Since the early 1990s, ideas that Sydney is a ‘global city’ have had major impacts on urban economic and social policies attempting to deal with the city’s growth. This discourse has also shaped understandings of Sydney’s role in the period of sustained national economic growth since the mid 1990s. Yet there are two implications for Sydney’s outer suburban areas. First, Australia’s version of the global city script has been remarkably silent about the suburbs. Recent ideas about Sydney’s ‘global arc’ appear to exclude or marginalise the outer west. Second, what makes Sydney global usually revolves around its role as an international node in financial flows, telecommunications, corporate decision-making and the financial and business services which support them. Although Western Sydney is one of Australia’s largest manufacturing regions, this easily disappears off the global radar.

This paper challenges these interpretations of Sydney’s outer suburban areas by exploring employment and labour market changes between 1996 and 2001.