Among them is the Newcastle Knights, who recently wore high-vis-inspired jerseys against the North Queensland Cowboys for the annual Minerals Council-backed "Voice for Mining" round.

Mining's well-marketed credentials aside, it's worth asking which sector truly powers the NSW Hunter region, of which Newcastle is the major city, and countless others around Australia. In a word, it's health.

Of the 280,000 jobs that exist in the Hunter, more than 44,000 are in healthcare and social assistance. It is daylight second, followed by a clump of sectors including retail, construction, education and training, accommodation and food.

If sectors were football teams, health would already have the minor premiership and be resting its stars ahead of the finals. Like the Penrith Panthers, but more dominant. It feels almost sacrilegious to point out that mining, with 14,000 jobs but still mentioned in most conversations about the Hunter, sits in ninth spot, the Wests Tigers of industries.

This is not to disparage mining. Zooming out, manufacturing is Australia's biggest gross revenue-generating sector, followed by construction. In this regard, mining generates more than healthcare does nationally, by about $222 billion to $194 billion. But in NSW, the ledger flips back to health; apart from employing 10 times more people, health generates twice the wealth of mining.

Without paying athletes to take the field in lab coats or surgical scrubs - although 2020 isn't the year to rule anything out - the health sector is nonetheless showing signs of waking up to its own localised economic might. Last November, before COVID-19 triggered Australia's recession, 65 of the country's foremost health practitioners and researchers met in Alice Springs to establish the rurally-focused Spinifex Network.

Among their objectives is to change an approach to regional economic policy in Australia that has been tin-eared to the importance of health and medical research as drivers of regional economies.

In the current climate, it's hard during election campaigns to frame regional health policy and funding as more than a workforce issue for any given region. This preoccupation, though important, blinds politicians to the unmatched value of the health economy to position Australia as a high-class domestic supplier and a global leader in delivering healthcare across vast distances.

Health as a human-centred supply chain is high-tech and service-oriented, and draws in other industries such as food production, cultural heritage, housing and environmental services. It boosts people's wellbeing economically, physically, socially, psychologically and environmentally. Quite simply, health anchors the regions.

If any of this rings familiar, it should. Many rural Australians face the loss of their jobs to automation, or a grim wait to confirm that industries no longer require their skills.

This doesn't apply to one or two sectors - the pandemic has changed the nature of work perhaps forever, upending organisations and slicing, in particular, through middle management.

Australia's next stage of growth, with its infrastructure needs and likely focus on place-based industries such as food, agriculture and technology, will lean heavily on health services that are already economic beacons in their communities and are uniquely able to withstand the winds of the pandemic and the recession.

But political leaders need to do more than swap hardhats for surgical caps. Currently, governments cap local health system costs at the individual patient or "episode of care" level. They do this by moving patients to big city, high-volume centres, which may be better quality and should cost less (but often don't). This is cost shifting, though not the familiar kind between the states and the Commonwealth. The cost of supporting, for instance, head and neck oncology care in Armidale is shifted to the patients and family, who have to travel and take time off work. These costs, and many others, are personal and damaging to rural economies.

Governments should cement health services as regional juggernauts by funding care and research.

Through health, the regions can be centres of employment where pathways light up, for example, from high school to nursing careers. The right leadership can end the damaging cost shifting of patients' care, and create the test bed for new service models and technologies.

For many of Australia's regions, it would be a game-changer.

Professor Christine Jorm is the director of NSW Regional Health Partners. Dr Lou Conway is the director of the University of New England SMART Region Incubator.