Table of Contents
The rhetoric, mythology and practical consequences of nation-building are inextricably bound in the Australian story. Iconic infrastructure projects such as the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme are embedded in the collective national memory because of their audacity, scale and impact upon the shaping of the nation. However, it can be argued that other national institutions, from the ABC, to the CSIRO to the Australian Parliament also had nation-building as a primary raison d’etre. In a decidedly post-Keynesian age, however, the ascendancy of economic rationalism as the dominant public policy framework appeared to have consigned nation-building to an historical footnote. It has for some time been out of fashion to expect governments to intervene to correct market failure, other than through the reduction of regulatory or policy barriers to market participation. The nation was largely ‘finished’: the market largely ‘mature’ and the private sector could be leveraged to fill any gaps in the national patchwork using a mixture of deregulation and public private partnerships. This chapter asks the following questions: Has nation-building really been abandoned as a policy frame, or has it simply gone underground? Are today’s major infrastructure projects the natural descendents of Keynesian era nation-building? What are the new frontiers of nation-building in the information age?