Time to pump life into the nation's engine rooms

The Adelaide Advertiser and the Brisbane Courier-Mail has today run a feature piece written by the Australian Workers' Union National Secretary on we need to turn our regional centres into the nation's engine rooms.

Breaking the boom-bust cycle and building sustainable regional communities is the great challenge facing rural Australia, Paul Howes will tell the 2020 Summit this weekend.

THE resources boom in Western Australia's Pilbara is just the latest in a series of booms and busts that has defined the development of regional Australia.

Workers from across the country have flocked to the regions, just as once they headed for the goldfields of western NSW and Victoria.

Then the treasures were tangible and the risks more obvious. Today, the big pay packets are attractive but the pitfalls can be less obvious.

Anyone driving through the goldfields and seeing the ghost towns that survive may wonder how opportunities to build sustainable communities were squandered. The answer is simple - they never planned for the long-term.

The upcoming 2020 Summit provides an opportunity for our nation to break this boom-bust cycle and re-imagine the vital role regional Australia plays in our nation.

We will never be able to move beyond the boom or bust mentality in our regional cities and towns until we properly map out and implement regional industry plans that create jobs that last and facilitate the redistribution of the population to our regional centres.

The current mining boom providing untold wealth in the Pilbara, Queensland, South Australia, western New South Wales and, now, even in the Victorian Goldfields, needs to be harnessed to create the infrastructure - the roads, the airports, the rail links and ports - that should be the foundation stone of new innovative industries in the bush.

This infrastructure, coupled with a new environment consciousness, a progressive attitude to social inclusion and a broadband revolution, is the right mixture to make our regional centres the engine room of Australian growth.

Government cannot dictate where people should live and where business should be but we, as a nation, can entice, invite and give reasons why the regions are good places to be, with affordable housing, agreeable scenery and lower environmental damage than the cities.

The National Farmers Federation has identified that rural industries are facing a shortfall of up to 100,000 workers.

Although the NFF's preferred solution is the expansion of short-term temporary work visa schemes for foreign agricultural labourers, we see the labour shortage as a great incentive to change the culture and to dramatically increase the liveability of regional Australia.

One big step in addressing this issue would be establishing a national plan to shift resources for the delivery of training - especially of apprentices - to regional Australia. Not only would this meet some of the skills shortage issues these areas face, it also would allow students to complete their training in a more affordable part of the nation.

The key to revitalising regional Australia is to stop treating it like a problem and begin recognising it as an opportunity. Large-scale, effective population redistribution is the real solution to the emerging labour shortage in the regions.

We know the issues and problems for these communities - the key is building the forum which would enable stakeholders to work together to fix the bottlenecks that hold back their potential for growth.

The 2020 Summit this weekend will be the first step in creating that forum.

The Coalition reaped what it sowed in its neglect of the regions. Now it is incumbent on the Rudd Government to be the first in generations to preside over a new sustainable boom in the Bush rather than regional towns and industries shrinking and withering away.