Research relating to Australia’s urban planning and policy agenda is dominated by what happens in Australia’s five metropolitan cities. However the growth of Australia’s medium cities and the sources of this population growth, suggests an increasing importance for many medium-sized cities.

This paper investigates the hypothesis that there is a distinctive Australian approach to metropolitan planning. It does this by examining the major strategies formulated for the mainland state capital cities since the Second World War.

In recent decades outdated noise, planning and liquor laws, encroaching residential development, and the rise of more lucrative forms of entertainment for venue operators, such as poker machines, have acted singly or in combination to close many live music venues in Australia.

Using Melbourne as a case study and drawing from an international literature, this paper reviews the purposes of urban growth boundaries and their potential impacts on land prices.

This paper explores crime in Northbridge entertainment district in Perth, Western Australia and highlights how the legacy of governance can operate counter-intuitively, to foster crime precipitators, which can increase opportunities for crime.