An economic and financial geography of the Australian superannuation industry

The Australian superannuation industry has grown enormously over the past 30 years. Whereas working people are automatically enrolled at their workplaces, the head offices of many industry funds are in Melbourne rather than Sydney. Melbourne’s dominance of the superannuation industry is explained, in part, by happenstance—the location of major unions and employer groups and their initiatives in response to the enabling legislation. Other factors identified include opportunism, cooperation, and the advantages of growth. Government-prompted mergers and acquisitions have also reinforced the dominance of Melbourne, notwithstanding attempts by Sydney-based superannuation funds to out-compete their Melbourne rivals. Whereas the geographical bifurcation of the Australian superannuation industry has been mediated by the formation of a Queensland-based superfund “champion,” it is suggested that it faces numerous challenges. In conclusion, avenues for future research are sketched, focusing upon the future of Melbourne as the centre of the superannuation industry, the role of digital platforms in service delivery, pension adequacy, and the increasing importance of Australian funds in global financial markets.     

Menzies' road map for Asia still guides us today

This is an excerpt from the 2014 Sir Robert Menzies Lecture, delivered by the Honourable Josh Frydenberg, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister and the Federal Member for Kooyong, on August 14, 2014, in the Queen's Hall at the Parliament of Victoria, Melbourne.     

The Foundation of the Melbourne College of Divinity

This article provides the first substantial account of the foundation of the Melbourne College of Divinity in 1910. It reveals the ecclesiastical, academic, and civic perceptions of theology in Australia in the first decade of the twentieth century. The article sets the establishment of the College against the background of the modernisation of higher education, especially secularism and the exclusion of the teaching of divinity at the University of Melbourne. It demonstrates the roles played by several churches in the formation of the College, and traces its origin to early Protestant interdenominational cooperation. Although the College's architects failed in their aim of having divinity accepted within the University of Melbourne, and thereby ensuring theology was in constant dialogue with the wider academy, they succeeded in establishing high academic standards in theological education and facilitating ministerial formation in an Australian context.     

Commodities and the Power of Prayer: Pentecostalist Attitudes Towards Consumption in Contemporary Ghana

This article addresses the phenomenal success of pentecostalism, a global religious movement par excellence, throughout postcolonial Africa. Investigating pentecostalist views of and attitudes towards commodities in southern Ghana, the article shows that pentecostalists represent the modern global economy as enchanted and themselves as agents of disenchantment: only through prayer may commodities cease to act as ‘fetishes’ which threaten the personal integrity and identity of their owners. Pentecostalism creates modern consumers through a ritual of prayer, which helps them handle globalization and control foreign commodities in such a way that they can be consumed without danger. Through prayer, commodities cease to possess their owners; the latter are rather enabled to possess the former. Pentecostalism engages in globalization by enabling its members to consume products from the global market and by offering its followers fixed orientation points and a well-delimited moral universe within globalization's unsettling flows.     

Gentrification in inner Melbourne: problems of analysis

Measurement and analysis of survey data for the period 1961–76 show that the concept of ‘gentrification’, borrowed from the British inner housing scene by local media and social scientists, does not capture the most salient features of the recent inner Melbourne experience. Serious inadequacies are revealed in the census data and alternative data sources are tapped. Positivist methods say nothing about the ‘meaning’ of inner city social changes, leaving room for interpretation based on the socio-political stance of the observer. This is seen in the attribution of motives for the ‘gentry's’ entry into inner Melbourne and for their environmental and political activities.     

REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article: Forest Soils and Nutrient Cycles, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne Division of National Mapping Climate, Atlas of Australian Resources Herbicides in Agriculture: Minimum Tillage, Science and Society Population aging in Australia: Implications for social and economic policy Australia's Changing Population: Trends and Implications, Melbourne The Natural Environment. Australia–a geography Volume I, Sydney The Adelaide City Plan: Fiction or Fact, Wakefield Press, Adelaide With Conscious Purpose: A History of Town Planning in South Australia Atlas of South Australia, Adelaide     

Conflict in Water Use in Victoria,Australia: Bolte's Divide

In 1964, the Premier of Victoria, Australia, Henry Bolte, announced that, in order to protect irrigation interests in the north of the state, he would prevent Melbourne from developing new water resources from the north of Victoria's Great Divide. Neither the water resource needs of Melbourne, the need for irrigation development nor the changing economic structure of the state provides a satisfactory explanation for this decision. Instead, Bolte's policy appears simply to have provided a means of improving the parliamentary position of the Victorian Liberal government. Bolte's principle has never been formally revoked and continues to influence water resource planning in the state. In order to make the most appropriate use of Victoria's limited natural resources, it is imperative that ‘Bolte's divide’ should not continue to influence future resource development and allocation.     

Born in Melbourne? Considerations on the origins of Australian political science

In a pioneering academic discussion of Australian politics written just before the First World War, William Harrison Moore reinforced the image of Australia as an increasingly autonomous part of a slowly evolving but essentially liberal British Empire. In this 34-page account of ‘Political Systems of Australia’ published in George H. Knibbs, ed., Federal Handbook (Melbourne, 1914), the Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Melbourne arguably created the ur-text of the Australian Politics textbook. It is argued that there is an unbroken thread of Cambridge-inspired political science teaching and writing at Melbourne from Harrison Moore onwards. The early Australian politics textbooks and ‘Political Systems of Australia’ are cut from the same cloth, making the latter an important precursor.     

Rethinking suburban development in Australia: a Melbourne case study

This article considers suburban development in Australia through the lens of its second largest city, Melbourne. Contemporary urban policies have focussed on the low densities within Australia's capitals and tried to achieve sustainability through urban consolidation policies. The article argues that these policies are often based on a distorted understanding of the relationship between housing markets and labour markets in Australia's large metropolises. The analysis of suburban development in Melbourne shows that suburban development involves complex links between changes in housing and job location and that urban sustainability policy needs to include actions designed to change the distribution of employment as well as the location and density of housing. The article shows that the vast spread of the Melbourne population masks closely linked regional labour and housing markets.     

Chinese Students in White Australia: State,Community, and Individual Responses to the Student Visa Program, 1920-25

A recent archival discovery reveals that around four hundred visas were issued to students from China to study in Australia from 1920 to 1925. This article explains and explores the significance of this little-known initiative under the White Australia Policy by reference to China's global resurgence, the role of the Chinese consulate-general in local community affairs, and support and resistance among Chinese community leaders in response to these developments. It highlights a paradox associated with the students' arrival, specifically the Melbourne publication of fabricated ‘Chinese letters home’ at a time when literate students were writing personal letters to their families and friends in China about their impressions of Melbourne, their understanding of local labour and gender relations, and their engagement with the big political and business issues of the day. The recently-released letters and papers of a contemporary student, Joe Tong, tell an untold story of Chinese Australians in the postwar era.     

Stones from Bavaria: Iranian Lithography in its Global Contexts

This essay traces the circulation of the industrial commodities of lithographic presses and stones and compares the uses to which these commodities were put in Iran with other regions at the same time. Using Persian travelogues as sources on scientific exchange, the essay compares Iran's access to lithography with its spread through Europe, Russia and South and Southeast Asia. Using lithography as a gauge of Iran's integration into an industrializing global economy, it compares state-led Iranian attempts to access lithographic commodities with attempts by other regional powers to develop local sources for these ‘stones from Bavaria’. After tracing the role of Christian Evangelicalism in the technology's dissemination, the essay finally contextualizes Iranian uses of lithography in global developments in illustrated and newspaper printing.

Since the art of Lithography has risen to considerable celebrity, attempts have been made to discover the same species of stone…

– Aloys Senefelder, 1819

     

The Future In The Far East

Nationalism and Communism in East Asia, by W. Macmahon Ball (Melbourne University Press, 1952. 25s.).     

“A Twist in the Tale” of a Surgeon and his Patient: An Australian First in Seizure Localization

In 1894 at St. Vincent's Hospital Melbourne, George Adlington Syme removed a meningioma from a patient with symptomatic focal epilepsy. The operation stands as the first surgery based on seizure localization in Australia. It is also the country's first documented successful resection of an intracranial meningioma. It followed William Macewen's landmark cerebral localization case on the boy John McKinley by 18 years and Victor Horsley's first epilepsy case on Hughlings Jackson's patient James B. by a mere 8 years. Syme's patient, Constable John G., survived the operation by some 23 years, dying from a gunshot wound to the head in 1917. Newly discovered inquest papers reveal that the coroner's judgment that the death was accidental completely fails to address the more credible scenario of suicide. The story makes for a fascinating epilogue to an important landmark in Australia's neurosurgical history.     

Gender equality in housework among professional Filipinas in Melbourne: painfully slow and illusory?

This article analyses how professional Filipinas in Melbourne negotiate housework with their partners in the absence of the domestic workers they were accustomed to in the Philippines. To some extent, the absence of maids revealed the informants’ escape from classism and sexism. I argue that as a result of the women’s persistent strategising, household work division did eventually become more egalitarian although variously insufficient to be able to relieve them from extreme stress. The women’s ambitions and career demands were important drivers in renegotiating the domestic realm. Yet the slow change towards gender egalitarianism is seen as a response to changed circumstances rather than to commitment to ideals of gender equity.     

Clubs,Spades, Diamonds and Disadvantage: the Geography of Electronic Gaming Machines in Melbourne

Opportunities to gamble, particularly on electronic gaming machines (EGMs) have been rapidly increasing in Australia during the 1990s. The increase in expenditure on gambling and the related problems have subsequently become a growing concern, particularly in relation to disadvantaged sectors of the population. Given this, the development of a geography of gambling is an important step in understanding the implications of this rapidly expanding industry. This paper addresses this issue at two distinct geographical scales in metropolitan Melbourne and considers the distribution of EGMs in relation to levels of economic well‐being. Findings suggest that patterns evident at the wider Melbourne scale of greater concentration of EGMs in less advantaged regions are also reflected at a local level. These findings are related to the wider issues of accessibility to gambling facilities and problem gambling.     

Islamic cosmopolitanism out of Muslim Asia: Hindu–Muslim business co-operation between Odessa and Yiwu

This article explores the forms of cosmopolitanism that form an important element of the identities and activities of long-distance Muslim merchants involved in the global trade in Chinese commodities. It focuses on two nodes that are central for this type of trade: Odessa on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast and Yiwu in China’s Zhejiang Province. Ethnographically, the paper focuses on the commercial and social ties that exist between Muslim traders from Afghanistan and those who identify with the country’s dispersed Hindu ethno-religious minority. It argues that the ability to manage heterogeneous social and religious relationships is of critical significance to the activities and identities of these commodity traders.     

从历史地理看徽商的兴衰

多山少地的生存环境、俭朴的生活、商业中的诚信、儒家思想的影响,对徽商的形成和发展或许都起过作用,但对徽商这样一个商业群体来说,决定性的因素还是商品和市场.从历史地理的角度看,即根据当时的地理环境加以考察,徽商充分利用地理优势,稳定占有以长江三角洲为主的市场,经营的商品也摆脱了原籍的局限.与政治权力的结合使徽商获得食盐营销的特权,并以此迅速致富.徽商的最终衰落也在于市场的丧失和商品落后.     

Children and politics

R. W. Connell, The Child's Construction of Politics, Melbourne University Press, 1971, pp. 251, $3.75.     

Knopfelmacher's essays

Frank Knopfelmacher: Intellectuals and Politics, Nelson's Australian Paperbacks, Melbourne, 1968, vii + 156 pp., $2.95.     

Suburbia and thorns

Lois Bryson and Faith Thompson, An Australian Newtown. Life and Leadership in a Working‐class Suburb, Penguin, Melbourne, 1972, pp. 380, $2.25. Bernard Barrett, The Inner Suburbs. The Evolution of an Industrial Era, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1971, pp. 181 + xv, $9.00. Theo W. Brown with Keith Willey, Crown of Thorns. The Death of the Great Barrier Reef?, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1972, pp. 128 + xiii, $2.95.