Rationalising and resisting neoliberalism: The uneven geography of costs

This paper explores the relationship between public policy, geography and accounting in the context of an ongoing program of neoliberal restructuring. We present a case study of the proposed privatisation of two prisons in New South Wales, Australia, including the subsequent public debate and the finalisation of the policy, which together covers the period 2008-2010. The privatisations were justified by the New South Wales government through the use of accounting technologies and discourses which purported to demonstrate that a model of private delivery would be more cost effective than continued reliance on public ownership. Yet, despite the identical accounting rationales given by the government and the Department of Corrective Services for the privatisation of each prison, the policy outcome was to privatise only one of the prisons. We examine the resistance strategies employed by the various union and community groups opposed to the privatisations and find that they differed markedly for each prison. Quite different discourses of costs were mobilised to counter the proposed neoliberal reforms: one was based in orthodox accounting discourse, and the other in a spatially grounded discourse of costs to the community. We therefore argue that spatial factors played a crucial role in the discussion. This contributes to a potentially rich, but as yet under-examined, area of research on the relationship between geography and accounting, and of accounting's contribution to the distinct spatiality of neoliberalism.