Funding for businesses to relocate to regional areas for research and development into locally sourced raw material supplies

Regional Decentralisation Agenda supports the long-term economic prosperity of Australia’s regional communities. It does this by:

• promoting jobs growth
• boosting investment
• building sustainable businesses and competitive regional industries.

It also delivers lifestyle benefits to regional communities. It does this by encouraging businesses and government agencies to relocate to regional Australia.

Your project must relocate or establish a new operation, branch or outpost in a regional area.

A regional area is any location outside the Urban Centre and Locality (UCL) cities with a population of over 1 million people. This is as defined by the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Australian Statistical Geography Standard (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide). Regional areas don’t include the Australian Capital Territory.

Regional areas do include Hobart and Darwin.

Check if your project location is in a regional area.

You are not eligible to apply if you are:

• an individual
• partnership
• unincorporated association
• an incorporated not for profit organisation
• any organisation not included in section 4.1 the Grant opportunity guidelines
• trust or trustee
• a Commonwealth, State, Territory or local government body including government business enterprises
• a non-corporate Commonwealth entity.

We first assess your application against the eligibility criteria. We then assess it 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 Minister will make the final decision.

We’ll only consider funding applications that score at least 50% against each assessment criterion. This is because these applications will represent the best value for money.

Assessment criterion 1

Project alignment with policy intent (program objectives and outcomes) (60 points).

You should demonstrate this by describing the following:

• how your project will develop or increase the supply of new, innovative or improved locally-sourced raw materials
• the benefits of the project to your business, industry sector and wider economy, including potential job creation and the broader utility of the project within the industry sector
• how your project will strengthen supply chains and linkages to, or relationships with, the research sector in regional Australia
• how you will embed the benefits of the project and your relocation into the regional area.

Assessment criterion 2

Capability, capacity and resources to deliver your project (30 points).

You should demonstrate this by describing the following:

• your track record in managing similar projects and access to personnel with the right skills and experience, including management and technical staff
• your plan to manage the project, addressing scope, implementation, timeframes, budget and risk
• the role of each partner and how collaboration will be managed to deliver project outcomes.

You must attach a detailed budget as part of your application

Assessment criterion 3

Impact of the grant funding on your project (10 points).

You should demonstrate this by describing the following:

• how the funding amount requested is justified with respect to the scale of the project and intended outcomes.

If your application is successful, you’ll receive a written offer. If you are unsuccessful, we’ll notify you in writing and give you the chance to discuss the outcome with us.

Successful applicants must enter into a grant agreement with the Commonwealth. The grant agreement will specify the reporting requirements, payment schedule and milestones necessary to receive payments.

We will make an initial payment on execution of the grant agreement. We’ll make subsequent payments in arrears, based on your actual eligible expenditure. Payments are subject to satisfactory progress on the project. We set aside a minimum of 10% of the total grant funding for the final payment. We’ll pay this when you submit a satisfactory final report.

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