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Taking ‘WA Inc’ Seriously: An Analysis of the Idea and its Application to West Australian Politics
Author(s) -
Stone Bruce
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
australian journal of public administration
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.524
H-Index - 41
eISSN - 1467-8500
pISSN - 0313-6647
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8500.1997.tb01243.x
Subject(s) - government (linguistics) , politics , term (time) , sociology , period (music) , linkage (software) , political science , public administration , social science , law , biochemistry , chemistry , gene , philosophy , linguistics , physics , quantum mechanics , acoustics
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the term WA Inc (or WA Incorporated) became a by‐word in the West Australian community for the failings, especially in their commercial activities, of the West Australian Labor governments of that period. Despite popular and academic interest in the notion of ‘WA Inc’, it is arguable that the conceptual linkage between ‘business’ and government, once central to popular interpretations of the term, remains under‐analysed. This article has two main purposes: to illuminate usage of ‘WA Inc’ by identifying several basic referents of the term and relating these to popular criticisms of the West Australian government in the 1980s and to determine the importance of those criticisms, thereby contributing to the larger debate about capacity of government to emulate private sector business.