Thirty seven percent of Australians do not live in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth or Adelaide. Reinforced by popular media references and current political arrangements at the federal level, this constituency has increasingly being referred to under the collective term of ‘regional’ Australia. Regional Australia is a broad term that can cover persons living in as a diverse range of settings as, on farms, in remote mining communities, as well as those who live in towns, cities and large regional centres. Contrary to widely held perceptions, reinforced by the often-used media term ‘the bush’, regional Australians mostly live in large cities and towns (DFAT, 2008). These non-metropolitan Australians are urban dwellers just like their metropolitan counterparts, with nearly 20 percent of them living in cities with populations between 40,000 and 500,000. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS, 2004, p. 1) defines ‘urban’ as a settlement of over 1,000 people. Another 5 percent of Australians live in cities and towns with more than 1,000 and less than 40,000 people. Only 13 percent of Australians live in rural or non-urban settings. The reality of this demographic situation, together with the financial and political dominance of the five metropolitan areas, sets much of the national policy agenda and dominates dialogue and research about urban policy at the national level and in each of the five mainland states. Recent initiatives by the federal government have provided a much stronger focus on regional Australia with policy and programs to specifically address the assessed needs of regional Australians. This new found recognition of regional Australia can be linked to agreements between the Labor party and three independent Members of Parliament who represent regional electorates (Brett, 2011). At the same time, the federal government has once again entered the policy area of Australia’s cities and has pursued a program to develop a national urban policy (DIT, 2011). In doing so it has provided a definitional cut off in terms of ‘urban’ as places with 100,000 persons or more. Using this criterion, only eighteen Australian cities (see: Figure 1, below) are part of an urban policy agenda and by default all urban areas below this population level are not part of that agenda. By implication, a national urban policy has no application to about 12 percent of the population who live in cities and towns with populations between 1,000 and 100,000 people (ABS, 2011). Many cities have a population just below that critical 100,000 level, they include cities such as: Ballarat (VIC), Bendigo (VIC), Mandurah (WA), Wagga Wagga (NSW) and Mackay (QLD). They are among a number of smaller cities in Australia that are growing rapidly and some will, in only a few years, achieve 100,000 persons. Do these cities suddenly acquire an urban policy agenda once they pass this population milestone? This definitional divide begs the question; what is the ‘urban’ policy agenda for cities and towns with less than 100,000 people? Is it the same as larger places just scaled down, or is it somehow different? The urban policy and planning agenda of smaller cities that sit below the level of major cities in developed nations receives little attention (Bell and Jayne 2006, 2009). However the size and scale of these ‘small’ cities varies depending on their particular national setting and settlement hierarchy. Bell and Jayne have examined the UK and North American examples, and by their definition small cities in these demographic settings are typically around the 250,000 population level. They do though find the same issues prevailing, that is the urban policy and research agenda is dominated by the largest cities and the agenda of smaller cities is little studied, poorly articulated and likely to be a combination of limited research and an assumption that it is the same as larger cities just at a smaller scale (Bell and Jayne 2006, 2009). This paper discusses the periodic emergence of regional Australia as a focus of policy and action, the development of a network of regional centres in Australia, the difficulties and shortcomings in confining a national urban policy to only the very large cities and how regional policy and an urban policy agenda relates to Australia’s ‘non-urban’ cities and larger towns.