Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis article contributes to understandings of geographies of discontent by focusing on the way that political frameworks condition the demand for fringe or protest voting. It discusses how Australia's federal political framework, preferential voting system and timely crisis intervention policies combine to reduce the demand for fringe voting. The local effects of this system are illustrated via an examination of voting patterns in two disadvantaged and deindustrialising locations in the State of Victoria. The conclusion suggests that European jurisdictions have much to learn from the Australian example.

Policies designed to hasten the closure of high-emissions coal-fired power stations routinely include reference to the need for a 'just' transition in affected communities. But the detail of what a just transition might entail is rarely specified. This article examines how policy interventions in Australia in 2012–2013, as part of the Gillard government's Clean Energy Future package, approached the problem of a just transition in the case of Victoria's coal dependent Latrobe Valley. It describes how policymakers framed the issue as transition, adopted a regional scaling, and expanded the territorial arena of policy action. A stakeholder-based multilevel governance committee shrouded this top-down decision-making from public scrutiny. These moves made it possible to conjure a narrative of benign transition governed by market processes. The paper explains how these strategic framings sidelined local interests, misrepresented the issues, exacerbated local disempowerment, and enabled the redirection of re-distributional funding to communities that were not directly affected by the impending closure of coal-fired power stations. The perceived injustice of this process exposes the limitations of climate policy-related strategic issue, scale and place framing.

AbstractThis article extends recent examinations of incomplete or disrupted policy mobility by examining the politically volatile case of policies to manage the regional impacts of decarbonization in Australia. The article's extended case study shows how political interests differently incorporated figments of circulating policy into longstanding debates and how more‐than‐local political networks defeated an antipolitical, technocratic exercise in 'new regional' governance. 'Follow the policy' methods could not have revealed the complexities of this case. The article concludes that mobilities approaches need to be more attentive to institutional arrangements, to the contested politics of policy formation and to the ambiguities of perceived policy likenesses. This case highlights the importance of considering how antipolitical institutional architectures facilitating policy mobility relate to established political power networks.

AbstractAlthough recent circumstances have rekindled interest in matching skilled migrant intakes to domestic labour needs, the factors contributing to migrant employment outcomes remain poorly understood. Contemporary research tends to focus on the best and worst of skilled migrant outcomes – either integration into elite transnational labour markets or relegation to relatively menial work. By approaching the issue from a perspective attuned to differentiated labour markets and their multiple segmentations, this paper argues that skilled migrant outcomes are best examined at the scale of occupations, with analysis oriented to understanding mobility across groups of related occupations. Using the example of the 'in demand' occupation of accountants migrating to Australia in the years 2005 to 2010, the paper's analysis of data from theContinuous Survey of Australia's Migrantsreveals that migrant accountants trickled across and trickled down to a wide range of accounting‐related occupations. Individual migrant's positions were conditioned by the intertwined effects of region of origin, gender, and migration pathway. The paper concludes with a discussion of policy implications. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper examines how the conduct of a local festival of fashion retailing—the L'Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival—reinvigorates the commodity fair format of older times. The paper takes a longitudinal view of the festival's evolution and draws on Lefebvre's spatiology, complemented by Terranova's approach to the participatory economy, to explore how it produces monetary value as it produces space. The discussion highlights the contradictory nature of event processes, arguing that they reinforce dominant representations of the city and extend retailers' reach into public space, but at the same time undermine spaces of business activity. The paper suggests that the event's use of participatory economies of cultural mobilisation are similar to the tactics of social movement activism, but that in this context mobilisation works to support the value-capturing strategies of local retailers and to reinscribe urban spaces as spaces of consumption.

This article examines the longer-term effects of job loss for middle income households in Australia. Specifically, it analyses the experiences of workers who lost their jobs in the 2001 collapse of an Australian airline, Ansett Airlines. Since Ansett employees' savings were tied up in the Ansett corporate structure, its workers faced the double jeopardy of losing both their careers and their savings. The article illuminates the role of financial losses in overall outcomes and argues that an adequate understanding of post-redundancy experiences must incorporate employment, wellbeing and financial effects. The article concludes that employment policies pay insufficient attention to the financial risks that accompany job loss. To reduce the adverse impacts of job loss for middle-income households, institutional frameworks need to address the interactions among labour markets, financial markets and housing markets.

ABSTRACT When studies of industrial organisation are informed by commodity chain, actor network, or global production network theories and focus on tracing commodity flows, social networks, or a combination of the two, they can easily overlook the less routine trans‐sectoral associations that are crucial to the creation and realisation of value. This paper shifts attention to identifying the sites at which diverse specialisations meet to concentrate and amplify mutually reinforcing circuits of value. These valorisation processes are demonstrated in the case of Australian Fashion Week, an event in which multiple interests converge to synchronize different expressions of fashion ideas, actively construct fashion markets and enhance the value of a diverse range of fashionable commodities. Conceptualising these interconnected industries as components of a trans‐sectoral fashion complex has implications for understanding regional development, world cities, production location, and the manner in which production systems "touch down" in different places.

Much of the large literature on precarious work has largely tended to assume that precarity is shaped by job quality: that precarious work leads to precarious lives. This paper adds to the literature by questioning this line of causality and highlighting the broader range of influences shaping the lives of older workers who enter precarious work after retrenchment from secure, long-term careers. Drawing on a study of Australia's automotive manufacturing industry, which closed in 2017, this article finds that for older retrenched workers, exposure to precarious employment sharpened life precarity for some but did not lead to precarious lives for others. Instead of a uniform transition from security to precarity, these workers' life trajectories diverged depending on their household-scale financial security. Key issues influencing the likelihood of older workers' lives becoming precarious were enterprise benefits and asset wealth accumulated through their previous careers.