THE LONG SHADOW OF THE BEACH.

For most of its modern history, the Sunshine Coast has been understood through the prism of its coastline. The beaches were the product, the sunshine was the brand, and the economy — such as it was — organised itself around the visitor. Motels, caravan parks, fish-and-chip shops, surf schools, and the slow seasonal rhythms of a place that made its living from people passing through. This was, for several decades, not merely an economic arrangement but an identity. The Sunshine Coast was where Queenslanders went on holiday. That was the full description.

It is not the full description any longer. The Sunshine Coast’s Gross Regional Product reached $26.33 billion in the year ending June 2024, growing 5.1 per cent since the previous year. The region had grown from a $13.8 billion economy in 2013 to that figure in 2024 — nearly doubling in a single decade. That rate of expansion belongs to a different category of place than a tourism town. It belongs to a regional economy in genuine structural transformation: one that has built new institutions, attracted new industries, and begun the long work of establishing civic infrastructure commensurate with its ambitions.

How that transformation happened — and what it reveals about the character of the region — is worth examining carefully. The Sunshine Coast’s story is not simply one of growth. It is a story about deliberate reinvention: the choices a region makes when it decides that a single economic identity is no longer sufficient.

BEFORE THE BEACH: THREE PHASES OF DEVELOPMENT.

The Sunshine Coast was not always defined by tourism. Sunshine Coast Council acknowledges the Kabi Kabi and Jinibara Peoples as the traditional custodians of the Sunshine Coast. The biosphere reserve is home to two First Nations, the Kabi Kabi and Jinibara peoples, sustaining a highly valued natural environment and rich biodiversity. Their relationship with this country was formed over thousands of years — a tenure that dwarfs every subsequent chapter in the region’s economic history.

The Kabi Kabi Traditional Owners have demonstrated a continuous connection to their land, culture and history on the Sunshine Coast, following a Federal Court of Australia native title consent determination on 17 June 2024. That recognition — decades in the making — is itself a marker of this region’s ongoing process of coming to terms with its layered past.

Following European settlement, the region experienced two early phases of development: first an agricultural-based economy with supporting services, then from the 1960s a move toward tourism, property development and personal service industries. The closure of the Moreton sugar mill in 2003 signalled the end of sugar cane farming in the region, further emphasising the shift toward a tourism-based economy.

The name that anchored the tourism phase was itself a deliberate construction. The name “Sunshine Coast” was launched in December 1958 at the inaugural dinner of the Sunshine Coast Branch of the Real Estate Institute of Queensland, held at the Hotel Caloundra — the result of a drive to popularise and obtain recognition for the name, replacing the term “Near North Coast” which was considered to lack significance for southerners. The idea of changing the name was controversial and only adopted after eight years of debate. In November 1966, Maroochydore, Noosa and Landsborough Shires all voted separately to adopt the name “Sunshine Coast.” It was officially gazetted on 22 July 1967 and took effect from 1 August 1967.

The 1960s marked a new era; major social changes followed a movement away from a hinterland-based rural farming economy to a new focus on coastal development, accompanied by the growth of the tourism industry. The 1980s marked a period of rapid growth and development, as the Sunshine Coast became one of Australia’s fastest-growing regions and most popular tourist destinations. The region had found its identity, and that identity was effective. But it was also, structurally, narrow.

Since the late 1990s the region has been transitioning into a third phase of development, characterised by rapid diversification that builds on the existing strengths of the tourism industry. The Sunshine Coast is moving toward an era of broader economic potential, greater employment opportunities and an enhanced 21st century lifestyle. Understanding that third phase — what it comprises, how it was designed, and what it has produced — is the central project of this essay.

THE STRATEGY BEHIND THE SHIFT.

Diversification of this kind does not happen accidentally. It requires a deliberate plan, institutional commitment, and the patience to work across a timeframe longer than any electoral cycle. Sunshine Coast Council worked with leading businesses, industry and the Queensland Government to develop the Sunshine Coast — The Natural Advantage: Regional Economic Development Strategy 2013–2033. The strategy was designed to provide a 20-year vision and blueprint for sustainable economic growth to 2033, aiming to ensure the region actively participates in the global economy and delivers the best possible lifestyle and opportunities for both residents and businesses.

