IN the late 1990s, the Hunter Region had a workforce of about 230,000, an unemployment rate in double figures and a steel industry in steep decline.
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Grave fears were held for an economy facing the closure of the BHP steelworks and the Pasminco lead smelter. Those fears did not eventuate. Instead, Newcastle began to flower economically and socially as it threw off its old identity as a company town.
Its economic fortunes were helped, no doubt, by the prosperous years of the coal boom. But even with coal in the doldrums, the Hunter today employs more than 300,000 people, and its unemployment rate is still closer to 5 per cent than 10 per cent despite a recent worsening.
Over the years, various government bodies have turned their attention to job creation and economic development. The latest of these is the Hunter arm of Regional Development Australia or RDA - one of 55 such agencies around the nation set up by Canberra to bring the three levels of government together with business and community groups to support the development of their regions.
RDA Hunter has been an active player in the conversation about the Hunter and its future, promoting the employment potential of such diverse interests as the National Broadband Network, high-speed rail and the so-called STEM subjects - science, technology, engineering and mathematics - in secondary schools.
In Parliament House on Wednesday, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull launched RDA Hunter’s latest project, a 52-page innovation policy that its chief executive, Todd Williams, describes as Australia's first "smart specialisation strategy".
Time will tell whether RDA Hunter’s “agenda for economic transformation – based on an OECD initiative “widely used” in the European Union – has any marked impact. But the region’s export performance, to start with, could do with some fine tuning. The Hunter Research Foundation noted in December that the percentages of Hunter businesses selling either internationally, or simply outside of the region, had actually fallen in the past decade.
In an increasingly globalised economy, successful regions will need to turn their faces to the outside world. Hopefully, RDA Hunter’s new strategy – which identifies seven growth areas including pharmaceuticals and the creative industries – will help the region's businesses with their export tasks.
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