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This paper draws upon the 2001 census to examine the impact of national economic reform on the growth of regional cities. The paper argues that regional cities in Australia have taken on new roles within both their region and the national economy. It argues that deregulation of the economy has contributed to the growth of some regional cities and especially those that have been able to deepen their economies. Through the use of regression analysis, the paper suggests that regional centres that have witnessed an increase in the level of specialisation within their economy have, on average, grown more quickly than other cities. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for our understanding of the evolution of urban systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Australia's cities, and in particular the suburban areas, are car dependent and vulnerable to higher oil prices. This paper examines the policy and planning responses to this emerging problem. It does this by reviewing relevant plans and policies at the local, regional/metro, state and national levels. The analysis suggests that there are a number of contradictions in these plans and policies. There appears to be a vertical disconnection between national policy development and that occurring at the local and metropolitan levels. In addition there is a horizontal disconnection/contradiction between oil vulnerability mitigation and other policy areas, such as transport. At present, policy and planning prescriptions are inadequate to meet the challenges of an oil constrained future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a comprehensive and integrated framework of targets and indicators to support national planning and reporting through until 2030. Interest in the SDGs is growing, as seen by the emergence of a range of data-driven assessments of progress, gaps and opportunities for achieving the SDGs. Despite this growing momentum, few national governments have completed their own evidence-based assessment of progress. This paper explores the method and results from an independent, evidence-based assessment of Australia's progress towards the SDGs. The assessment evaluates Australia's progress across 86 SDG targets and 144 corresponding indicators which were selected through an expert-driven, consultative process. The study uses a novel approach combining several contemporary methods to produce a comprehensive assessment of national progress on the SDGs. The results show that Australia has mixed performance on the SDGs, with strong progress in goals relating to health and education undermined by poor progress in goals relating to climate action and reducing inequalities. By comparing our results against other recent assessments of Australia's progress, we observe that SDG assessment results are highly sensitive to the selection of indicators and assessment methods. Our assessment addresses these sensitivities by maintaining the integrity of the SDG framework and a clear linkage to official targets and indicators, while also having regard for national priorities and relevance. The study provides a timely contribution to research in the emerging field of evidence-based assessments of national progress on the SDGs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper applies strategic planning principles to national planning of wildlife tourism in Australia. Strategic planning typically begins with the identification and organisation of stakeholders, who then develop the mission and necessary resources, generate and implement plans, and monitor and evaluate results. However, the literature of strategic planning has previously been applied primarily to established organisations rather than to an industry sector that is not formally organised. In this paper, the role of Wildlife Tourism Australia Inc. and other organisations in beginning the organisation and mission development stages of strategic planning for Australian wildlife tourism is discussed. A proposed mission for wildlife tourism is to achieve triple bottom line sustainability and maximise benefits for wildlife, visitors, host communities and tourism businesses. The key problems that limit such benefits, as well as potential solutions, have already been researched and are summarised here. This paper thus indicates some progress in this 'initial start up' phase of strategic planning. With enhanced resourcing and further building of partnerships with other key stakeholders, Wildlife Tourism Australia is well placed to play an important role in further development of this strategic approach. This paper contributes to understanding how strategic planning begins and develops in a new tourism sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines discourses and developments of the knowledge economy and learning society in Australia and New Zealand. It outlines the international context of the rise of the knowledge‐based economy and sets the New Zealand and Australian debates against this backdrop. A current heightened emphasis on education and learning in both countries is closely aligned with the key imperatives of economic development and competitiveness. Older models of the learning society based more on cultural and humanistic aspirations remain evident and competitive with economic models. Prospects for further innovative development in education and learning across the life course, and across a broader population in democratic societies are considered. The paper concludes that notwithstanding the current influence of singularly economic discourses shaping conceptions of the learning economy and society there is no definitive or triumphant model of the learning society prevailing in Australia and New Zealand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Funding of local government systems in Australia has been falling relative to other tiers of government for the past 30 years with various adverse consequences, especially the decline of local government infrastructure. This paper seeks to explain this phenomenon by drawing on two relatively new theoretical strands in the political economy literature; the Australian theory of local government failure and the Wittman model of democratic efficiency. Three explanations are assessed: a traditional public finance perspective, Australian local government failure, and the institutional efficiency of democratic preference revelation. A secondary aim of the paper is to evaluate the implications of the Wittman model for the local government failure paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