The updated Strategy provides a program of action over the next five-year block of implementation covering 2023 to 2028, to drive further progress toward the delivery of a continued strong, new economy for the Sunshine Coast region to 2033. This kind of long-horizon strategic planning is unusual for a regional local government. Most councils manage what they have. The Sunshine Coast chose to actively redesign what it was becoming.

Since the development of the REDS, Sunshine Coast Council has been driving infrastructure investment, urban development, population growth, innovation and the nurturing of high value industries. As a result, the Sunshine Coast economy has undergone a period of significant growth and diversification. The strategy identified seven high-value industries as the structural pillars of the new economy. As the region and economy continued to evolve, the focus on a diversified economy through those seven high-value industries remained strong, while the strategy expanded to include six new and emerging broad economies within the areas of knowledge, digital, production, green, visitor and place-based.

Food and agribusiness is one telling example of how this approach has worked in practice. The Food and Agribusiness Network was itself born out of the initial REDS with the industry then valued at $725 million. By the mid-2020s that industry was recognised as a leading Australian food cluster and had grown to a value of over $1 billion. A tourism town does not typically build a billion-dollar agribusiness sector. That belongs to a region that has made deliberate choices about industrial mix.

BUILDING THE INSTITUTIONS OF A REAL CITY.

Economic diversification in the abstract means very little without the institutional infrastructure to sustain it. The Sunshine Coast’s transformation has been inseparable from a substantial program of institution-building — most visibly in health, education, and the creation of a genuine urban centre.

The health sector has been transformative. The Sunshine Coast Public University Hospital was described at the time of its development as the first new major, not replacement, public hospital to be built in Australia in more than 20 years. The Sunshine Coast University Hospital opened in 2017 with 450 beds and aims to expand to 738 beds and 4,600 staff. That hospital did not merely add medical capacity to the region. It became the anchor of a far larger economic cluster.

Development of the Health Precinct will contribute $3.2 billion to the Sunshine Coast economy and $447 million each year after completion. The precinct is anchored by the Sunshine Coast University Hospital, Sunshine Coast Health Institute and Sunshine Coast University Private Hospital, and incorporates the adjacent Health Hub and surrounding Birtinya Town Centre. The Sunshine Coast University Hospital is a tertiary teaching hospital that, together with the Sunshine Coast Health Institute, boasts world-class research facilities and advanced medical training. The hospital has added around 3,500 jobs when it opened, with figures expected to grow to almost double that five years later.

The significance of this goes beyond employment numbers. A teaching hospital that conducts research and trains specialists anchors a knowledge economy in ways that a resort hotel cannot. It attracts educated professionals, creates spin-off research enterprises, and builds the workforce pipeline that sustains a more complex economic structure. The new telecommunications and health infrastructure was forecast to help change the region’s economic profile from one dominated by tourism, retail and construction industries, and encourage business to consider the Sunshine Coast as a tech-savvy region and a smart place for their business.

Higher education has played a complementary role. The University of the Sunshine Coast (UniSC) is a public university based on the Sunshine Coast. After opening with 524 students in 1996 as the Sunshine Coast University College, it was later renamed the University of the Sunshine Coast in 1999. It was the first greenfield university established in Australia since 1971. The university has a subsidiary, Innovation Centre Sunshine Coast Pty Ltd, which is the first stage of a planned technology park precinct for Sippy Downs. The Innovation Centre comprises a business incubator for start-up technology businesses and a business accelerator for established technology, knowledge-based, and professional service firms.

The Sunshine Coast’s first fully local medical program is set to start from 2030 or earlier, to address doctor shortages in Sunshine Coast and regional Queensland. The ambition embedded in that announcement is telling: a region that thirty years ago had no university and no major hospital is now planning its own medical school. That is a fundamentally different kind of place from a tourism town.

THE NEW CITY CENTRE: A CBD BUILT FROM NOTHING.

Perhaps the most striking physical expression of the Sunshine Coast’s economic reinvention is the construction of an entirely new city centre in Maroochydore — not the renovation of an existing one, but the creation of a central business district on previously undeveloped land.

