“Feudal Barons Extracting Tribute”: Narratives of Market Power in the Australian Retail Property Sector during the 1980s

Abstract

This article analyzes the ways that shopping center tenants deployed narratives to encourage government intervention in the Australian retail property sector during the 1980s. Tenants claimed that landlords were abusing their market power through a range of egregious and exploitative practices. Landlords responded with stories of their own, claiming that amateurish retailers were using isolated cases to make broad generalizations about the industry as a whole. Politicians retold retailers’ stories in Parliament, championed small business enterprise as a driver of economic growth, and produced retail leasing legislation aimed at protecting shopping center tenants. In the process, established conceptions of shopping centers were inverted. In the 1960s and 1970s they were seen as bastions of capitalist enterprise constructed by nation-building visionaries. Through stories, retailers captured the cultural legitimacy of entrepreneurship from their landlords, who were characterized as feudal barons blocking the free operation of markets they controlled. Exploring these developments offers new insights into the relational dynamics of preplanned retail environments, expands our understanding of postwar Australian retail history, and contributes to a growing historiography on the role of narrative in business history.

Introduction

Complaints about shopping center leases began to emerge in Australia in the late 1970s. This coincided with the consolidation of shopping centers as the country’s dominant retail form. ¹ Retail tenants and their state-based trade associations accused retail landlords of abusing market power to impose unreasonable rents and onerous conditions. These associations were often generalist organizations, having evolved out of smaller groups representing sectional retail interests, and now lobbied on behalf of a wide range of retailers, from independent operators through to national chains. Landlords, represented by Building Owners’ Management Associations (BOMA) nationally and in each Australian state, argued in contrast, that a loud minority of poorly performing business operators drove complaints. Politicians proved receptive to the claims being put forward by retailers, instituting inquiries and enacting protections for tenants under the legislative jurisdiction of Australian states. Applying a discursive lens to this process demonstrates how narratives were deployed in a struggle for legitimacy between retail tenants and landlords as each sought to shape government responses to an increasingly fractious commercial relationship. Doing so follows Per Hansen’s approach of “moving focus from whether narratives are true or false to narratives’ origins and effects… [to] increase our understanding.” ²

This article examines the industry trade journal, Inside Retailing, that contained content generated by retailers and retail trade associations, retail property firms and BOMA, and journalists and editors. It begins with an outline of the historical development of shopping centers in Australia before examining the emergence of complaints about tenant mistreatment in the late 1970s. It charts the ways in which isolated complaints became collated in the public sphere, largely through publication in trade journals such as Inside Retailing, and how through repetition and “persistent organisation by persistent people,” ³ these stories were amplified and transmitted. This produced the thematic elements of a story about abuses of market power: landlords benefited from asymmetries of information and often misled tenants during leasing negotiations; their executives frequently acted poorly, imposing onerous, expensive, and unreasonable conditions on retailers; and their privileged market position allowed them to charge exorbitant and ever-increasing rents.

The stories told through trade journals ran in parallel and intersected with direct dialogue between retailers, trade associations, landlords, and politicians. Under a process that Nikolas Rose has termed ‘Advanced liberalism’ the latter proved willing to intervene to ensure market competition was maintained. ⁴ Appealing to this policy instinct, retail trade associations sent petitions signed by hundreds of retailers to parliamentarians. ⁵ They encouraged specialty retail tenants to contact members of Parliament with stories about their experiences. Retail chains also made direct representations to government ministers seeking support. ⁶ Politicians selectively vocalized this correspondence in Parliament, adding their own rhetorical flourishes to produce “quite hair-raising” accounts of the tenant experience. ⁷ The trade press reported their speeches, producing a cycle of telling and retelling. This article thus demonstrates the ways that narratives were deployed to influence legislative intervention in the market, but also how they evolved during the 1980s: stories about egregious misconduct became less common; complaints about high rents turned into a broader story about total occupancy costs and how these hampered the entrepreneurial ambitions of small businesses; and a broader discussion emerged about the dynamic between interventionist legislation and the free operation of the market.

