Unprecedented crisis could also bring opportunity to a struggling Northern Territory
THE Territory has the chance to come out of this crisis strong, with an emerging manufacturing industry and a booming tourism sector, writes MATT CUNNINGHAM
Opinion
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AT some point during this coronavirus crisis, thoughts will have to turn to what comes next.
At the end of all this, we will be presented with a world that will be reshaped forever.
This new world will present challenges, but there will also be opportunities.
And many of those opportunities will present themselves right here in the Northern Territory.
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While the Government’s priority should rightly be protecting the lives of its citizens, it should also be casting one eye to what the future might look like in the NT, and how it can best seize the opportunities that will inevitably present themselves.
There are two main areas that immediately come to mind. The first is manufacturing.
The coronavirus pandemic has exposed our reliance on China for everything from car parts to face masks and ventilators.
There’s now a growing belief that Australia needs to become more self-reliant to ensure our supply chains are not ground to a halt.
And few cities are better placed to take advantage of this shift than Darwin.
Here we have access to rich energy sources – particularly gas – that have the potential to power a manufacturing hub, creating thousands of new jobs.
This is not a new idea. In March 2012, then Chief Minister Paul Henderson outlined his vision for a gas manufacturing jobs hub in Darwin following the release of the Commonwealth Government’s Draft Energy White Paper.
“Australia’s manufacturing industry is in decline and the Australian Government has an opportunity to facilitate the establishment of a whole new gas-based manufacturing industry in Northern Australia,” Henderson said at time.
Sadly, those plans have been stifled in recent years and we are now paying the price for failing to act on that vision.
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But the coronavirus crisis presents a genuine chance this plan can be revived.
Henderson’s plans were developed with the long-serving chief executive of Dow Chemicals, Darwin-born Andrew Liveris.
Liveris was sought out by Barack Obama and Donald Trump to guide the revival of manufacturing in the United States.
He’s now been tapped by Scott Morrison to do the same thing here as part of the Prime Minister’s new advisory committee.
“We want to use the manufacturing task force to help revitalise and grow the manufacturing industry in Australia as it comes out of the crisis,” Liveris told The Australian this week.
His connection to Darwin puts us in the perfect position to have our city at the forefront of this revitalisation.
One of the first projects on the table should be the $2 billion petrochemical plant Liveris’s former company considered building in Darwin more than a decade ago.
But there will be no time to fiddle, as our current government has been prone to do.
It should immediately establish its own NT manufacturing task force with a view to getting projects off the ground as quickly as possible.
It could be an expansion of the existing TeamNT, but the task force should be bipartisan and consist of people with a history of getting things done, rather than slowing things down.
Henderson is an obvious choice from the Labor side of politics, while someone like Dave Tollner or Nigel Scullion could be considered from the CLP.
These people have all talked of the potential to make Darwin a manufacturing mecca.
There’s no better time than now to make that dream a reality.
The other obvious opportunity will come in tourism – particularly on the domestic front.
The desire for Australians to travel overseas in the wake of the coronavirus crisis will be greatly reduced.
But people will still want their fix of adventure.
And what better place to get it than the Northern Territory – a part of the country like no other.
We will need to think, though, about how we market ourselves.
We should revive the image that put us on the tourism map back in the 1980s – crocodiles, Aboriginal culture and red dirt
In recent times – perhaps driven by our own insecurities – we’ve tended to try to sell the Territory as a place that has all the nice things you can get in Melbourne or Sydney. Trendy cafes, cool bars, fancy restaurants.
These things are all great, but they should be the bonus people enjoy when they arrive, not the thing that gets them here in the first place.
No-one ever said they wanted to come to Darwin for the coffee.
We should revive the image that put us on the tourism map back in the 1980s — crocodiles, Aboriginal culture and red dirt.
The Federal Government will need to lift its game here too.
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Its neglect of Kakadu under the watch of Parks Australia has been a disgrace.
With the park likely to be closed for most of this dry season, work needs to begin now to ensure that from next year, all the jewels in Kakadu’s crown are open for as long as possible.
The more than $200 million allocated to be spent over the next 10 years should be rolled out immediately, creating jobs for those who might have suddenly found themselves in the Centrelink queue.
The coronavirus pandemic is a once-in-a-lifetime crisis.
But it will also present unique opportunities.
To seize them, we will need to push back against the creeping bureaucracy that has slowly been infecting this place and revive the can-do spirit that built the great Northern Territory.
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