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   RAI Regional Champions: Chris Sounness

The work of the RAI would not be possible without the ongoing support of organisations and individuals across regional, rural and remote Australia.

They are a collective coalition working alongside the RAI to build a better future for regional Australia, by turning the dial on the 20 targets outlined in the RAI’s Regionalisation Ambition. 

Our regional champions ensure the voices of those who live outside of our biggest cities get heard and that’s something we think is worth celebrating, which is why we’d like to introduce you to some of our regional champions.  

Name: Chris Sounness
Role: Chief Executive Officer
Organisation: Wimmera Southern Mallee Development
Location: Horsham, Vic
Population: 20, 429 (ABS 2021)

What are three facts about your region that most people don’t know?

From grain stores to game scores, to river life restored:  The Wimmera Southern Mallee does things differently.

The Murtoa Stick Shed is Australia’s cathedral to food security and stands as a national engineering icon, built in wartime urgency to protect wheat supplies. Meanwhile, Nhill is home to Australia’s only pinball museum, where flippers, bumpers and vintage neon celebrate a very different kind of legacy. Both are one-of-a-kind. Both speak to how this region makes the practical memorable.

From one season, we produce enough wheat, lentils, meat and canola to feed the world for a day. And if you add our barley, faba beans and oats, we meet not just the calorie count, but the nutritional standard of a global diet. That’s the scale of food we quietly move through our supply chains every year.

The Wimmera River doesn’t flow to the sea but it still matters. It’s part of the Murray–Darling Basin, though it ends in a chain of terminal lakes instead of heading to the ocean. After years of effort by Landcare groups and locals, platypus are starting to return to parts of the river system. That’s not a small thing. It shows that community-led work on water, habitat, and care for country is making a real difference.

What’s a regionalisation win your organisation has achieved?

We have pledged to help enable the building of 3,000 new homes in the Wimmera Southern Mallee over the next decade. At the time, we knew it was ambitious. It actually looks further out of reach now than it did then. But we also knew something else; that system change takes time, and the groundwork matters.

Through the Wimmera Housing Innovation Partnership (WHIP), we’re starting to build that groundwork. WHIP brings together health services, volunteer groups, councils and major project developers to grow local capacity in a way that fits how our region actually works. Four communities are preparing to build. More are coming.

When we first wrote the pledge, we had a sense that energy and mining investment was coming, but we didn’t know how or when. Now we’ve got a clearer view. The challenge is turning that activity into long-term housing that allows our population to grow and that’s where WHIP is already shifting the landscape.

This isn’t about projects being done to our towns. It’s about giving local communities the tools to shape what comes next.

The pledge is still ambitious. But now, instead of looking like a stretch without a plan, it sits on a runway we’re laying down piece by piece. WHIP is making take-off possible

What’s the biggest challenge in your region and how do you propose to overcome it?

Our biggest challenge is attracting capital and overcoming the structural barriers that stop it flowing into regions like ours.

We’re on the verge of a major infrastructure build-out across renewable energy, food processing, mining and transmission. Plus, we have our business as usual. All our major employers have staff shortages and vacancies.  Every one of those projects needs housing, and not just temporary solutions. But the investment market doesn’t match the timing or risk profile we’re dealing with.

Project proponents are open to playing their part, but most won’t commit to housing until they reach financial closure. Investors, in turn, won’t invest without pre-commitments or rental guarantees. Developers struggle to get decent leverage because banks rely on historical data that doesn’t reflect what’s coming. Government investment in social and affordable housing keeps passing us by. We’re seen as too small, too safe, or too stable on paper so when the system looks backwards, we stay invisible.

And layered over all of this, we’re in drought. Again. It’s not a hypothetical risk it’s here now, and it’s putting pressure on farm businesses, family incomes, community wellbeing and local confidence. Drought reaches into every part of life out here, and it makes every conversation about growth or ambition that little bit harder to carry.

That’s why our region has stopped waiting. We’re building our own systems. We can’t afford not to.

Within the next 12 months, what does success for your organisation look like?

In the next 12 months, success for us looks like this: that our region is able to have clearer conversations with each other about what we’re actually trying to achieve which, at its heart, is building a better place to live.

Right now, that’s not easy. There’s a lot of pressure across the region.  This is layered upon a community wrestling with drought and bushfire recovery. Corporate investment is heading our way, driven by government policy, renewable energy, transmission, mineral sands and food processing. These are big projects, but they often feel like they’re being done to us, not with us. Communities feel they’re not at the table. Volunteer groups are under pressure to approach potential funding partners effectively. Conversations between neighbours, partners and even councils are more strained than they should be.

But things are starting to shift. There’s a growing understanding that food security isn’t just a national issue it’s our issue. Corporate partners are beginning to see that trust isn’t built through consultation; it’s built by turning up differently. And there are signs that the government is starting to realise that roads, health, education, childcare and housing aren’t downstream extras they’re part of the social licence to operate in regions like ours.

We’re hopeful that over the next year, we’ll secure investment to strengthen our regional approach to food security preparedness, see real progress in housing, and help shift the mindset from ‘consulting communities’ to ‘working with communities’. That’s when we’ll know we’re heading in the right direction.

If you had to describe to someone what it’s like working with the RAI, what would you say?

RAI membership is about connecting with people in other regions who are tackling different challenges, but often facing the same underlying issues.

On the surface, it might look like we’re dealing with separate problems housing, early years workforce, transport, investment, but once you peel back the layers, the patterns are familiar. The difference is in the sense of place and how each region responds. Being part of the RAI network means you can learn from how others are navigating similar systems and use that insight in your own context. There’s value in that kind of translation.

The second part is about voice. As individual regions, we often don’t get cut-through in Canberra. But RAI provides a platform where regional and rural perspectives are put front and centre at the federal level. It gives us a seat at the table with senior public servants and politicians. The shared ambition across the membership helps hold the line that business as usual in rural Australia is not good enough, and that regions deserve better.

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