To what extent has Australia’s developmental trajectory been neoliberalist?

Our account of Australia’s economic trajectory over the last four decades highlights the play of tensions, contradictions and imperfect resolutions. We see Australia’s political economy as shaped by tensions between the opposed needs and demands of inward- and outward-looking sectors, regions and interests, and irresolvably-different understandings of Australia’s past and visions of Australia’s future. We show how Australia’s spatially fragmented economy – with its entrenched power coalitions, rigid state structure and established institutions and practices – produces systematic resistances to marketisation. Numerous market-oriented reforms have languished, or been modified or reversed, after proving incompatible with extant social, economic or political realities. Those neoliberalist reforms which have been successfully and permanently installed have often generated perverse and unintended outcomes. Put together, we see that attempts to fit Australia’s political economy into a framework dominated by neoliberalism insufficiently acknowledges the intricacies of Australia’s contemporary (re)organisation.