytic Partners has measured about $800 billion of marketing spend globally over 24 years, and extra reach is the pattern that keeps showing up.

WHERE EXPERTS DISAGREE

• Boomtown’s sales case: Gallagher and Ryan treat the 32 percent comparison, and the 37-to-18 population-to-spend gap, as a reason to make regional media a default line in national plans.
• Foo’s yield curve: The same 32 percent is real at current low weights, and it would shrink if everyone doubled regional spend at once.
• Salt’s consumer case: The argument is not the spot rate. It is 10 million people in 4 million households, heading through peak income, already buying the house, the second car and the larger trolley.

Ryan’s August 2026 line still describes the job Patrick inherited. Thirty-seven percent of the country lives in the regions, about 18 percent of national advertising follows them, and the 2025 card file says those households already spend like the market Salt named in Barangaroo.