Rural Jobs Push - a National Priority

Australia must look to regional communities for economic growth.

This opinion piece, in the influential regional and rural newspaper - The Weekly Times - is based on just part of Paul Howes' speech to the National Press Club in Canberra - the first televised Press Club speech for 2008.

Our big industry superannuation funds must look again at regional Australia for new investment opportunities, and I will advocate for the Rudd Government to provide incentives for these funds to invest locally in our regions.

The Bush is where my union - the oldest union in Australia - started; and the Australian Workers' Union will never forget that.

This union is not only proud of being the oldest union in this country, we are also the biggest blue-collar union in Australia . And we are proud of the fact that more than half of the AWU membership lives and works in regional Australia.

During my first year as AWU National Secretary I will launch a new campaign to secure the jobs of my members in regional Australia and to expand jobs in the regions to provide opportunities for AWU members' and their families.

We need to find new ways to back the mining boom in Western Australia with both private sector and public sector infrastructure spending; and we must make sure the Broadband revolution spreads to the sticks.

We have to sort out the present dire situation of drought and dust-blown towns, and boarded-up shops, and high schools closing, and trucked-in water, decaying infrastructure, and kids on the bus leaving home forever.

Like an aeroplane, a nation needs two wings to fly. It needs capital cities and provincial towns, and similar skills in both places. It needs Green consciousness in both places, in Tamworth as well as Wentworth.

It needs variety and quality of lifestyle in the regions, the kind that graduating medical students would like to spend a few years in. It needs reliable power supplies from clean energy, water resources, freight networks, airports and industries that export by good rail links overseas.

Unions can't dictate where business does its work. But we can entice, invite and give reasons why the regions are good places to be, with affordable housing and agreeable scenery and lower environmental damage than the cities.

We can work with the Rudd Government , and the likely stakeholders, to say powerfully why good regional outcomes make great national commonsense.

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