Economic policy and Australian state building: from labourist-protectionism to globalisation

Abstract

The emergence and development of the Australian state and economy from the initial precarious colonisation of New South Wales (NSW) in 1788 must be understood within the context of British imperialism and the world economy of the nineteenth century. The early economic development depended to a large degree upon state direction of investment, labour and land use. Early political/administrative struggles concerned the control and alienation of land, access to foreign currency in order to import luxuries and control of the convict labour supply. The lands of Aboriginal inhabitants were simply expropriated by the crown under the legal fiction of terra nullias. A free, proto-capitalist economy soon burgeoned within the imperial framework, especially after a couple of decades of uncertainty. Unlike almost all other parts of what became the industrialised world of the early to mid-twentieth century, and in comparison with other former settler colonies in the Americas, Australia was founded within and was an integral part of the world economy from the very beginning.