This is a book about the impact of globalisation on Australia, particularly its political and economic systems.

In his seminal work on the subject, geographer Peter Dicken says of globalisation that ‘the tendency towards an increasingly highly interconnected and interdependent global economy will intensify. The fortunes of nations, regions, cities, neighbourhoods, families and individuals will continue to be strongly influenced by their position in the global network. In a rapidly shrinking and interconnected world there is no hiding place’. During the last twenty years this tendency has had its impact on Australia, producing profound changes in public policy and the organisation of national life. Other works have examined the effect on the national economic structure, and some attention is paid to this issue here. But the primary focus of this book is public policy, debates about it, and the effect of their outcomes on the national economic and social structure.

Various methodological approaches might be taken to explain these phenomena. Elsewhere explanations have been offered couched in terms of the dominance of international capital, the end of the Soviet system producing the global dominance of market relations, the ideological triumph of neo-classical economic doctrines or, more simply, the pragmatic shift to the Right by the Australian Labor Party. The approach this work adopts is systemic and historical. In the international system of 200 sovereign states each has its own characteristics which determine the manner in which it has reacted to the post-Cold War world of globalisation. In order to explain that process the dynamics of the system and the manner in which each state has become party to it require exposition.