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Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/33998
- Title
- Inter-regional migration
- Author(s)
- Burke, Terry
- Abstract
- For a decade or more Australia has been undergoing a process of economic restructuring. Some of this restructuring is an unplanned private response to local and international market dictates. Much of it is a response to government policy reforms. Both Commonwealth and State Governments have embarked upon a series of programs that we now loosely categorise under the title of economic rationalism. Microeconomic reform, particularly of the labour market; cutbacks in government spending; tax cuts; and restrictions on State borrowing rights characterise the thrust of this strategy. Parallel with economic restructuring has been a slow social transformation of culture, politics and demography; dimensions of social existence that are related to economic change but also have a life autonomous from it. These include the changing structure of Australian households; the broad acceptance of a multicultural society; a greater political conservatism paralleled with recognition of diversity in respect of homosexuality, gender and ethnicity; the importance of our environment and the re-emergence of 'place', that is, the recognition of local community or locality as being important in defining one's identity in a world increasingly becoming internationalised and homogenised. What has all this to do with inter-regional migration? The obvious point, but one often neglected by policy makers, is that economic restructuring and social transformation does not take place on the head of a pin. Economic and social transformations impact on people's lives by affecting their income and wealth (for most people held in the form of housing), their confidence in the future, aspirations for self and family, patterns of consumption and lifestyle choices. Changes in these societal processes then overflow to how people see and use space. The degree, form and direction of household and personal mobility are in part outcomes of social and economic transformations. Analysis of mobility can therefore suggest the problems and potentials inherent in these wider processes. [Introduction]
- Publication type
- Book chapter
- Research centre
- Swinburne University of Technology
- Source
- Population shift : mobility and change in Australia / Peter W. Newton and Martin Bell (eds.), p. 103-107
- Publication year
- 1996
- Keyword(s)
- Australia; Diversity; Economic rationalism; Economic restructuring; Government; Interregional migration; Migration; Residential mobility; Social change
- Publisher
- Australian Government Publishing Service Press
- ISBN
- 0644361182
- Copyright
- Copyright © P. W. Newton and M. Bell 1996.
- Peer reviewed
