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Rankings of the world's cities by a liveability factor have become increasingly significant in the media, among governments and city councils in the promotion of cities, as well as academics interested in understanding the impact of quantifying liveability on urban planning and the relationship of liveability indices and tourism. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

While examining characteristics of liveable cities according to some of the widely reported liveability indices, such as those produced by Mercer, Monocle magazine and the Economic Intelligence Unit (EIU), the authors provide a snapshot of Perth as a liveable city and consider liveability in relation to urban tourism, sustainability and environment. Perth's liveability ranking is discussed in terms of environmental sustainability, noting that for Perth to retain its position as one of the world's most liveable cities, consideration must be given to sustainable planning and environmental practices at policy, organisational and individual levels, placing the long-term liveability of the environment and Perth's flora and fauna at the forefront of urban, and tourism, planning.

The accessibility of nature in Perth and its surrounds, its outdoor recreational opportunities and warm climate are factors that make it unique. Developing and promoting nature-based tourism would further enhance the accessibility of nature for visitors and residents. While Perth's EIU top ten ranking is justified, its major attributes remain unrecognised by the widely used EIU liveable city assessment framework.

Moreover, the notion of a liveable city is open to contention due to the subjective nature of various assessment criteria. Liveability indices should include quantifiable environmental factors such as green space, remnant vegetation, biodiversity, air quality and unpolluted water.

This paper thus contributes to the discourse on what constitutes a liveable city, the authors emphasise that liveability is significantly related to the presence of green space and natural areas as well as the opportunity to see and interact with wildlife. Perth has such opportunities for it residents and visitors but as yet the aforementioned natural characteristics are not implicit in international measures of liveability.

This chapter is an examination of the contribution of female musicianship to the Perth metal scene, particularly in relation to the positioning of women in frontier mythology and the ways in which we might read the gothic sublime in terms of women’s experiences. While it has been recognised that Australian metal music, in general, is tied to the colonial frontier narrative, Perth’s isolation produces a particular kind of frontier narrative which can be read in relation to the gothic sublime. In this chapter, the author examines three Perth metal bands which comprise female members: Claim the Throne (featuring Jess Millea on keys and vocals), Sanzu (featuring Fatima Curley on bass) and Deadspace (featuring Shelby Jansen on bass and vocals). The author will argue that there is a motif running through Perth bands that comprise female musicians that is tied to their positioning in the Western frontier narrative and its production in relation to the gothic sublime. To do so presents one kind of way to conceptualise a metal scene on the ‘Western Front’. The author emphasises that this is not a totalising conceptualisation, rather, it is one way to suggest how context might shape women’s experiences and, perhaps more importantly for this argument, the way in which women women’s experiences and historicity in relation to the legacy of ‘frontierswomen’ inflect metal music in this scene.

“Asian” is an aggregating descriptive term commonly used in Australian media, politics and everyday speech to describe people of diverse backgrounds. The purpose of this paper is to question the extent to which “Asian” Australian residents living in Perth, Western Australia demonstrate spatial or organisational panethnic association.

The paper analyses quantitative population data from the 2011 Census using GIS to visualise the spatial residential distribution of individuals born in Asian countries and individuals with Chinese ancestry within the Perth metropolitan area. The paper further uses qualitative data drawn from fieldwork conducted in Perth to consider evidence of organisational panethnic association.

For first generation migrants there is currently little spatial or organisation evidence of “Asian” panethnic association in Perth. Migrants from different ethno-national backgrounds exhibit very different residential patterns. Incipient ethnoburbs are developing that appear to be based on ethnicity rather than panethnicity. Migrant organisation in Perth is likewise arranged primarily on the basis of ethnicity although some panethnic work is observed.

Findings indicate trends towards ethnic residential segregation. Further longitudinal research could expand upon these findings. Qualitative research could determine causes of segregation and implications of (pan)ethnic identities, and explore how individuals from Asian countries respond to the dominant linguistic aggregation of “Asians”.

This paper offers an original analysis of a common frame of reference that has received little critical attention in the Australian context. It applies the framework of Asian panethnicity developed in the USA and finds it wanting, highlighting an inconsistency between the racialised language used in Australia to describe migrants from Asia and the ways these migrants associate.

In Australia, the Foodbank of Western Australia (Foodbank WA) has a reputation for being at the forefront of health promotion. The purpose of this paper is to describe Foodbank WA's innovative food bank plus approach of incorporating healthy lifestyle initiatives (i.e. nutrition and physical activity education) into its core food bank business, so as to target priority issues such as food insecurity, poor food literacy, overweight, obesity, poor nutrition and physical inactivity.

A case study approach was utilised to explore Foodbank WA's Healthy Food for All® (HFFA) strategy. HFFA is a comprehensive state wide, school and community based strategy, including the School Breakfast Programme, Food Sensations® and Choose to Move initiatives, designed to promote healthy lifestyles to low socioeconomic and vulnerable groups – a major target group of food banks.

