A Community Led Approach to Sustainable Economic Change
The Hunter Jobs Alliance
By Georgina Woods
In the first week of November, thirteen local and state-wide unions and environmental advocacy groups met in Maitland, in the Hunter Valley, Australia. There, they formally created the “Hunter Jobs Alliance” – an historic collaboration to move beyond the stale “jobs versus environment” story that is preventing the region from forging its path to adjust and transform in response to declining markets for coal. The Alliance is an initiative of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, which has teamed up with eight other unions and four environment groups to focus on a shared vision of full employment, good union jobs, a thriving and healthy living environment, an equitable society, a stable climate, and renewable prosperity. The Alliance has ambitious plans to give workers and the environment a seat at the table and hold conversations across the Hunter region with people from all walks of life about the challenges the region faces and how this unusual collaboration will tackle them.
The Hunter Valley. Courtesy of Lock the Gate
The Hunter, some 120 km north of Sydney in the state of New South Wales, is the largest regional economy in Australia. It contributes roughly 8 per cent of the state economy and indirectly drives around 28 per cent of the state’s economic output. It is a diverse region, with large numbers of people working in health, manufacturing and all levels of education. The region hosts 30 per cent of the NSW’s power generation and produces 11 per cent of the state’s milk, 17 per cent of commercial pasture seed in NSW and 25 per cent of Australia’s aluminium. The Hunter is also the state’s largest coastal catchment, and hosts Australia’s largest saltwater coastal lake and an internationally significant wetland estuary. While it has always been economically diverse, the Hunter is exposed more than most regions to rapid changes in Asian energy markets. This is particularly true in Singleton and Muswellbrook, where a large proportion of people and households depend directly or indirectly on the thermal coal mining and export industry for their livelihoods.
A new, community-led approach
The Hunter Jobs Alliance is united behind a call for a locally controlled public process to involve the public and stakeholders in planning for and adjusting to closure of power stations and changes in the thermal coal market, rather than leaving the people, landscapes and communities that have contributed so much to New South Wales’ prosperity to the cruel mercies of the market. Experience in coal communities locally and around the world has shown that weathering this kind of change needs both large-scale public investment and local leadership.
One of the difficulties the Alliance will have to confront is the political simplification and sloganeering that has hampered Australian climate change and energy policy for years. Meeting climate change commitments is not a simple matter of replacing coal power stations with renewable energy, particularly in the Hunter where coal exports, aluminium production and other energy-intensive industry play complex and crucial roles in the region’s economy, culture and identity. But nor is it unthinkable or unnecessary, as self-interested politicians sometimes pretend. The Tomago aluminium smelter, for example, plays a keystone role in energy and industry but its continuation is under threat from high electricity prices, thanks to the gas producers’ successful efforts to drive up the price of gas. Innovation can save Tomago and the Hunter region’s industrial base and ensure that Hunter aluminium can compete in a low-carbon world, but not without timely structural incentives and public investment. Similarly, the region’s 150 million tonnes of polluting coal ash waste can become the basis of new industry, since coal ash can be manufactured into light-weight aggregate and a range of construction products. This would reduce heavy metal pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, but needs a structural incentive to get going. Bringing the pollution already being caused by NSW’s biggest waste problem into a licencing regime that creates impetus to reuse it could stimulate the creation of hundreds of jobs.
The Hunter region is not just about industry. As many people work for Hunter New England Health as in the entire Hunter coal mining industry, and the Hunter Jobs Alliance includes unions that represent people who work in health, care services, teaching and research. By bringing together this diverse collection of unions and environment groups, the Hunter Jobs Alliance is reminding Australia of the inter-connection of people and communities with each other and with the natural landscapes, ecosystems, water and climate systems that support us all.
Those interested in staying in touch with the work of the Alliance can sign up for updates via its website, join your union and your local environment group, and be part of making a fair and sustainable future for the Hunter.
Georgina Woods is an environmentalist living and working on Awabakal and Worimi land in Newcastle, New South Wales. She is one of the founding members of the Hunter Jobs Alliance.
This article is original content published under a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
