The National candidate for the seat, Sheridan Bond, the senior vice-president of the state party, concurs. Russell Northe, independent β 1. Northe was elected as a National but resigned from the party last year and is yet to declare whether he will stand again. Mixed urban and rural electorate south-east of Melbourne in the Latrobe Valley region of Gippsland.
Main towns are Churchill, Morwell, Traralgon, Newborough. Biggest employer is hospitals and healthcare. Second biggest is the fossil fuel electricity industry. Latrobe has the second highest crime rate of any local government area in the state after central Melbourne.
For every people, 26 experience very high disadvantage, while the state average is eight. But which jobs, and how they will be created? The electorate sits in the Latrobe Valley, a two-hour drive east of Melbourne, and takes in the town of the same name and the nearby centres of Traralgon, Churchill and Newborough.
As the heart of electricity generation in Victoria since the s, the Valley always capitalised here has been tossed about by coal politics for decades: the privatisation of the electricity industry in the s cost thousands their jobs and threw the region into depression, the fierce fire in an open-cut mine in , and now the drumbeat that the world must stop burning coal if it has any chance of avoiding the worst impacts of climate change.
The ageing Hazelwood power station turned off its boilers last year, putting about people out of work and intensifying the sense that this way of life may be coming to an end. The three stations remaining are due to gradually close, the last by The people of the Valley are a reminder that the national confusion about energy policy reverberates far beyond Canberra.