State processes of land dispossession rely on multiple modes of power such as domination, legitimisation, pacification, and deceit to achieve their aims. This article analyses how governments in Australia have drawn on these varied forms to redevelop inner city areas in Sydney which are important to Indigenous communities. It analyses three redevelopment practices that targeted the suburbs of Redfern and Waterloo between 2005 and 2019. First, domineering planning structures used to marginalise Indigenous housing in Redfern. Second, racist tropes that have worked to legitimise this authoritarian approach and the resulting dispossession. Third, community consultations, that attempted to placate residents impacted by redevelopment, with culturally inclusive participation, but that maintained a deceitful silence on the question of colonisation. The article shows how authoritarian state planning, racialised legitimisation, and colonial pacification and deceit wielded in Redfern and Waterloo, are directly inherited from and/or reproduce historic colonial nation and city building agendas. On this basis, the article claims that settler colonialism can be understood as a self-perpetuating process, where practices of dispossession, developed at a given time, can set precedent for and be reworked into later programmes of land dispossession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's poverty has long been a central concern for policy makers and policy researchers. The body of extant research conducted and the range of programmatic interventions undertaken by successive governments in this and other countries is extraordinary. Nevertheless, children remain in poverty. Clearly there are many reasons for this, not least of which is the maintenance and intensification of market capitalism with its attendant blatant inequalities. Even so, the moral, political, social and economic imperatives for developing workable responses to children's poverty remain. This paper argues that we, in Australia, should adopt an approach increasingly taken in the UK. Drawing on, among other things, the new sociology of childhood, this approach begins not with the expertise of adult researchers and policy makers, but with that of children. In doing so, the case is made for why children's perceptions and experiences of poverty are key concerns for policy. The paper outlines in theoretical terms why children's voices matter. Invoking the new sociology of childhood and the sociology of identity, a conceptual framework for understanding why policy scholars and makers should carefully attend to the voices of their subjects is sketched - in this case, the subjects are children. Finally, some methodological implications of this for undertaking policy research informed by this approach are outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The planning and design of golf course developments is influenced by many factors. This paper focuses on the environmental ramifications of insufficient or lack of compliance with standard environmental and economic planning practices. Specifically, it looks at a tourist destination location that was under the influence of extensive land development and investment speculation. The Gold Coast in Australia was the focal point for large overseas investment due to changes in government legislation regarding foreign investment. Due to the economic climate in the second half of the 1980s many golf course resort developments were built, approved, or planned. Many of these circumvented normal business and environment planning processes. The result has been a dangerous concentration of golf facilities in environmentally sensitive areas and an oversupply of golf facilities. Both of these matters are discussed in terms of the general planning process and the potential economic and environmental impacts to the Gold Coast and similar destinations in other parts of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contains an analysis of the sources of income inequality in Australia, based on data from the ABS income survey for 1978-79. The analysis proceeds by progressive decomposition of the population into component groups differentiated by characteristics such as sex, age, employment status and occupation. At each stage of the decomposition, total inequality is partitioned into contributions from within and between the component groups, as measured by the Shorrocks I[sub 0] index. The importance of the characteristic in question as a source of inequality can then be assessed. While the results of the analysis are described in some detail, the emphasis of the paper is primarily methodological. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clear-cut definitions of strategic spatial planning are rather exceptional. Therefore in this paper I use building blocks from literature (planning and business) and my experience in practice to construct a workable normative definition of the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of strategic spatial planning. Five main characteristics (selective, relational annex inclusive, integrative, visioning, and action orientated) that constitute the hard core of the ‘strategic’ in the normative view are confronted, in a first broad scan, with nine so-called strategic plans from different planning traditions in Europe (Italy, France, Spain, the Czech Republic, Belgium, and the Netherlands) and in Australia (Perth). The confrontation highlights some hesitant shifts towards the normative view but also makes it clear that there is still a long way to go. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A report by the Centre for International Economics titledThe Benefits and Costs of Alternative Growth Paths for Sydney: Economic, Social and Environmental Impactsthat was commissioned by the New South Wales Government has been released. It examines alternative ways in which additional people could be housed in Sydney. The findings of this report are marred by the fact that some of the costs that it uses on which to base conclusions are questionable and the fact that not all significant factors are covered. The findings also make the current New South Wales Metropolitan Strategy planning policy difficult to justify as it portrays minimal cost differences between the scenarios examined when the time period examined and the cost of a dwelling are taken into account. