Redundancy and Tales Thereafter: An Australian Regional Perspective

In the face of the 2017 Hazelwood power plant closure and ongoing debates about privatisation, especially in the power industry in Australia, this thesis tells the tales of twenty individual lives of former employees living in the Latrobe Valley region who were negatively affected by the corporatisation and privatisation of the State Electricity Commission of Victoria (SECV) in the 1980s and 1990s. Their accounts demonstrate that receiving a redundancy package is not the end of the journey but the beginning for the employees as they had to create a life, work identity, and community connections after the redundancy event.