The structural changes described in the last three chapters also affected the geographic distribution of people, industries and wealth in Australia. Such geographic changes have been a historical part of Australian economic development, but globalisation has induced new configurations.

The only economies which don't change are those which are stagnant. This is a characteristic which some authorities have attributed to imperial-bureaucratic economies like late classical Rome or the pre-modern Chinese Empire. Wittfogel and Marx appeared to believe that the oriental despotisms exhibited this feature as long as the central power controlled the supply of water. It was also long thought that hunter-gatherer societies maintained a static relationship with their natural environment. Modern scholarship questions these interpretations. Technological innovation and economic progress continued in both the Roman and Chinese Empires, though in their later phases at a speed insufficient to maintain their military superiority over their external opponents. There is now enough evidence to conclude that in the naturally more abundant regions of Australia, even in that most isolated of human civilisations, the Aboriginal people were undertaking reasonably permanent settlements, the first step on the progress to agricultural economy. Progress and change are probably integral features of the human condition.

It is even more certain that capitalist economies cannot remain stagnant for any period of time. On the contrary, an economy driven by the market mechanism is in a continual process of change as the individuals within it are given the freedom to adjust their desires or market demands, invent new products or technologies, or undertake to distribute them differendy to the market.