| Abstract: | The Australian aluminium industry has played a ‘semi-peripheral’ role in world production. The transnational corporations dominating the world industry were supplied with large cuantities of cheap raw materials for smelters overseas. Three of the firms also produced metal, largely for local sale. Recently, however, there has been a dramatic restructuring of this pattern with six proposals for smelters producing metal for export. The explanation lies not simply in Australia's energy advantages, but in interactions between the corporate global strategies and Australian governments. New patterns of regional ‘comparative advantage’ have been created, in part by corporations setting stale governments in competition with one another to provide cheap energy and supportive infrastructure. The impacts of these changes are inherently uneven geographically. |
