Tory Shepherd: South Australia has everything needed to be key player in Australian Space Agency

SOUTH Australia has the right, the background, the skills, the history and the industry to fight for serious involvement in the nation’s new space agency, writes Tory Shepherd.

SA – the Defence State. SA – the Space State. SA – the Parochial State? I just typed “South Australia” and “parochial” into Google. Google suggested I also search “is Adelaide a dying city?”.

Ouch.

But apart from that glum proposition, there were plenty of hits of politicians and pooh-poohers calling SA parochial.

After five years in Canberra copping snark for asking SA-specific questions, I even started half-apologetically pre-apologising for my parochial focus.

The accusations of small-town small-mindedness were a feature of former senator Nick Xenophon’s time in Parliament.

That wily negotiator managed to weazel all sorts of perks and lurks for the good people of SA thanks to the power of his vote.

(You wouldn’t know it from most of the crossbench chaos, but the Senate is meant to be the states’ house, where an SA Senator should always be representing SA).

Then came the $90 billion continuous naval shipbuilding announcement, which put Adelaide squarely at the centre of the Defence spend.

Others acted as though we’d just been given a pile of cash, no questions asked.

And more recently the other states – lethargic until now – are scrambling to get some space payload and making noises about SA’s headstart.

As if we wouldn’t try to be part of a $345 billion global industry. As if it doesn’t mesh perfectly with the Defence work we do here.

Nah, it’s parochial Adelaide looking for handouts.

Why is it OK to shed blood, sweat and tears over fiercely tribal football games but suddenly we’re hopelessly insular if we’re fighting for the future of the state – and the future of the nation and even the world by extension?

Let’s face it, football is emotion-laden but ultimately relatively meaningless.

But defence and space will be intimately entwined with not just our prosperity, but our national security.

Perhaps people are just using the wrong word.

Parochial means trivial or narrow.

The word stems from an ancient word for a church parish; a patch to be cared for.

It has evolved to mean petty, provincial, myopic.

What could be less myopic than becoming part of two industries that are each worth hundreds of billions, that are each worth thousands of jobs?

And this is not just about the economy and jobs, although of course that’s front of mind for a state still struggling with the jobless and still waiting to see the economy take off.

It’s also about the type of jobs and the way education will (bloody better) transform to deliver those jobs.

STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) are the skills that children need to be building today.

The new world is a hi-tech, futuristic one with robotics and artificial intelligence and all the other lashings of the fourth industrial revolution.

Industry bods say the message about the defence billions is starting to trickle through; interest in working for the big companies is up.

That will only continue as more people realise that defence industry isn’t all shipyard work, but cutting-edge science.

And once more kids start hearing about space – say, when astronaut Pam Melroy talks to them at their school, or they hear more about a mission to Mars or constellations of satellites – they should jump on board. Imagine inspiring children enough to be looking through telescopes at the stars instead of down at their Instagram.

As Megan Clark, head of the new National Space Agency, says: “No other industry can inspire nations quite like space, where human ambition can set its sights on interplanetary missions, colonisation beyond Earth, and the opportunity of finding new life.”

Then there’s the national security angle. A range of experts argue in a report out today that Australia has to enter the space biz to protect itself as space becomes ever more contested and congested.

Right now we’re utterly dependent on others for space capability.

And in case you hadn’t noticed, the leader of the free world is an erratic populist who spent yesterday shaking hands with a despot.

The future is not on steady ground.

Warfare here on Earth already relies on satellite communications, and experts warn if they go down for even a day, chaos will ensue.

Then there’s the Star Wars threat, as enemies fill space with killer satellites and dubious intentions.

Parochial?

Of course these capabilities shouldn’t be developed all in one state. That’s neither desirable nor possible.

But SA has the right, the background, the skills, the history and the industry to fight for serious, long-term, central involvement in the new space agency – especially as we’ve already won that with defence.

We’re not begging for a handout, we’re fighting to be involved.

The other states are belatedly strapping on their own gloves and arguing their own corners; good on ‘em.

We could well end up with a launch site in the Northern Territory, and a presence in every state. And an industry hub in SA? Great.