Still Calling Australia Home? Conceptions of International Capital in Recent Official Reports

Abstract

The last 7 years has seen a large number of government and semi-government reports on the changing nature of Australia's integration into the international economy. This paper explores their differences but focuses more centrally on their common premises. It is argued each starts with a nationalist conception of accumulation which poses, by assumption, the notion of Australia as a coherent and singular economic entity and the rest of the world as 'exogenous'. In a world of increasingly integrated accumulation, this nationalist assumption must be challenged.