Special Reports

The high Australian dollar is generally considered bad news for business, but some of the recent evidence suggests it is not that simple.

BANKS and risk management groups say the Australian dollar’s volatility makes it a good time for businesses to start using hedging instruments to protect against foreign exchange risk.

Mandurah’s developers are still waiting for the market to turn after three hard years.

THE property market around Mandurah may be in the doldrums, but major land developers have taken the breathing space provided by the global financial crisis to prepare for the next wave of growth in the sector.

THERE are plenty of residential developments that have a golf course as their focal point – and the Mandurah area has its fair share.

Colin Barnett is riding high and consistently outpacing Canberra. But he faces some major challenges to maintain his trajectory.

ANKETELL is a location on the Pilbara coast few Western Australians could pinpoint.

LAST week’s standoff between the federal and state governments over mining royalties overshadowed the news from Shell that it had given the green light to its $11 billion Prelude floating LNG project.

LAST month, a heavyweight crowd attended the opening of an exhibition of Jeffrey Smart’s work at the new high rise on the Bishop’s See site.

SERCO is a company that Western Australians are becoming increasingly familiar with, since it became preferred tenderer to supply non-medical services to the giant Fiona Stanley Hospital project rising near the Kwinana Freeway at Murdoch.

DON Voelte’s departure from Woodside comes at a time when the business face of Perth is changing rapidly, and quite literally.

HE’S chairman of the East Perth Redevelopment Authority and heads up the Perth Waterfront Taskforce, but don’t call Stuart Hicks powerful; instead, he says, it’s influence he’s wielding to build a 21st century face for the city.

LEIGHTON Holdings subsidiaries Leighton Contractors and John Holland are two of Australia’s major construction contractors, but they are not names normally associated with engineering work on LNG projects.

THE resources sector anticipates Enterprise Migration Agreements will enable more than 30 large projects to overcome the labour shortages that threaten their viability.

New figures have shed light on the enormous scale of the emerging oil and gas boom, for both investment and employment.

The term ‘sustainability’ is often bandied about in various industries; for wineries, the context of the word has morphed to include organic production, efficient and environmentally conscious viticultural practices and business sustainability for the mar

I WONDER if wine shows have lost their relevance.

THE long, hot summer may have lingered a bit long for residents of the South West, but for the state’s wine industry it meant an early harvest and what looks to be another good vintage.

The wine industry is copping it from all angles, Emily Morgan reports.

The emergence of cloud computing and the growth of data centres are the buzz topics in the IT sector, but what do these trends really mean?

DATA centres are a long-established feature of the IT landscape, yet during the past year there has been unprecedented activity in this sector and the promise of more to come.

No matter what Perth’s professional sporting outfits do on or off the park, it’s the quality of the venue that dictates the pace of their financial growth.

PERTH Glory could hardly have been more optimistic ahead of the 2010-11 season.

AFTER consecutive years of financial losses and a team that’s struggling on the pitch, Western Force chief executive Vern Reid is concerned Perth’s rugby community may be losing patience.

A WOODEN spoon didn’t stop West Coast Eagles fans from opening their wallets during the past year, but it seemed to stop them dead in their tracks at the turnstiles.

THE on-field (and off-field) dramas of the high-profile football codes may dominate the mainstream media’s attention, but there continues to be community and business support for mass-participation sports such as netball, surfing and tennis.

WITH a move to a funky new venue just around the corner, and the team firmly entrenched as a perennial finals contender, it’s hard to wipe the smile from Perth Wildcats chief executive Nick Marvin’s face.

THESE days, it seems it is not enough to be entertained purely by top-class sports people displaying amazing athletic feats as they pit their well-honed skills against rivals.

AMONG the 3,400 delegates at the recent Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Asso-ciation annual conference in Perth was lawyer Paul Griffin.

THE arrival of international players in the Perth legal scene has been a talking point for more than a year, and remains a big issue in the sector.

Women lawyers in Western Australia are calling for employers to put an end to the inflexible work hours, lack of promotion and recognition and pay inequalities that cause many women to exit the legal profession.

IF you took away the names of the leading law firms in Perth and focused on the numbers of lawyers, it would be hard to believe that the legal sector has participated in the dramatic changes in the Western Australian economy during the past decade.