Industrial restructuring and the metropolitan fringe: Growth and disadvantage in western Sydney

Although academics and policy-makers alike were slow to place Australia's industrial crises of the 1970s in their global context, most seemed agreed that a form of de-industrialisation was taking place. The fall in manufacturing's contribution to the total workforce from 25 per cent to less than 17 per cent in only a decade was not simply the move to a 'post-industrial society' with continued growth in services. Rather, it resulted from profound restructuring of both the industrial and financial systems in which both domestic and global factors were at work.