Here you can read and download selected research I have produced
Investing in North Australia’s Human Capital: Population Policy, Talent Acquisition & Immigration Innovation
This presentation accompanied my keynote address at the 2024 Developing North Australia conference. It examines population growth, migration data, policy progress, and possibilities for how to tackle demographic decline in north Australia.
On the Necessity for Economic Geographies of International Migration
This academic manuscript from 2020 is one of several that emanated from my doctoral thesis on ‘Maintaining Competitiveness in the Global Market for Skilled Migrants’. Key insights include that: Immigration should be reaffirmed as a long-term objective in the post-COVID-19 era; economic geography should advance empiricist investigation of international migration, independent of theoretical migration study; economic migration policy should encompass economic, family and humanitarian streams, and re-categorise as ‘emigrational, transitional, educational and preferential’; future narratives on skilled migration should be more holistically repositioned as dialogues on economic migration; future research could better articulate the positive case for immigration, recouple with population policy, explore preferential migration pathways, and decouple from skill as a bedrock construct.
Welfare Reform and North Australia
This thesis was submitted in 2003 as part of my economics degree. It examines welfare state restructuring across the developed world, and the trend towards governments redefining citizenship entitlements – from systems of entitlement to systems of conditionality and reciprocal obligation to the state. Within this examination, it primarily focuses upon consideration of a targeted package entitled ‘Australians Working Together’, intended to promote self-reliance amongst Indigenous Australians, and specifically, seeks to critique the likely impact of the Howard government’s welfare reform initiatives on Indigenous people within the distinct landscape of northern Australia. The hypothesis of the study was that the particular attributes and complexities of welfare provision in northern Australia would require considerable sensitivity to its uniqueness of place, if welfare reform was to reach any potential it might have in acting as an agent of change and empowerment for individuals and communities.
Euthanasia for the Terminally Ill
This is my earliest research work, completed in 1993 when I was in high school, exploring whether people in Darwin think the practice of euthanasia should be legalised in Australia for people who are terminally ill.