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent years there has been an international trend to encourage greater participation by community members in making decisions over local developments. A small study of the experiences of community activists residing in the City of Moreland (Australia) indicates that existing political and economic structures are neither flexible nor supportive of greater, substantive, democracy. Indeed the kinds of barriers reported at the grassroots suggest that deep reforms in the traditional patterns of engagement between political and bureaucratic authorities and neighbourhood communities are necessary in order to enhance the power of community members. This analysis of community engagement practices draws a parallel between the multi-various scales of struggles necessitated for womens liberation and the breadth of reforms necessary for neighbourhood residents to achieve greater power in decision making over local developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The City of Sydney's urban planning philosophy and practice experienced fundamental changes in the 1980s and 1990s. In the post-World War decades, Sydney's urban planning was characterized by a laissez faire tradition which exempted any attempt to plan and control the city. Furthermore, this laissez faire context was interrelated with the conflicts of planning powers between the New South Wales State Government and its agencies, and the Sydney City Council. However, this ad hoc planning approach and conflict-ridden planning politics between tiers of governments appeared to give way to a converged recognition of the importance of planning intervention and concerted planning actions among major stakeholders in the pursuit of a global Sydney in the 1980s and the 1990s. This article attempts to address two questions of the urban planning transformation in Sydney: (1) how did the transformation occur? and (2) what were the thematic patterns of the transformation? This article describes Sydney's historical planning background, makes a content analysis of benchmark strategic plan documents – The City of Sydney Strategic Plan (1971–1983) and Central Sydney Strategy (1988), and narrates the planning practices in the pre-Olympics 2000 years. This article finally concludes the thematic patterns of urban planning transformations in Sydney in the 1980s and 1990s: the inter-governmental consensus on visioning and planning for a global Sydney, the thematic planning transformations including the emergence of entrepreneurial planning with the prominence of economic planning, the neutralization of the social planning, and the emphasis on urban design in the physical planning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents a reprint of the article "National Planning in Australia," by A. R. Hall, which appeared in the March 1962 issue of "Australian Planning Institute Journal." It identifies national economic planning as a technique for the creation and implementation of national policy in Australia. It demonstrates appeals as to raise the vision of growth, and the avoidance of large short-term fluctuations in the level of business activity.

The Intergenerational Report recently released by the Commonwealth Government contains some of the elements of a national long-range plan. Because the Report comes from the Treasury it lacks some important themes such as the impact of the envisaged population growth on natural resources. However, it is linked with the major cities which it recognises as the major drivers and arenas in the changes it foreshadows. This link is cemented in the recent COAG agreement to produce new metropolitan strategies by the beginning of 2012, using an agreed and enriched planning process. The opportunities in this new situation are canvassed. [image omitted] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1990s witnessed a major era of structural reform in Australian local government. Amalgamation programmes in all six states resulted in a substantial decrease in the number of local authorities in Australia. The chief rationale underlying local government mergers lay apparently in the belief that larger municipalities would exhibit greater economic efficiencies. Despite its widespread acceptance amongst policy elites, this argument did not derive from a solid empirical base. This article seeks to evaluate available research evidence on the controversial question of economies of scale in Australian local government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The era of environmental concern ushered in by the World Conservation Strategy and the Brundtland Commission in the 1980s was given renewed impetus following the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in 1992 and the adoption of Agenda 21. Water was a key resource singled out for attention and governments around the world have made a commitment to ecologically sustainable management of the resource. Australia is no exception and a number of processes are under way aimed at ensuring the sustainability of the country's limited water endowment. In recent years the Australian water industry has increasingly come under criticism as the perceived source of widespread resource degradationand extensive impairment of riverine environments. At the same time, growing demands for alternative uses of water have arisen for a wide range of environmental purposes. Addressing these criticisms and satisfying these demands have prompted moves for far-reaching adjustment to water allocation systems and a new approach to water management, a key component of which is the use of economic instruments to bring about change. Among measures introduced to improve water management are the encouragement of water markets and tradable water entitlements, and the rationalization of water pricing. These measures have had a mixed reception from water users, particularly in the irrigation sector, and have come under scrutiny with regard to their rationale and effectiveness in promoting efficiency and equity in rural water use. The challenge remains to identify the most appropriatemix of incentive-based and regulatory mechanisms for the management of Australia's water resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]