Maroochydore City Centre was declared a priority development area in July 2013 by the Queensland Government to streamline the planning, approval and development processes to accelerate development with a focus on economic growth. The project is positioned as Australia’s newest greenfield CBD and aims to be Australia’s first truly smart city, just 15 minutes from the Sunshine Coast Airport and 20 milliseconds from Asia via the international broadband submarine cable. Master-planned from the ground up, the new CBD will offer capital city infrastructure and has been designed for the Sunshine Coast lifestyle, with almost 18 hectares of parklands and waterways.

This ambitious $4-billion project is creating a connected, thriving community that is driving innovation and economic growth. SunCentral Maroochydore was established as an independent entity by Sunshine Coast Council in March 2015 to drive the delivery of a new city centre for the region. Walker Corporation’s investment in the 53-hectare Priority Development Area has commenced, with the project expected to create more than 15,000 jobs over its life.

The Maroochydore city centre will be the first development in Australia to incorporate a CBD-scale underground automated waste collection system. One of its most significant attributes is an underwater technology cable that provides the fastest internet connection to Asia from the east coast, as well as supercharged data connectivity to Sydney. These are not incremental improvements to a beachside town. They are the foundation conditions of a regional knowledge economy — digital connectivity that places the Sunshine Coast in direct competition with capital city precincts for the attention of technology businesses and professional services firms.

The multi-billion-dollar greenfield CBD will feature a mix of commercial, retail, residential and dining precincts and will serve as the Sunshine Coast Olympic village location for the Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games. That Olympic function will be discussed in detail in other parts of this series. What matters here is what the Maroochydore project represents as an economic statement: a region that chose to build its own urban centre rather than remain a collection of coastal suburbs within Brisbane’s economic orbit.

CONNECTING THE REGION: THE AIRPORT AS ECONOMIC INFRASTRUCTURE.

A regional economy that aspires to genuine self-sufficiency requires reliable physical connectivity to national and international markets. For the Sunshine Coast, this has meant a sustained investment in airport infrastructure that goes well beyond the needs of a tourism destination.

The Sunshine Coast Airport expansion project included construction of the existing north-west/south-east runway, which commenced in March 2019 and was completed in June 2020. This runway is longer and wider than the previous runway and is now compliant with regulatory standards. The airport received international status in October 2016, providing international tourists direct access to regional Australia.

The airport’s development trajectory since then has moved well beyond tourism facilitation. The Sunshine Coast Airport Priority Development Area was declared on 28 July 2023, in recognition of the airport’s growth and expansion as a significant domestic and international gateway to the region. The PDA will deliver significant economic benefits as a result of a fully developed airport through boosting jobs, growing the tourism economy and supporting other sectors such as food and agribusiness, freight, education and health.

By the 2026–27 financial year, Sunshine Coast Airport expects the growth in passengers to boost the local tourism industry by supporting 4,977 tourism jobs and $422 million in gross value to the sector. By 2030, estimates suggest an annual increase of $11 million to Queensland’s GDP, supporting 165 jobs each year over the construction period. Jobs at the airport are forecast to grow to 2,400 by 2040 and support a total of 3,438 jobs, direct and indirect. By 2040, the airport is estimated to directly contribute $307 million to Australia’s GDP and $460 million in total.

Construction of the Sunshine Coast Aerospace Precinct expansion has begun, with $7 million in site preparations including earthworks, roadwork and other infrastructure to pave the way for the expansion. An aerospace precinct attached to a regional airport speaks to economic diversification of a specific kind: aviation services, maintenance, training, and emergency services that have no dependence on the holiday visitor at all.

THE LIMITS OF THE OLD STORY.

It would be easy, and inaccurate, to frame this transformation as a simple supersession — tourism replaced by something more sophisticated. Tourism remains a significant part of the Sunshine Coast economy and will continue to be. What has changed is its proportional weight, and more importantly, its structural role. The region has transformed from a tourism and retirement relocation that drove the growth of construction and retailing into a diverse growth region built around balancing the economy, environment and community needs.

The old story — of the region as a place of pleasurable transience, sustained by visitors who came to forget the city for a week — served the Sunshine Coast well enough for several decades. It attracted capital in the form of motel developments and theme parks, and it built a population base of people who came for holidays and stayed for the lifestyle. But it also created structural vulnerabilities: overdependence on discretionary spending, a workforce concentrated in low-wage service roles, and an economic profile that offered limited pathways for the kinds of skilled professionals a modern economy requires.