Historiographical Context

Academic research about Australian retail leases has been largely concerned with measuring the profitability of contracts or informing stakeholders of their legal obligations under Acts of State Parliaments. ⁸ Literature elsewhere has tended to focus on optimal forms of leases, ⁹ the implications of leasing models for landlords, ¹⁰ the relationship between the customer-generating role of anchor stores and their rental levels, ¹¹ broad institutional and industry analysis, ¹² and the ways that lease structures incentivize retail activity. ¹³ The relationship between retail tenants and landlords has also been examined, particularly in markets such as the United Kingdom, where planning regimes have exerted constraints on development. ¹⁴ In such contexts, the “conflicting pressures” faced by landlords and tenants have come into stark relief. ¹⁵ In the United States, in contrast, a laissez-faire approach to planning produced overdevelopment and stronger bargaining positions for tenants. This appears to have generated less conflict about leasing conditions and may explain the dearth of historical analysis about small retailers in American malls. ¹⁶ But even in countries such as Australia, where leasing has been a highly vexed public issue, historians have had little to say about the experiences of specialty retailers. ¹⁷ This article addresses this gap.

It also contributes to a burgeoning interest in narrative among business historians. The origins of this intellectual turn date back to the 1960s, when scholars began grappling with the idea that narrative was the archetypal mode of writing employed by historians to explain the past. Subsequent scholarship emphasized the connection between narrative and human action and expanded understanding of the ways that human beings constructed stories to create meaning. ¹⁸ This was part of a broader rise of cultural history ¹⁹ and led to business scholars such as Kenneth Lipartito calling for cultural approaches to be applied to business history topics. ²⁰ Ronald and Kroeze and Sjoerd Keulen argue that while the more radical aspects of cultural history and the linguistic turn such as deconstructivism failed to take hold among business historians, narrative has gradually proved appealing. ²¹ From the early 2000s, numerous business historians incorporated studies of narrative into their analysis of firms, industries, and organizations. ²² Despite this promise, however, as well as a recent special edition of Business History that brought narrative to the fore, the editors of that special edition noted that narrative remained underutilized by business historians. ²³ This suggests ongoing opportunities for exploration. ²⁴

Andrew Popp and Susanna Fellman argue that “the narratives told about business are important lenses through which interpretations and understandings are reached and from which actions arise.” ²⁵ They note this in the context of business history writing, but it applies equally to firms and industries themselves. Christopher Fenton and Ann Langley, for example, suggest that narrative provides an avenue for understanding organizational strategy and that it can be used by firms to enable and constrain the activities of actors within them. ²⁶ Indeed, Andrew Brown and Edmund Thompson argue that “storytelling is a vital strategy practice,” ²⁷ while Buchanan and Dawson note that “narratives have causal functions and intent, in seeking not only to shape understanding of past events, but also in seeking to shape trajectories of change into the future.” ²⁸ Pursuing a related line of argument, Timothy Kuhn proposes a “communicative theory of the firm,” in which “textually mediated coordination and control” is deployed to generate stakeholder consent and shape the trajectory of the firm. ²⁹ This article expands the frame of such analysis from individual firms to an industry-level account of multiple stakeholders with competing, conflicting, overlapping, and mutual interests.

Inside Retailing, which was “privately-circulated each week for manufacturing and retail management,” is an invaluable source for this study. ³⁰ The size of its readership is unclear, but it was distributed nationally and catered to a wide section of the retail industry with articles of relevance to independent retailers, owners of medium-sized firms, and executives of national chains. The journal reported on all matters concerning retailing across the country, with editors located in each of the largest state capital cities. The vast majority of stories cited in this article come from comments or notes submitted by retailers, submissions from retail trade associations, or from articles by editorial staff based on interviews with retailers and retail property executives. Articles tended to be relatively brief, usually comprising less than a couple of hundred words. Such story fragments and snippets have become recognized as important narratorial objects: stories do not need to be “complete, whole or ‘grand’” to produce valuable historical evidence. ³¹ Indeed the gathering of story fragments through systematic research can help reconstruct the lives and experiences of non-elite historical actors. ³² Furthermore, recognizing these actors as “co-tellers” of small, interlinked stories demonstrates a co-creation process, with narrative structures evolving through “negotiation by interlocutors in the course of a story’s telling.” ³³ Inside Retailing provided a platform for this process by publishing hundreds of micro-stories alongside less frequent, lengthier articles drawn from conference presentations or prepared by individual retailers and executives. There were few editorials, with most material presented as reportage or as the views of contributors. The hands of editorial staff, however, were pervasive, selecting, collating, and summarizing submitted material. They exhibited a consistent willingness to document the views of retail tenants, but also sought out interviews and perspectives from the retail property sector. This produced an almost continual written dialogue between retailers and their landlords in its pages during the 1980s, as participants engaged in narrative co-creation processes to protect and promote their interests.

