Time to energise the Bush

The biggest selling daily newspaper in Australia, the Melbourne Herald-Sun, has this morning run a major Opinion piece by the AWU National Secretary, Paul Howes, arguing the union’s case why business and government must accept that it is Time to energise the Bush

Every day it's in the papers. How our big urban centres just aren't fit to live in any more.

How Melbourne prices make it hard, very hard, for families to buy a decent house any more.

And if we do find one, two hours' travel from the workplace, how hard it is to commute, since petrol costs four times what it cost in 2001.

Big cities bursting at the seams

How there won't be enough water, transport and hospital wards, nurses, teachers and garbage trucks to keep them going any more.

Our country towns are Australia's future

We are saying that our country towns are our future. That they can be, for the next five decades, the engine-room of Australia's growth, its protected environment, its new sustainability, its redistributed population, its happier way of being. That they alone can provide, in most lives, the Australian dream.

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Be smart about the jobs we put in place

These jobs have to demand local skills, local people.

They have to nourish local priorities. They mustn't go, like so many jobs before them, overseas.

Too often we read easy, cheery headlines about regional job creation.

But they are nearly always low-waged, low-skilled jobs that, at the flick of a switch or the nod of a corporate head, the shuffling of some numbers and a shareholders' meeting, go rapidly offshore - because the bottom line, the profit margin, is better served offshore, in Indonesia or India or Africa.

What we are advocating are strategies for places like Portland, to allow new high-tech aluminium smelter spin-off manufacturing - so they can proudly say are made here in south-west Victoria and sold overseas.

What we are advocating is government programmes that help young families relocate, sell up and move from Melbourne or Sydney to a regional city like Bendigo, which have plenty of jobs in manufacturing, but not enough skilled workers to fill them.

The AWU's roots are in the Bush

Nor can we forget that half of our membership lives and has jobs in regional Australia. The Bush has been good to us, and the Bush now needs our help.

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 Creswick as well as Carlton.

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.

• Read this item on the Melbourne Herald-Sun website