Australian municipal governments have lagged behind many of their international counterparts in local public broadband provision. However, by 2013 there are clear signs that the gap is closing, with a significant upsurge of investment in public Wi-Fi by city governments across Australia. This...

Wireless communication is now integral to the social, economic and cultural life of cities and will become increasingly so as Internet of Things (IOT) technologies alter existing urban processes and generate entirely new ones. Although wireless connectivity engages almost all aspects of urban...

This paper examines the rise and fall of the Victorian (Australia) education department's learning management system Ultranet. The Ultranet was conceived as a web-based portal that was designed to integrate and deliver on a range of policy objectives in the areas of student management, school...

Community playgroups have been a feature of Australia's early childhood education and care landscape for at least forty years. Research in this field has focused on the developmental benefits of playgroup participation for children. However, as a playgroup member interviewed for this study said,...

This article traces the emergence of productivity as a central theme in Australia’s national cultural policy, and discusses some implications of this development for the Australian museum sector. The analysis focuses on two texts – Australia’s two national cultural policies Creative Nation...

There is widespread evidence that geographical borders reduce trade. This paper presents a theoretical model capable of providing a succinct comparison of three broad forms of trade barriers involving i) trade costs, ii) localized tastes, and iii) information frictions. Despite being...

To provide a more exible workhorse model of temporary price reductions or "sales", this paper presents a substantially generalized "clearinghouse" sales framework. Our framework permits multiple dimensions of firm heterogeneity, and views firms as competing directly in utility rather than...