Historical Context: The Emergence and Growth of the Shopping Center Industry in Australia

Shopping centers were introduced to Australia in the late 1950s as vehicles for department stores and supermarket chains to access increasingly affluent and mobile populations in rapidly growing suburban areas. ³⁴ These anchor stores were joined by numerous other smaller department stores, grocers, hardware stores, clothing and footwear chains, specialty traders, and food retailers. ³⁵ The media promoted shopping centers as exemplars of capitalist modernity; politicians lauded the “rock courage” of developer entrepreneurs. ³⁶ In 1966, New South Wales premier, Robin Askin, described Bankstown Square as “private enterprise at its best”; a building that would “help keep New South Wales as the leading State in Australia.” ³⁷ Consumer adoption of shopping centers was uneven, but the logistical advantages of parking lots, prominent anchor stores, curated tenancy mixes, cohesive environments under the control of unified management and air-conditioning proved compelling. ³⁸ Within 20 years, retail property development had become an industry in its own right. ³⁹ By 1970, there were approximately 150 shopping centers in Australia, including 30 regional centers, 36 community centers, and 84 neighborhood centers (Table 1) – a tripartite hierarchy reflecting the size and function of shopping centers that was adapted, along with the shopping center form itself, from the United States. Complaints about shopping center leases thus emerged out of a still maturing industry: its rapid growth attracted numerous new firms, while established retail chains experienced steep learning curves as they introduced property development divisions. In the early 1980s, shopping center management was not yet professionalized; there were few standardized operating procedures. ⁴⁰

Table 1. Australian shopping centers, average size, and number of specialty shops: 1970, 1995

Modern Merchandising Methods, Australian Shopping Centres; BOMA, Shopping Centre Directory N.S.W., Queensland, South Australia, Victoria, and Western Australia (1995).

Questions about the impact of shopping centers had been raised earlier, ⁴¹ but it took until the late 1970s for their financial and operational form to mature and the implications of this to manifest. Traditional retail involved individual ownership of sites, whether by retailers themselves or landlords renting to tenants. Shopping centers coalesced control of entire retail environments under unified management that set the rules and costs of occupation. Retailers benefited from the customer traffic that shopping centers generated through their logistical advantages and convenience, but ceded degrees of autonomy over their business operations and could not easily change their locations at the conclusion of leases. Their relationship with landlords was one of mutual dependence, but conflict emerged as power differentials between them became more firmly established. ⁴²

During the 1980s, shopping centers became the main generators of customer shopping traffic in most suburbs and regional towns. This was particularly the case for certain product categories such as fashion. ⁴³ As a result, many traditional high street shopping precincts entered a period of decline. ⁴⁴ Australian planning regimes also protected shopping centers from new competition through zoning regimes that limited development to specific geographic locations. This created strong competition for scarce shopping center sites that increased their cost and incentivized developers to extract more value from the retail environments they established. ⁴⁵ In this context, rents extracted from specialty retailers became increasingly important contributors to the financial performance of centers and the capital value of retail property assets. ⁴⁶

This occurred at the same time as the Australian specialty retail sector was expanding. A number of specialty chains used shopping centers to expand their operations, but the sector was predominantly composed of independent, small-scale operators. ⁴⁷ Many took up locations in shopping centers. Industry surveys with landlords undertaken in 1970 and 1995 provide reasonably accurate, though self-reported, data on this growth (Table 1). ⁴⁸ They show that there was an enormous increase in the number of shopping centers of all types, particularly convenience-oriented neighborhood centers. There was also a significant increase in the average number of shops housed in midsized and large shopping centers. Incomplete industry data collated between these surveys suggest that these developments were incremental in the 1970s and accelerated during the 1980s, when redevelopment projects to expand existing sites became a major area of growth for the industry. ⁴⁹ In this environment, a range of behaviors and practices spread that produced adverse outcomes for tenants, many of which were ill-equipped to respond through negotiation or legal channels.

