Gambling,Resource Distribution,and Racial Economy: An Examination of Poker Machine Expenditure in Three Remote Australian Towns

Our aim in this paper is to examine the ways in which electronic gaming machines (EGMs) redistribute resources to and from three remote towns in the Northern Territory (NT), namely Katherine, Tennant Creek and Nhulunbuy. We describe EGM expenditure levels in each town at the level of the individual venue, examine patterns of socioeconomic status within each town, explore the ways in which EGM markets are racialised through venue gate‐keeping practices and spatially‐based alcohol regulations, and examine the effects of resource redistribution mechanisms designed to return a proportion of EGM profits to host communities. The ability of venues to draw resources from extremely disadvantaged groups from the remote periphery is of central concern when attempting to assess the societal consequences of gambling in remote towns, both in terms of individual harm and the adequacy of resource redistribution. Existing mechanisms for resource redistribution are both selective and relatively meagre, pointing to a political and racial economy of EGM gambling that transfers resources from remote towns to sites of centralised ‘white’ power. We conclude that political economy in the context of remote NT towns may not be understood outside a consideration of racial economy and the way that constructed notions of race operate to legitimate existing processes of economic exploitation and resource redistribution.     

Character and Age of Lateritic Weathering at Jervis Bay,Southern New South Wales

Lateritic profiles near Jervis Bay developed under humid temperate climates on a surface of considerable relief. δ¹⁸O and TL dating of these profiles indicates that their ages range from Late Mesozoic-Early Tertiary to Late Pleistocene. These profiles thus demonstrate a complexity of development far greater than that allowed for in traditional explanations which attributed lateritic weathering to the effects of tropical climates on Middle Tertiary erosional surfaces.     

Identifying Functional Regions in Australia Using Hierarchical Aggregation Techniques

This paper continues our work focused on developing a new socio-economic geography for Australia such that the chosen spatial aggregation of data is based on an analysis of economic behaviour. The underlying hypothesis is that the development of a geographical classification based on underlying economic behaviour will provide new insights into critical issues of regional performance, including unemployment differentials, the impact of industry, infrastructure and changes in local public expenditure on local labour markets. As a precursor to detailed work on the 2006 Census of Population and Housing data, we establish the proof of concept in this paper of the Intramax methodology using 2001 Journey-to-Work data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) for the state of New South Wales. The functional regionalisation generated by the Intramax method is then tested using ABS labour force data. We compare 2001 ABS Census of Population and Housing data aggregated by the ABS labour force regions to the same data aggregated using our functional regions. The results demonstrate the potential value of this technique for the development of a new geography.