The Hunter Valley needs jobs that last beyond 2045

The decision to extend Hunter Valley Operations (HVO) until 2045 has understandably been welcomed by workers and their families, and the MACH decision more recently has shifted the goal posts again. If your mortgage, grocery bill and kids' future depend on your job at that mine, being told it could close in December is not an abstract debate about energy policy, it is your livelihood.

But we should be careful about calling those 1500 jobs "saved". A statutory extension is not a job guarantee, and there is an economic cost to repeatedly extending the life of an industry facing long-term global decline. Every engineer, electrician, technician and apprentice tied up maintaining an industry with a shrinking global market is also a worker who could help build the Hunter's next industrial economy.

That matters because the Hunter has an enormous opportunity. Beyond Zero Emissions' report on the Hunter Valley, Powering Up the Hunter, found the region already had many of the ingredients to become a major renewable-powered industrial precinct. Economic modelling commissioned by BZE and WWF-Australia found that a Renewable Energy Industrial Precinct in the Hunter could unlock $28 billion in capital investment, create 34,000 ongoing local jobs and generate an additional $11 billion in annual revenue.

Those figures point to the scale of the economic choice facing the region. Coal has supported generations of Hunter families and helped build one of Australia's great industrial centres. The skills and infrastructure developed through that history are precisely what give the Hunter an advantage in industries such as green steel, aluminium, batteries and advanced manufacturing.

The Hunter already has a huge head start. Decades of heavy industry have created a workforce with the skills to build and operate complex industrial projects, alongside established manufacturers, supply chains and infrastructure. Keeping that capability in the region as global markets change should be at the heart of the next phase of the Hunter's economic development.

The problem is that the next industrial economy is not being built quickly enough.

Our assessment found that 74 per cent of renewable energy projects in the Hunter were yet to get planning approval, with approvals taking between five and eight years, while fewer than one-third of approved projects were under construction. The region also faces significant gaps in transmission, energy storage and renewable fuels infrastructure.

Our work with industry, government and communities in the Hunter maps out the practical steps needed to address those gaps and build the industries that can sustain the region into the future. That includes getting renewable energy projects through approvals faster, building enough transmission and storage to support new industrial demand, and ensuring skills and training are connected to the jobs actually being created.

None of that happens simply because 2045 is now written on a mine approval.

The worst outcome would be to spend the next 19 years congratulating ourselves for protecting today's jobs, only to leave another generation of Hunter families confronting the same uncertainty. Nineteen years can sound like a long time, particularly to a worker who was facing the prospect of losing their job in December. But many of the people who will make up the Hunter workforce in 2045 are children today. They should be able to imagine building a career in the region without having to choose between leaving home and finding secure, well-paid work.

The Hunter has managed enormous economic change before. The question now is whether the next period of change is something that happens to the Hunter, or something that the region is given the investment and infrastructure to lead. Waiting until existing industries are approaching their end dates would leave workers with fewer choices, not more. The Hunter does not lack workers, industrial capability or economic potential. What it needs is a plan that treats 2045 as a horizon to prepare for, rather than evidence that the problem has been solved.

For the 1500 HVO workers, this decision provides welcome certainty today. The measure of good policy will be whether the Hunter has thousands more secure, well-paid industrial jobs waiting for the generations that follow them.