Regional Australia often takes pride in being the well-kept secret of the nation.
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After all, we don't necessarily want everyone in the big cities to know just how great life can be living in the country.
It's the lack of congestion, the community's diversity, in what's on offer and the general clean living that makes it so valued.
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If everyone in the big smoke truly understood, we'd be swamped - we reckon - and a part of that would be lost.
It's certainly something that people in the regions treasure and, to be honest, there's probably not going to be a stampede any time soon.
Nevertheless, many regions - with Albury-Wodonga a stand-out example - produce strong year-on-year growth, even as some smaller towns and villages in more isolated areas wither.
That growth though is often not recognised by government in the way that it should.
Albury-Wodonga's public health system is a prime example. The Border Medical Association recently decried the sub-standard support from government, pointing out how some regional cities' health services less busy than our own have still attracted substantially more infrastructure funding.
This scatter-gun approach to health funding is symptomatic of the attitude across the board to regional Australia.
The panel favours up to $2 million a year being provided to every Regional Development Australia committee in the form of a rural development fund.
But the very fact it took over a year for the recommendations in the report to be released is a worrying sign of the lack of genuine commitment to making wholesale change.
It is time for the federal government to get serious about treating the regions on an equal footing to their city counterparts and to recognise the enormous potential there exists in the bush.
Doing so will be of considerable benefit to all, not just regional Australia.
