Funding for projects that will provide economic and social benefits to regional and remote areas

• Round Five of the program incorporates $100 million towards tourism-related infrastructure projects
  • On 8 October 2021, the Government committed an extra $25 million towards tourism-related infrastructure projects.
• when applying, you will be asked to indicate your intention to seek funding for your project from the tourism-related infrastructure projects funding pool
• you will be asked to demonstrate the impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had on your region’s tourism industry (or the region that will benefit from your proposed project) and how your project will provide benefits to the tourism industry to assist in mitigating the impact from the COVID-19 pandemic
• you will be required to provide evidence to support your claims and must meet the eligibility requirements
• you do not have to be a tourist organisation to apply for the tourism-related infrastructure funding.

You are not eligible to apply if you are:

• a for-profit organisation
• an individual, partnership or trust (however, an incorporated trustee may apply on behalf of a not-for-profit trust organisation)
• a Commonwealth, state or territory government agency or body (including government business enterprises) with the exception of those organisations referred to in section 4.1 of the grant opportunity guidelines
• a university, technical college, school or hospital
• a Regional Development Australia Committee.

Your project must be in an eligible area. You will need to show this in your application by providing the latitude and longitude of your project location.

Our mapping tool will help you determine your project location and its eligibility.

Use the Building Better Regions Fund map tool.

We assess your application against the eligibility criteria and then against the assessment criteria. Only eligible applications will proceed to the assessment stage.

The amount of detail and supporting evidence you provide in your application should be relative to the project size, complexity and grant amount requested. You should define, quantify and provide evidence to support your answers. The sample application form displays character limits.

We provide recommendations to the Ministerial Panel on which projects to fund. The Ministerial Panel will make the final decision.

We will only consider funding applications that score at least 60 per cent against each assessment criterion, as these represent best value with relevant money.

• Assessment criterion 1: Economic benefits of your project for the region (15 points)
• Assessment criterion 2: Social benefits of your project for the region (15 points)
• Assessment criterion 3: Capacity, capability and resources to deliver the project (15 points)
• Assessment criterion 4: Impact of funding on your project (5 points)

We may make an initial payment on execution of the grant agreement. We will make subsequent payments as you achieve milestones in arrears, based on your actual eligible expenditure. Milestone payments are subject to satisfactory progress on the project.

Note that if you request an upfront initial payment, we will request additional financial information from you, to verify your organisation is unable to cover the costs associated with your project without that initial grant payment.

We set aside at least 10 per cent of the total grant funding for the final payment. We will pay this when you submit a satisfactory end of project report demonstrating you have completed outstanding obligations for the project.

Payments will be made by direct credit into a nominated bank account.