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Operator Ron Bernardi at Hazelwood power station.
‘This worker transfer scheme isn’t the grand solution to the coal power problem. But it’s a big step in the right direction.’ Operator Ron Bernardi at Hazelwood power station. Photograph: Robert Cianflone/Getty Images
‘This worker transfer scheme isn’t the grand solution to the coal power problem. But it’s a big step in the right direction.’ Operator Ron Bernardi at Hazelwood power station. Photograph: Robert Cianflone/Getty Images

The Hazelwood transition deal gives my wife and me a future in our hometown

This article is more than 7 years old

It’s not only 150 workers and their families who will benefit from the transfer scheme in the Latrobe Valley – small businesses will also reap the benefits

I was thrown a lifeline last Friday. Along with at least 150 of my work colleagues, and hopefully many more, I will be given the opportunity to continue to work in the Latrobe Valley power industry, despite the closure of the Hazelwood power station, my workplace of the last 28 years.

The closure of Hazelwood was announced in early November for the end of March and my redundancy effective at 7am on April Fools Day (seriously). The 750 or so workers all knew that Hazelwood was one of the oldest and certainly the most emissions-intensive power station in Australia. We knew it was going to close. But in the last few years the owners had been employing new young people, and they had been told that the jobs would last until at least 2025 in their interviews.

All that came crashing on 3 November with an SMS for a meeting with Engie announcing the closure with just a few months notice. It brought the entire Latrobe Valley community crashing down too. Hazelwood is one of just four brown-coal power stations in Australia, all located within a short distance of each other. Along with a paper mill, they are the largest employers in the region, and pay wages to a skilled workforce that are higher than most jobs in country areas.

The Committee for Gippsland, which represents major stakeholders in the area, reckons more jobs would be lost outside the power station – that for every power station job lost, there would be more than one other job lost in the businesses that supply the power station, or sell goods and services to the workforce.

While some of the older workers will be OK with taking a redundancy package and early retirement, hundreds of younger workers like me were given no future. Our jobs are skilled and specialised, and nearby small-to-medium-sized businesses were not going to cope with a large number of newly-unemployed knocking on their doors.

Unemployment in local towns like Morwell is at 20.2% and Moe is at 14.4%, up there with some of the highest regions of unemployment in Australia. We had no chance.

Workers like me were going to be pushed out of the region – we would have had no choice but to go looking for work elsewhere. I was even looking at work in other countries operating large power stations.

So the deal that was announced by Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, last Friday is a huge relief for me, my colleagues and the region. That deal achieves something that was pushed by my union, the CFMEU, but which has never been done in Australia before.

It provides for another company in the same industry to provide jobs for redundant Hazelwood workers while also offering redundancies to its own workforce to make room for those redeployed workers. Friday’s announcement was about AGL, the operator of the Loy Yang A power station, agreeing to the deal with unions and with Victorian government support. We hope that Energy Australia, operator of the Yallourn power station, will also enter the arrangement. And Engie will seek to redeploy workers from Hazelwood to the Loy Yang B station that it also operates.

This also benefits the community as older workers who volunteer for redundancy in order to retire early are more likely to stay in the region and continue to support local businesses. Younger workers like me also get to stay in the region and keep doing the jobs we love. Most importantly, our families and community are not broken apart unnecessarily.

We know that all the coal power stations have grim prospects. Unless something like carbon capture and storage becomes much more viable as a way to massively reduce global warming emissions from coal power, they will close.

We need longer notice of closures, and a plan for the region to host high skill, high wage jobs as the energy system shifts away from coal power. The Victorian government has made a raft of announcements to stimulate construction and investment in the region – that’s really good to see. Personally, I would like to see an alternative use for coal besides burning it, as we are talking about a 500+ year resource. One example could be coal to carbon fibre as a strong lightweight material for industry.

The strange thing is that what we are seeing in the pooled redundancy and redeployment scheme, and which we now see as new and outside of the box, is what would have happened if the power stations had stayed in public hands. When the power stations were run by the State Electricity Commission of Victoria (SECV), the workforce was moved around as the industry developed. If power stations were going to be closed, again the jobs would have been moved around to reduce the impacts.

Having a large pile of private companies in the industry is making it that much harder to work out a way to transition the industry to a different future.

While not all workers will be covered, this transition deal is good – it’s given my wife and I a potential future in our home town if I’m one of the successful applicants. It will do the same for hundreds of other workers and their families, and give the region more breathing space to develop a future that relies less on power stations.

It took a great deal of work – thanks are due to my union the CFMEU for pushing this hard along with the Gippsland Trades and Labour Council (GTLC). The Andrews government appointed ex-federal minister Simon Crean to bring the parties together – thanks to them too. The power companies that have come to the deal have done the right thing in helping the community in which they operate. AGL led the way by signing up to the scheme first.

To avoid more of these social disasters we need a national energy policy that has long-term bipartisan support and we need planned and agreed closure dates. To do this, a national energy transition authority with sufficient powers and resources to plan and coordinate the transition in the energy sector needs to be created. The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) exists to manage the national electricity market but has no role in managing the impacts of major electricity system restructuring. We need an overarching body that can deliver a fair and just transition for working people, their families and communities.

This worker transfer scheme isn’t the grand solution to the coal power problem. But it’s a big step in the right direction. One that says workers and communities have to be at the forefront of public and private decision-making about our energy system, rather than an afterthought.

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