Not before time, more Australian critics are confronting ‘economic Rationalism’, or what David Harvey (1992:597) calls ‘market triumphalism’: the idea that the organisation of our economic and social life through public policy should mirror the disciplines and principles of the market. While it is a loose coalition of different viewpoints, economic rationalism rests on two fairly basic convictions: that governments tend to be inherently inefficient in their attempts to produce or to distribute wealth and resources, while markets, through which ‘sovereign consumers’ satisfy their individual preferences, are ultimately the more efficient and equitable means of rewarding effort and generating productive growth. Left to itself, the market will provide. In a sense, the idea seems to be that the skills involved in running the country are not unlike those needed to run a business.

Against these suppositions – and they are, as Frank Stilwell (1993a:31-3) points out, based on highly restrictive and questionable assumptions – critics argue that government activities, from direct investment and regulation through to tax-based redistributions of income, are vital to the efficient functioning of the economy and society and, by extension, the Australian city. Academic and professional debates over the urban future, in league with State government and Federal government reviews of urban policy, have played an important role in challenging the doctrines of market rule.