Sunshine Coast Council worked with leading businesses, industry and the Queensland Government to develop the Regional Economic Development Strategy 2013–2033, which provides a 20-year vision and blueprint for sustainable economic growth. This strategy has been undergoing a 10-year review, as the region focuses its sights on the opportunities and legacy potential as a delivery partner in the 2032 Brisbane Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The acknowledgement embedded in that strategy — that tourism alone was insufficient — represents a significant moment of institutional self-awareness. The region’s leaders recognised that the name “Sunshine Coast” had become, in economic terms, a trap as much as an asset: a brand that attracted visitors but undersold the growing complexity of what was actually being built here.

"Maroochydore's new city centre will cement the Sunshine Coast as one of Queensland's, and Australia's, best-performing regional economies."

That observation, from the public record of the Maroochydore City Centre development approvals, captures the aspiration precisely. Not “best holiday destination.” Not “most beautiful beach.” A performing regional economy — measured, productive, institutional.

A REGION NAMING ITSELF.

There is something instructive in the history of the name “Sunshine Coast” itself. It was chosen deliberately, debated for years, and only formally adopted in 1967 — because the region’s decision-makers understood that naming is an act of economic positioning. The old name, “Near North Coast,” described a geographic relationship to Brisbane. The new name described an identity.

A generation later, the Sunshine Coast is engaged in a similar process of naming at a different register: the gradual construction of civic institutions, economic infrastructure, and strategic frameworks that describe what the region is, rather than merely where it sits. The Maroochydore CBD names the region as a place with its own urban centre. The University of the Sunshine Coast names it as a place capable of generating its own knowledge. The health precinct names it as a place that can manage the complexity of its own population without depending on Brisbane.

Sunshine Coast Council’s Gross Regional Product is estimated at $26.33 billion, representing 5.06 per cent of the state’s Gross State Product. That proportion — one-twentieth of Queensland’s entire economic output, generated by a region that a generation ago was principally a holiday destination — speaks to how far the transformation has progressed.

The permanence of that identity has a digital dimension as well. The onchain namespace sunshinecoast.queensland exists as part of a broader project to anchor Queensland’s regions onto a permanent civic address layer — one that reflects institutional reality rather than commercial expediency. For a region that has spent the better part of two decades constructing the infrastructure of a genuine regional economy, the question of how that economy is identified and addressed in digital space is not trivial.

THE UNFINISHED PROJECT.

The Sunshine Coast’s economic transformation is real, documented, and substantial. It is also unfinished. A $4 billion CBD built on a greenfield site is still being constructed; the CBD is expected to be completed within 15 to 20 years. A hospital opened in 2017 is still expanding toward its full bed capacity and staffing complement. A university established in 1996 as a college with 524 students is still building its research profile and has only recently gained a pathway to its own medical school. An airport declared a Priority Development Area in 2023 has a development scheme that took effect in September 2024.

These are the indicators of a region mid-transformation — not a region that has arrived. The institutional foundations have been laid with unusual deliberateness and unusual ambition. But the full economic maturity that those foundations are intended to support is still years away. That is, in a sense, the honest account of where the Sunshine Coast stands: further along than the tourism-town narrative would suggest, not yet at the destination its infrastructure implies.

What distinguishes this moment from earlier phases of the region’s history is the structural quality of what is being built. Tourism infrastructure — motels, theme parks, beachfront promenades — depreciates and can be demolished. A university, a teaching hospital, a CBD with submarine broadband connectivity, an airport declared a strategic national asset: these things persist. They change the nature of the economy they serve, and they change the character of the region that sustains them.

The Kabi Kabi and Jinibara Peoples, whose tenure on this country extends across thousands of years of recorded memory, might recognise something in the current moment: a place being named anew, its identity being claimed and constructed through deliberate acts of institution-building. The economic transformation of the Sunshine Coast is, at its deepest level, a story about a region deciding what kind of place it intends to be — and then doing the slow, infrastructural, institutional work required to become it. The permanent civic namespace sunshinecoast.queensland is, in that context, one small expression of a much larger ambition: to give this region an identity layer that reflects the full weight of what has been built here, and what is still being built.