Stories About Power and Exploitation

As shopping centers became more powerful in retail geographies, retail trade associations fielded a growing correspondence from aggrieved tenants. A common early complaint concerned the provision of misleading information during leasing negotiations. In the early 1980s, retail trade associations, small retailers, and retail chains inundated Inside Retailing with unsolicited missives arguing that “all the promises” landlords made about turnover estimates, the presence of competing businesses, and projections of profitability were lures that simply “never came true.” ⁵⁰ These negotiations began as private conversations between individual retailers and their landlords but were interpreted and made public by aggrieved tenants. In one survey, 95 percent of tenants reported receiving factually incorrect information before signing their leases. ⁵¹ The secretary of the Small Business Association of Victoria argued that “when some of the leasing smooth-talkers bamboozle them on conditions, many have no idea what they are letting themselves in for.” ⁵²

Tenants argued that the odds were stacked against them because market power and asymmetries of information produced an environment that encouraged egregious and even unconscionable operating practices by landlords. ⁵³ Many complained bitterly about the lack of transparency concerning “outgoings,” which were contributions by tenants to the expenses landlords accrued through operating, maintaining and owning a shopping center. ⁵⁴ One retail consultant wrote to Inside Retailing in 1980 claiming that promotional outgoings were being spent on public relations lunches, alcohol, and entertainment that brought no productive improvements to center trade. ⁵⁵ In an interview in 1982, the legal officer for the Retail Traders’ Association of New South Wales described outgoings as “grey areas” and the situation where retailers could be denied the total understanding of what they were being billed as “absurd.” “Tenants,” he said, “had every reason to wonder whether the landlord was buying advertising, insurance, cleaning and so forth to best advantage, and whether he, the tenant, …[was] getting [the] full benefit of any special deals.” ⁵⁶ Retailers contacted Inside Retailing in the early 1980s accusing landlords of buying electricity in bulk and selling it on to tenants at a substantial profit. ⁵⁷ They also reported demands for other kinds of payments. This included requests for “key money” of up to A$60,000 to secure a lease. ⁵⁸ Two Melbourne retailers suggested that managers sometimes extracted key money that was never passed onto landlords, while other landlords knew of such practices but turned “a blind eye.” ⁵⁹

Tenants argued that landlords were unfairly taxing their entrepreneurial endeavors. Several told Inside Retailing that landlords demanded a percentage of “goodwill” when they sold their businesses. ⁶⁰ Many retail leases also contained turnover clauses. These required payments on top of base rents that were calculated as a percentage of sales over a designated threshold. In an interview in 1980, the managing director of the Victorian Chamber of Commerce described this as a “surcharge on success” that meant retailers were taking on “a silent partner in the form of the developer.” ⁶¹ To facilitate the collection of turnover rent, tenants were obliged to provide landlords with their sales figures, further extending the information disparity between the parties. With no automatic right of renewal at the conclusion of their leases, tenants looking to continue their operations faced robust negotiations with leasing executives who held intimate knowledge of their businesses. Moreover, there was considerable variation in the amount of rent charged per square meter depending on the size and market power of the retailer, leading some smaller operators to claim in self-published newsletters cited in Inside Retailing that they were “subsidising ‘the big boys.’” ⁶²

By 1982, the Building Owners and Management Associations at the state and federal levels (BOMA), which represented the shopping center industry, was becoming “as worried as hell” about the “horrendous” prospect of legislative regulation of shopping center leases. ⁶³ The coordinated efforts of state-based retail associations forced BOMA to develop its own counter-narratives. Retail property executives contacted Inside Retailing or made themselves available for interviews to declare that they were tired of being labeled “cut-throats, thieves and robbers” and that tenant complaints were “more emotional than logical.” ⁶⁴ They claimed in interviews that any problems that did exist were idiosyncratic rather than systemic, and were being generalized into an inaccurate and negative characterization of the retail property industry as a whole. ⁶⁵ They suggested that a more common source of problems was the “inability or unwillingness of the tenant to read and understand the [lease] document prior to signing it.” ⁶⁶ A representative of Westfield, one of the country’s largest developers, declared that legislation would only prop up businesspeople who had “failed to examine their lease obligations” or taken on “retail assignments for which they were hopelessly inexperienced.” ⁶⁷ Through unsolicited submissions to Inside Retailing, BOMA argued that interventionist legislation would act to “defer investment and development” and drive a wedge between the vast majority of landlords and tenants who were capable of working constructively together. ⁶⁸

