$4000 boost to Qld home buyers grant

First-home buyers will get an $11,000 incentive to move away from Queensland's southeast corner.

AAP

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FIRST-HOME buyers will receive an $11,000 incentive to move away from Queensland's crowded southeast corner.

And planning will begin to grow Townsville into a second capital city.

Premier Anna Bligh on Thursday announced several new initiatives to come out of the Growth Management Summit earlier this year to address the state's population boom.

Among them is a $4000 boost to the existing $7000 First Home Owners Grant for Queenslanders who buy outside of the state's southeast.

The boost will be funded from $7.2 million in the state budget and will kick in on July 1, 2010 for the purchase of newly built homes.

It will apply to areas outside Brisbane, Gold Coast, Redland, Logan, Ipswich, Lockyer Valley, Scenic Rim, Somerset, Moreton Bay and Sunshine Coast council areas.

Asked whether the boost could jack up house prices in the regions, Ms Bligh said the scheme would be monitored to measure its success.

"We'll watch and see what people do with it over the next 12 months or two years and we'll be reporting on it," she said.

"We think it's worth trying new ideas to encourage more people to look at regional towns and cities where they do want more growth, where they need new workers for big projects."

Other initiatives announced to address population growth include developing Townsville as north Queensland's key centre and relocating some government functions to regional areas.

"Townsville has the capacity to be, effectively, a second capital," Ms Bligh said.

"It already has a large population base, it has a very large defence force population, it has a very strong port, it has an industrial base.

"We think we need to start planning for it to be an even bigger city in the future."

Ms Bligh said government departments and functions like call centres were being looked at to see which could be moved from the southeast.

But she said this was a long-term goal which would take between two to five years.

She said a promise 18 months ago to move government workers to Ipswich had not yet occurred, as planning and consultation with staff was still happening.

The new initiatives come after the announcement of three new satellite communities at Ripley Valley, Yarrabilba and Flagstone to house 250,000 people in the south and western growth corridors of the southeast corner.