A trio of high-profile politicians travelled to Albany to spruik the local benefits of the State Budget, their plan to “drag” people out of the city to the regions and the future of the Great Southern as an energy hub.

Premier Roger Cook was joined by Minister for Regional Development Stephen Dawson and Minister for the Great Southern Reece Whitby at the Albany Entertainment Centre for the breakfast briefing on Tuesday, the latest stop on their regional roadshow.

Hosted by the Great Southern Development Commission, more than a hundred local government representatives, businesspeople, and industry stakeholders attended.

A lengthy presentation of the Budget’s key points was followed by a Q&A session, wherein the three politician-panel answered pre-submitted questions about Great Southern-related items.

Of particular note among the topics — which included unlocking land and increasing home builds, benefits for small business, and government procurement going local first — was the future of industry in Albany as one of the key Seven Cities in WA.

Biofuels made of crushed canola and wave energy were the two sectors of interest in the Great Southern.

“It’s crazy to think, isn’t it, the amount of canola that we actually process for crushing in WA is minuscule compared to the millions of tonnes of the stuff that we export,” Mr Cook said.

“It’s the iron-ore of the agriculture sector.

“We just send this stuff, unrefined, unprocessed overseas, to other people in other parts of the world to add value and to make money out of it.

“This has got to stop, and this is part of what the Seven Cities program is about.

“It’s about making sure that we’re doing all the things in our big regional centres where we’ll have access to renewable, reliable, affordable energy.”

Mr Dawson, who also holds the innovation and science portfolios, flagged wave energy to be a primary energy industry of the Great Southern “in the not too distant future”.

Mr Cook said he hoped the Seven Cities initiative pushed the WA population back into the regions.

“We want to make sure that our big regional Seven Cities are actually dragged out of Perth,” he said.

“In WA, for some reason, we’ve grown our capital city like nobody’s business, and we now actually see an ever-diminishing number of people actually living in regional WA.

“It’s unsustainable.

“Perth can’t continue to grow like this and we can’t allow our regional communities to die.

“The Seven Cities program is about dragging people out of the city, creating big, big regional centres like Cairns, Townsville, Rockhampton, which they do in Queensland but for some reason we can’t manage in WA.

“This is also about making sure that everyone in regional WA has more support, more opportunity and more community development.”