Australia needs a Be’er Sheva

AUSTRALIA needs to reform its mining industry and population growth by taking notes from Israel, according to Paul Howes, national secretary of the Australian Workers Union (AWU).

In a speech at an Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce lunch scheduled for Friday, but released early to The AJN, Howes argued that Australia’s north-western region would flourish if “desert settlements”, just like Be’er Sheva, had been built.

Following the election, Howes plans to discuss with the government the prospect of a Pilbara city, based on Israel’s successes.

Drawing on the idea in the 1930s to create a Jewish homeland in the north-west Australian Kimberley region, the union leader showed knowledge of Israeli history and geography.

“One wonders what could have happened had the refuge and safe haven, a homeland away from home for a restless, troubled, brilliant, exiled people using their passionate ingenuity, which created a great flowering in the Negev desert, had been instead concentrated on our great spread of sand in the west,” Howes said.

“A wilderness was to be tamed and turned into farms and orchards and pastures and factories, with secondary industries such as tanning, tinned fruits, jams, leather products, mats and bricks, with a dam across the Ord [river] and hydro-electricity, all done by 75,000 Jewish settlers who would write poems in Yiddish about the kangaroo and the kookaburra.”

Howes added that while the Jewish settlement idea was rejected at the time, Australia’s ongoing reliance on mining meant that the fly-in, fly-out worker model was failing and large towns and cities would have to be built away from the coast.

“I think if we decentralise and build a similar size city in the Pilbara or elsewhere — a city a little larger than say Townsville or Cairns — then we have much to learn from the modern-day development of Be’er Sheva.”

To make the plan concrete, he said he would invite the mayor of Be’er Sheva to take on a mentoring role to make the desert city a reality.

“Here we should plant our own version of Be’er Sheva’s Ben-Gurion University — maybe starting off straight away with a CSIRO research unit dedicated to the desert economy to help the new, urban centre identify local, export-oriented, cutting-edge, scientific opportunities, which can be turned into new job-creating enterprises,” Howes continued.

JOSHUA LEVI

PHOTO: Paul Howes. Photo: AJN