ABSTRACT
In Australia, as elsewhere in the world, there has been a burgeoning of regional initiatives since the early 1990s. Historically, it has been the Australian Labor Party (ALP), at the federal level, that has championed regional policies, and after a 20-year break, the Keating Labor government announced a new policy in 1994. Key elements of competitive regionalism are to be found in a number of reports released by the federal government during 1993 and 1994, and later synthesized in the White Paper on national strategy, called Working Nation, also released in 1994. Unlike the previous eras of regional reform, this one has been dubbed by some as a 'report-led recovery' in which regional problems are seen as principally structural or economic in nature, as opposed to spatial or locational (Clare, 1993:15; Hurley, 1994a; Hurley, 1994b; Stilwell, 1994a; Stilwell, 1994b). It is an era in which low cost solutions (or competitive strategies) are being sought to deliver long-term sustainable national growth in the context of the internationalization and globalization of the Australian economy.
