The federal government’s proposed population policy would force some migrants to spend their first five years in Australia living outside Sydney and Melbourne.

Population Minister Alan Tudge said on Tuesday that encouraging migrants to settle in regional areas would help ease population pressures in those cities.

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“There’s been small growth in the regions and indeed they’re often crying out for people,” he said.

Parkes MP Mr Coulton backed the initiative and said he has spoken to Minister Tudge about the policy.

“I am supportive of any plan that is designed to boost the local economy and social fabric of regional communities, which are widespread across my electorate,” he said.

“There is great potential for regional towns to flourish if more people come to live regionally.

“I believe addressing the skills shortage in my electorate is an important issue.”

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Mr Coulton said there were many “exciting projects in the pipeline” across regional Australia.

“There are wonderful opportunities for people to make a great life for themselves in regional Australia.”

Mr Tudge denied some calls that their was a lack of employment opportunities for migrants in regional areas.

“There’s some parts of regional Australia that are desperately crying out for workers,” he said.

“The jobs are out there and we want to support the economic growth.”

Mr Tudge said the government was “in a bit of a catch up phase” due to Australia’s the higher-than-expected population growth.

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“All of our population growth has been well above what the forecasts where and then on top of that we didn’t have the infrastructure built really even for the expected population growth, let alone the actual population growth that we saw,” he said.

“My overall message, and what I’m going to be outlining in a speech today is that we need to continue to build that infrastructure, ideally front of the population growth; second we need a better distribution of that population growth; and thirdly we actually need better planning so that we can more closely marry the growth with infrastructure expenditure.”