AN economic meeting in Muswellbrook on Wednesday morning brought up some important issues for the region, including legacy bias and the high amount of people that work in the Upper Hunter without living there.
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Professor Will Rifkin, of the Hunter Research Foundation Centre, spoke about how crucial it was for the future of the area to lure workers to buy property in Muswellbrook and Singleton, as opposed to the current fly-in fly-out method that is popular in industries such as the mines.
The Singleton and Muswellbrook local government areas (LGAs) are centres for employment in the Upper Hunter.
However, many of their workers live elsewhere, according to new analysis released at the Muswellbrook RSL Club.
Dr Anthea Bill, lead economist for Hunter Research Foundation Centre, says that journey-to-work data from the 2016 Australian Census shows that, in the Upper Hunter, Singleton has the highest proportion of commuters arriving there to work.
“A range of factors, including jobs, infrastructure and liveability, influence where people work and live,” she stated.
“We examine the economic and demographic data to unpack how some of the key factors interact, and how they play out in the Upper Hunter.”
Chief planner for NSW Gary White brought up the concept of “legacy bias”, and warned the Upper Hunter was a region at great risk of such a phenomenon.
The term refers to when a community or industry refuses to accept new ideas and innovations due to a sense of pride of what has carried them in the past.
As a result, they rely on out-dated tactics.
Mr White said this had led to developing countries such as Vietnam taking business away from more established nations because they don’t have pre-existing favouritism.
Marketing director at Forsythes Recruitment Geoff Crews explained he was a fan of the term and agreed it was something the region had to be conscious of, especially when it comes to job types.
“We have to address our thoughts on what a traditional view of work is,” he said.
“And, that’s manifesting itself in 100 different ways at the moment.
“That’s everything from not being in the same job for 10, 12 [or] 15 years… all the way through to the nature of work and an indeed how many jobs people may have at one time.”
Mr White shared that sentiment and extended on his previous point by saying industry must always be focused on the future.
“[We should] stop looking through the revision mirror and the solutions of the past, and look through the windscreen at what’s in front of us and make our decisions based off of those opportunities,” he said.
If the Upper Hunter is to successfully transition through the post-coal era over the coming decades, these topics will continue to dominate the debate on economic growth.
