What were the themes and outcomes of our 2025 Regional Leaders Summit?

Warmth, joy, learning and solidarity was served in spades at the inaugural Summit held on 5 & 6 Aug 2025 at Newcastle City Hall NSW. Rural and regional leaders from across the country were reminded they’re not alone in the shift to renewable energy and of the power of working together to strengthen outcomes at the local level.

We’re deeply grateful to every participant for committing to the event and sharing experiences. It wasn't always easy – participants went deep on the challenges, and expressed frustration, exhaustion and overwhelm amongst it all. This is difficult work. 

We heard from regional leaders that there are glaring gaps in capacity at the local government and community organisation level to appropriately manage the local energy shift, there are gaps in “who’s responsible” to lead key infrastructure upgrades needed to enable the renewables build, and there’s an appetite to continue working together.

That’s just the start. Join the regional leaders themselves to discuss the themes in a post-Summit report back webinar. We’ll also circulate a paper summarising summit themes and next steps ahead of the webinar.

Wednesday 3 September 2025
11:30AM - 12.30PM AEST
Register via this link

Thank you to our colleagues at the Australian Local Government Association, Community Power Agency, Foundation for Rural & Regional Australia, ProjectsJSA, Regional Australia Institute and The Next Economy who helped make this event truly exceptional.

We are so grateful to the organisations who financially supported a huge number of rural and regional leaders to get to the Summit: the Clean Energy Council, Essential Energy, PoweringWA, TasNetworks and VicGrid.