Since its inception in 2007, the delivery of food, education and resources has increased across all of Foodbank WA's HFFA initiatives. Evaluation results from feedback surveys demonstrate the success of these interventions to positively impact upon food security, health and wellbeing of participants.

HFFA is a unique, effective and novel strategy that addresses a number of health and nutrition issues. Food banks are well placed to deliver food literacy and healthy lifestyle initiatives. Foodbank WA's holistic approach and demonstrated success provides other food banks with a best practice model and knowledge base for the development of similar health promotion strategies and interventions.

Investors commonly use debt finance in the purchase of income‐producing properties with the aim of enhancing their return on equity. Describes how the past effects of borrowing can be assessed from property returns and loan interest rates in recent years. Methods for measuring the past consequences of financial leverage are considered and tested. Based on data from the residential property market in Perth, Western Australia between 1982 and 1994, borrowing at a variable interest rate would have shown a modest increase in return and added considerably to the volatility or risk. The impact of inflation and taxation on the benefits and risks of financial leverage is also assessed.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the interdependencies of the house price growth rates in Australian capital cities.

A vector autoregression model and variance decomposition are introduced to estimate and interpret the interdependences among the growth rates of regional house prices in Australia.

The results suggest the eight capital cities can be divided into three groups: Sydney and Melbourne; Canberra, Adelaide and Brisbane; and Hobart, Perth and Darwin.

Based on the structural vector autoregression model, this research develops an innovative interdependence analysis approach of regional house prices based on a variance decomposition method.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the service accessibility of Somali Australians suffering Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) by using both quantitative and qualitative methods.

Using Geographic Information System (GIS) and the 2011 census data a total of 19,178 people reporting Somali ancestry were mapped to SA1 level with most being in the three capital cities of original migration; Sydney, Melbourne and Perth.

Access to primary services pertinent to ASD was measured using the GIS software, some 15 per cent of these cities Somali children were within 500 m of a General practice and 89 per cent within 2,000 m. A quarter of children were within 2,000 m of a speech pathology service access point and nearly a third (31 per cent) within 2,000 m of a psychologist. Qualitative analysis found a quite negative perspective on mental illness and ASD within the community with 85 per cent of respondents reporting a “Bad” perception of ASD within the community.

Clearly, the opportunity these data provide is to develop service models targeting need and changing perspectives of ASD within an at risk community.

This is the first time in Australia that issues of service access (health) for Autism suffers and their families has been analysed in a detailed geographic manner.

The importance of story‐telling in organizational life has often been overlooked in contemporary organizational and leadership literature. Throughout history, leaders ‐ political and religious ‐ have used story‐telling as a powerful motivational tool, particularly during times of uncertainty, change and upheaval or in response to crises. This article looks at the role of story‐telling as an integral part of the human experience and at its applications in modern organizational life. The article concludes by suggesting that the art of story‐telling is still, despite recent advances in communication technologies, an essential managerial skill ‐ particularly for leaders of organizations.

Studies into ripple effects have previously focused on the interconnections between house price movements across cities over space and time. These interconnections were widely investigated in previous research using vector autoregression models. However, the effects generated from spatial information could not be captured by conventional vector autoregression models. This research aimed to incorporate spatial lags into a vector autoregression model to illustrate spatial‐temporal interconnections between house price movements across the Australian capital cities.

Geographic and demographic correlations were captured by assessing geographic distances and demographic structures between each pair of cities, respectively. Development scales of the housing market were also used to adjust spatial weights. Impulse response functions based on the estimated SpVAR model were further carried out to illustrate the ripple effects.

The results confirmed spatial correlations exist in housing price dynamics in the Australian capital cities. The spatial correlations are dependent more on the geographic rather than the demographic information.

This research investigated the spatial heterogeneity and autocorrelations of regional house prices within the context of demographic and geographic information. A spatial vector autoregression model was developed based on the demographic and geographic distance. The temporal and spatial effects on house prices in Australian capital cities were then depicted.

Housing is a composite asset comprising land and improved components varying as proportions of total value over space and time. Theory suggests land and improvements (structures) are unique goods responding differently to economic stimuli. This paper aims to test the expectation of different overall house price changes in response to variation in land and improved components.

House price dynamics are decomposed to analyse the influence of land and structure components for the city of Perth, Australia both at aggregate level and for spatially defined housing sub-regions, sample period 1995-2010.

Values of land and improvements on that land evolve differently over time and are significantly influenced by the magnitude of land leverage. The study extends previous research through extensive spatial disaggregation of a larger more detailed data set than previously used in studies of this type confirming significant variation in land leverage ratios, overall price change and growth rates for land and improvements in sub-regional markets defined by spatial criteria.

The results suggest an important role for policy development with respect to housing affordability and supply side regulation of land in large urban housing markets.

The results suggest important implications for hedonic price analysis of housing markets. The inclusion of land leverage variables in hedonic regression could remove coefficient bias associated with omitted location amenity variables.

The paper adapts methodology from previous studies but extends previous literature through detailed analysis of a large Australian housing market (Perth) enabling extensive spatial disaggregation of the sample and providing greater insight to spatial variation of land leverage than in previous studies.