Malcolm Tull

Recent major coastal disasters in the Asia-Pacific region have resulted in a massive loss of life and high societal costs. Unbridled development, growing coastal populations and injudicious land planning amplifies the predicted disaster risk due to climate change and extreme weather events. As it typifies expanding coastal development in areas prone to extreme weather events, the town of Exmouth (NW Australia) was used to investigate economic strategies for coastal risk mitigation. Recent marina development, with a loss of disaster mitigating ecosystem functions, has increased risk to previously unaffected areas. The extent to which risk perceptions of cyclonic storm-surge inundation and flooding influenced the price buyers paid for residential property in Exmouth over the period 1988–2013 was examined using a Hedonic Price Model. The analysis indicated that prices did not reflect the real societal cost of risk. Due to the absence of a monetary signal, such as higher insurance premiums, buyers tended to be risk insensitive and give greater weight to coastal amenity. To internalize these costs, a mandatory private insurance scheme for high-risk properties, penalties for local councils undertaking unsustainable developments, and a hybrid economic instrument aimed at correcting the market failure in coastal land, is proposed.

Indonesia’s catches of elasmobranchs (sharks, skates and rays) grew rapidly from the 1970s, driven mainly by the demand for shark fins, and by the beginning of the twenty-first century Indonesia was the world’s leading elasmobranch producer. The Indonesian fishery is effectively an open access one and overfishing has led to declining yields in Indonesian waters. Fishers have pushed the geographical catch frontier outwards and this has led to illegal fishing, especially in the Australian Fisheries Zone. Traditionally small scale fishers utilised most of the sharks for food and value-processes including the production of leather, but a large amount of shark is caught as by-catch in industrial fisheries for high value species such as tuna and this has increased the frequency of ‘finning’, a wasteful and cruel practice. The competition from industrial fishing has adversely impacted small scale fishers and their families; the main beneficiaries of the lucrative shark fin trade have been boat owners and traders rather than fishers and their families. A National Plan of Action is needed but complicated by fiscal constraints and the division of powers between the national, Kabupaten (district/regency) and provincial governments. Governance failures in fisheries are unfortunately a widespread problem in the Indo-Pacific Region.

The Australian and New Zealand port industries in the post-World War II period exhibit strong elements of path dependence. Simply put, economic and political actors’ purposive decisions pushed the development of port institutions down a pathway which became hard to step off: institutional lock-ins impeded strategic flexibility and the growth of port productivity; inefficient macro- and micro-level institutional arrangements reduced Australian and New Zealand port efficiency. Given this experience, our chapter uses path dependence as a method to explain institutional stability and change within New Zealand’s and Australia’s respective port systems. While port institutions in both countries were slow to adapt to shifts in the wider industry environment, they eventually succumbed to reformist change. As we explain, this occurred more strongly in New Zealand through pathbreaking institutional transformation in 1989, the pressures for which mounted over several decades. In Australia, by contrast, there were many false starts and change was slower even after the ports were caught up in the federal government’s late 1980s economy-wide programme of microeconomic reform.

The Port of Fremantle was originally established in 1829 to provide the British with a gateway to the western part of the vast Australian continent It has been operating continuously since then as a successful working port, central to Western Australia's economic development. The Inner Harbour is now a treasured part of the historic port city of Fremantle, one of the best-preserved nineteenth-century port cities in the world. This chapter traces the economic evolution of the Port of Fremantle and casts light on the processes of port renewal and transformation in an age of globalisation. Since its establishment in the nineteenth century, the port has been forced to adjust to major global, national and regional changes in trade, shipping and cargo-handling technology. These changes included, in the nineteenth century, the replacement of sailing ships by steamships; in the first half of the twentieth century, the development of bulk-handling systems for liquid and dry cargoes; and, since the Second World War, the development of large bulk carriers and the mechanisation of general cargo handling. ln the late 1960s containerisation transformed the handling of general cargoes from a manual activity; requiring a large labour force to a capital-intensive one requiring minimal labour, which had immense implications for both the physical and human shape of ports. All these changes have been reflected in varying degrees in the history of the port and the city of Fremantle and, indeed, Western Australia as a whole. This chapter discusses the major landmarks and issues in the evolution of the port: first, the opening of the Inner Harbour in the late nineteenth century second, early nineteenth-century port development; third, the opening of the Outer Harbour (at Kwinana, 20 kilometres south of Fremantle) in the mid-1950s; fourth, the container revolution of the late 1960s; and finally, the relationship between the port and the historic city in which it has operated continuously since 1829 as an integral part of the life of the city. The chapter considers whether changes in the latter relationship may eventually transform the Inner Harbour from a working port to a recreational centre. In order to better understand the port's development phases it commences with a brief overview of the growth of trade and shipping.

Australia and New Zealand are both island nations, sharing political, economic and cultural traditions, although there are major differences in land area and in the scale of their economies. In 2007 Australia's population reached 21 million, about five times larger than New Zealand's. Abundant primary resources and modem transport connections have helped both countries become 'the world's champions in challenging the tyranny of distance' (Withers, 2007, p. 21). Their port systems have longstanding maritime trade connections that were strengthened by the Closer Economic Relations Trade Agreement of 1983 (Tull, 2006). In the late 1980s New Zealand broke with the long tradition of state regulation of ports and centralised control of waterfront labour by embarking on a major programme of port reform and privatisation (Reveley, 2003). As was the case in the 1890s, when New Zealand pioneered social reform and other state initiatives later adopted in Australia (Wilkes, 1993), Australia quickly followed suit with a raft of measures intended to increase the efficiency of its ports (Tull and Reveley, 2001).