We Will Cope Without Steelmaking
Newcastle Herald
Tuesday May 25, 1999
THE next few years will be crunch years for Newcastle and the Hunter Valley.
In October this year almost 85 years of steelmaking will come to a historic end, and the BHP plant at Port Waratah will become a steel rolling centre fed with billets railed from the company's Whyalla steelworks in South Australia.
Employment at BHP will be slashed to less than a quarter of its current level, and conjecture about the region's social and economic futures has reached fever pitch.
A recent report commissioned by the Prime Minister's Task Force into the social consequences of the BHP changes came up with some highly negative conclusions, predicting widespread social dislocation and worse.
However, other reports have been more sanguine about the future, and there is a great optimism in many quarters that the Hunter is coping, and that a range of government and business decisions taken in the past 15 or so years have in fact placed the region in a surprisingly strong position.
The forces affecting the Hunter have been raging around the globe for two decades. In many respects, Newcastle is the last of the world's great steel cities to move into the post-industrial and information ages.
The changes that have taken place in the Hunter may not have been widely documented, and may not yet be properly understood. But a broad, irreversible and historic phase of change is well under way.
There is probably no single point in time that can be marked as the start of this new era, but BHP's massive cuts in 1982 and the comprehensive `Button' Steel Plan ? after then Industry Minister Senator John Button ? implemented a year later by the new Hawke Labor Government were crucial.
Various projects from the 1980s contributed to a regional rejuvenation.
The Foreshore redevelopment on former railway land on Newcastle Harbour was opened by Queen Elizabeth II during Australia's Bicentenary in 1988.
The December, 1989, Newcastle earthquake ? as tragic as it was ? spurred a $1billion building boom that continues to this day.
Housing estates are springing up in the residential precincts of the government-funded Honeysuckle redevelopment, which covers the harbourside land west of the Foreshore park.
Dotted throughout the inner city, various prestige apartment blocks are springing to life in either new or recycled buildings, exerting a subtle but noticeable effect on the city's distinctively Victorian and Edwardian skyline.
In 1993, the landmark 1929 Civic Theatre was brought back to its between-wars splendour through a $10million refurbishment. Newcastle City Council has since spruced up the adjoining block by creating a Civic Plaza, and a heritage-based Civic precinct building program is under way.
In the early 1980s heavy industry in the Hunter was being kicked along with the construction of the giant Tomago Aluminium smelter, a joint venture between Australia's CSR, French company Pechiney and German giant VAW.
There have been pockets of industrial unrest and financial uncertainty caused by the global falls in commodity prices, but Tomago has been nothing less than an unqualified success.
At Kurri Kurri, planning is under way for the much older Capral smelter to have a new lease of life with an extra potline, if the owners can agree with the State Government over power prices.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s the coal industry was in the middle of its own massive shift, from domestic to export, from underground to open, from the Lower Hunter to the upper regions of Singleton and Muswellbrook. Coal remains one of Australia's biggest export earners, and the Hunter industry seems set to grow by another 25% at least before reaching an expected plateau in about 10 years.
Between the many success stories have been a handful of high-profile failures.
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© 1999 Newcastle Herald
