Sunshine Coast City Deal funding milestones accelerate hospital and university investment

The Sunshine Coast City Deal, the $2 billion three-government investment partnership signed in 2022, is tracking ahead of its commitment schedule with both the Sunshine Coast University Hospital campus expansion and the University of the Sunshine Coast's new Moreton Bay campus having opened earlier than the deal's delivery timeline required.

Federal Minister for Regional Development Julie Collins conducted a mid-term review of the deal with Queensland counterpart Deputy Premier Jarrod Bleijie and Sunshine Coast Council mayor Rosanna Natoli, confirming that 16 of 23 commitments had been fully delivered and six were tracking ahead of schedule. Only one commitment — the Maroochydore CBD public transport connection — remained on its original timeline, reflecting the complexity of the transit planning process.

Collins said the Sunshine Coast deal was performing better than any of the nine city deals in the national program, attributing the strong delivery to the quality of project governance established by the three parties and the extraordinary economic growth in the region that had created favourable conditions for private co-investment alongside the government program. "When we committed to this deal, we couldn't have predicted COVID and then the fastest population growth in Australian history. The deal has held up under both conditions," she said.

The deal's housing component, which committed 2,000 new affordable dwellings, has been renegotiated upward to 3,200 in response to the more severe-than-projected affordability crisis in the Sunshine Coast rental market. Additional Commonwealth Housing Australia Future Fund allocation will fund the increment above the original commitment.

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