Regime Change in Australian Capitalism: Towards a Historical Political Economy of Regulation

Regulatory regimes of political economy have a high degree of stability. The old Australian regime of labourist-protectionism survived more or less unchanged since before the Great War. The key feature was the historic compromise between the classes and leaders of capital and labour, mediated via the state and the institutions created to implement it. In the 1980s the regime was radically and rapidly transformed into the neoliberal globalizing regime. Explaining such large-scale shifts in systems of political economy, the history of which follows a pattern of punctuated equilibrium, is a difficult task for historical enquiry. This paper seeks to articulate an appropriate theoretical framework, derived from the structurist (that is, historical and realist) tradition that emphasizes historicity, multidimensionality, an form of institutionalism, human agency, and neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory.