The Industry of Innovation in Muswellbrook: a transition economy

The building already exists.

The Hunter Innovation Precinct in Muswellbrook is already operational: housing the net zero authority, a TransGrid educational facility, and an energy hub. The University of Newcastle was there on the day, bringing research programmes in responsible AI, advanced computing, and mathematical solutions for industry, part of an ongoing effort to make the precinct a place people belong in, not just a building they pass through. Rail runs through the middle of the region. A state road runs to the door.

This is not a plan. It is not a vision statement on a slide. It is a building, already open, already working, in a town most people outside the Hunter associate primarily with what is leaving.

Jeff Drayton, Mayor of Muswellbrook, was direct about the lateness at the University of Newcastle Hunter Industry Open Day on 6 May. The region has known for years what the timeline was. The conversation has happened many times. What has not happened, at the pace the timeline demands, is the institutional response.

One specific constraint he named: the land classification has not changed. Mining land is classified as mining land. It cannot simply be repurposed. With approximately 22 coal mines in the Upper Hunter scheduled to close or undergo significant change over the next two decades, the reclassification process, converting former mining leases into productive alternative uses, has not moved at the speed the remaining 3.5 years requires. The Hunter Joint Organisation is advocating for clearer planning pathways. The Australian Government has committed $5 million for master planning rehabilitation and reuse of major sites including Mt Arthur. As of late 2024, around 35 per cent of land disturbed by mining in the Upper Hunter was under rehabilitation. The reclassification itself, the legal and planning step that allows the land to become something other than a mine, is the constraint that everything else is waiting on.

He described the scale in terms that deserve to sit on the page plainly. The end of coal in Muswellbrook will remove around 12,000 jobs from the region, approximately four times the scale of the BHP closure in Newcastle. Three thousand of those jobs belong to Muswellbrook Shire locals and Upper Hunter residents. The rest are workers who drive in from elsewhere, but the services, the spending, the schools, those are all local.

Jeff's point was not despair. It was the opposite. Rail through the middle. State road to the door. The will and the people. What he is asking for is institutional pace to match the clock.

What is arriving into that infrastructure is beginning to take shape.

The chicken growing industry is eyeing off Muswellbrook, partly because of its geographic isolation from disease, a factor that has mattered to the region since an outbreak in 1999 showed what proximity risk looks like. Professor Peter Lewis, Senior Research Microbiologist at Ethtec, is working on biotech fuels, specifically targeting hard-to-electrify industrial processes, with aviation fuel as a primary use case. Data centres are in active conversation, they need land, power, and water; the Upper Hunter has all three.

The Singleton bypass is expected to open by Christmas, reducing travel times to the aerotropolis and unlocking economic access to the corridor, with a future extension toward Muswellbrook.

Christopher Sampson from Tilter Technology, on the panel, put it simply: "If you're not thinking about AI you should be." The panel did not treat AI as a separate agenda item. It appeared in the same conversation as robotics, hardware, physical work, vocational pathways, and the need to connect capability to future industry requirements in a region whose workforce has been built around one kind of physical expertise for decades.

The human infrastructure question sits underneath all of it.

Laura Eadie, Executive Director of the Institute for Regional Futures at the University of Newcastle, noted that knowledge jobs now exceed trade jobs for the first time in Newcastle, a shift that represents a genuine change in the region's economic character. Fewer than one in five people think young people are getting the right skills for what is coming. Young people themselves are sceptical of renewables as a job pathway, counterintuitive, and worth naming honestly.

Sue George, deputy mayor of Singleton, talked about brain drain, about building reasons for young people to stay, about the generational shift in how a career gets described to a school student. When she was a teacher, the conversation pointed to the mines. That generic pathway is gone. What replaces it has not yet been fully named.

Jeff raised a correlation that deserves more attention than it typically gets. In a household with a coal miner and a health worker, when the mine closes and the miner leaves: how many health workers leave with them? Muswellbrook cannot currently support births due to workforce gaps. Singleton's hospital needs a collaborative model to attract and retain clinical staff. These are not footnotes to the AI story. They are the human infrastructure that the rest of the transition depends on.

Professor Kathleen Butler raised the role of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community, land councils, cultural governance, the difference between lore and law in how the land is understood and what it means to return it to country. Mining companies will rehabilitate the land; the question of what that rehabilitation means, and who has standing in that conversation, is not resolved. It should not be treated as peripheral to any honest account of what transition in this region looks like.

Claire Quigley, chair of the Hunter Innovation Festival, was announced at the event as having taken on a role in outreach and partnerships with the University of Newcastle.

Kyle Harrison, director of industry engagement at the School of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Newcastle, was exhibiting at the open day and walked through the scope of CARA's work: responsible AI, advanced computing, mathematical solutions for industry, including current projects in AI-assisted aged care translation.

By the end of the 2030 financial year, BHP's Mt Arthur Coal, five kilometres south of Muswellbrook, employing around 2,000 people, will cease mining. The final voids will fill with saline water over decades. The land classification question remains unresolved. The mining companies are not off the hook for rehabilitation, but rehabilitation and repurposing are different problems on different timelines.

That is the clock everything else is running against.

The Hunter Innovation Precinct is already built. The research capability is operational. The industries are in active conversation. The rail and the road are there.

What Muswellbrook and the Upper Hunter is waiting on is not a breakthrough. It is the pace of response finally matching the pace of the timeline.

That gap, between knowing something and doing something at the speed it requires, is the most important readiness question in the region.