Reterritorialisation of economies and institutions: The rise of the Sydney basin economy

Abstract

This paper is an account of institutional and spatial shifts in the Sydney basin economy that coalesce around Australia's current, long period of prosperity. The paper briefly sources this prosperity, noting the key shifts towards the financial and professional services sectors that accompany it. This material is then used to make the argument that two reterritorialisation processes underpin Australia's—and Sydney's—contemporary accumulation project. The first reterritorialisation is a spatial reformation of distributional flows. Whereas Australian governments had two parallel purposes in post-war economic management, successful accumulation and sustainable socio-spatial distributions, the latter has been largely abandoned. The assumption now is that successful accumulation processes are per se the most appropriate distributional strategies. The second reterritorialisation, in a Deleuzian sense, is the reformation of institutional structures that regulate economy and promote economic growth. Here we find a tension in Australia's state apparatus between, on the one hand, an aggressive neo-liberalist reconstruction of the economic regulatory and production arms of the state, but with an adherence to a Keynesian mood within the nation's key spending and human services agencies on the other. The historical reasons for this tension are explained and possibilities for future change are speculated on.

An earlier version of this paper was presented to the 97th Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in March 2000. The authors wish to thank session participants and especially the discussant Jamie Gough for their thoughtful comments. They also acknowledge research assistance from Natalie Moore and Tanya Cherry.

Notes

1. Criticism of new regionalism as an idea and as the basis for a contemporary political economy is now well advanced (witness Morgan, 2001; Lovering, 2001; O'Neill, 2005).

2. Calculated from capitalisation data available from Australian Stock Exchange website (www.asx.com.au).