Retailing lobby groups, however, continued to press for change. By the middle of the decade, some were suggesting that developers held a form of monopoly power. The idea that in a particular area, a single landlord might effectively control all the retail sites suitable for a particular type of business was first voiced in Queensland in 1983. ⁶⁹ A year later, the New South Wales Retailer Traders Association (NSWRTA) prosecuted the argument in more depth. In a report sent to Inside Retailing, it declared that “normal market forces do not operate, because there is no direct competition; there is only one seller and many buyers” for retail sites. ⁷⁰ Inside Retailing later summarized a submission to the Queensland minister for industry, small business and technology that argued: “Rents in shopping centers are increasing as the result of a monopoly, or series of monopolies, with the tenants being the captive market of the landlord holding the monopoly power. There is no competition between landlords and no free market.” ⁷¹

Translating Narratives into Political Action

The stories retailers told about shopping centers echoed in a policy environment influenced by an international discourse about “enterprise culture,” which valorized the entrepreneurial endeavors of small businesses as a new avenue of growth in developed economies. ⁷² As large-scale manufacturing declined, the small business sector became recognized as a broad-based distributor of innovation, enterprise, and wealth, as well as an important generator of employment. ⁷³ From the mid-1970s onward, small business attracted widespread government support in Australia at both state and federal levels. ⁷⁴ Politicians across the country expressed a commitment to small business in election platforms and backed this up with inquiries, policy, small business departments, and advisory bureaus once elected. ⁷⁵ In 1980, Victorian Liberal member of Parliament D. K. Hayward argued that small business was “critically important” for his state, because “firstly, it tends to be innovative and enterprising. Secondly, it is collectively the largest employer in Victoria and, thirdly, it is widely based and broadly owned and therefore the benefits from growth can be more easily and quickly distributed throughout the community.” ⁷⁶ In Queensland, the minister for small business of the ruling conservative National Party, M. J. Ahern, declared that: “no Government can hope to sponsor recovery without a healthy small business sector. Small-businessmen pay the most taxes in the community and they also employ the most people.” ⁷⁷ One of his colleagues declared there was “no doubt that the small business community in any Western society is the backbone of the economic and social stability of a country.” ⁷⁸

Government support for the sector coincided with an emerging international belief in market liberalization and aligned with a policy approach that Nikolas Rose has termed “advanced liberal” governance. This meant organizing national policy to “create and sustain the [perceived] central elements of economic well-being such as the enterprise form and competition.” ⁷⁹ While this frequently meant a smaller hand for government, it could also require active intervention “to create the organizational and subjective conditions for entrepreneurship.” ⁸⁰ Martin Painter argues that in Australia, this often involved a reactive and pragmatic approach to solving problems in order to unleash market forces and stimulate economic activity. ⁸¹ In this environment, the way that retail tenancy issues were framed became of significant consequence. ⁸² By positioning leasing inequities as systemic and structural abuses of market power and a constraint on the dynamism of small business, retailers opened a path to legislative intervention despite a broader deregulatory policy current.

Christopher Atkinson notes that politicians use rhetoric “to tell the story of why certain policies are necessary.” ⁸³ In debates about retail leases, the voices of retailers provided the narratorial spine for arguments that played out in parliaments across Australia. In these accounts, small business operated as an abstract term to which symbolic values such as hard work, enterprise, and integrity were attached. These values were similar to characteristics typically attached to entrepreneurs such as “bravery, ambition, success, autonomy and self-sufficiency.” ⁸⁴ The firms that had built the shopping center industry in Australia had once been described as the embodiment of such values, but now faced a substantial loss of cultural capital because of the damaging stories being voiced by tenants. BOMA’s account of the situation held some purchase but could not erase the image of large corporate landlords exploiting small businesspeople. The idea that “big business” was winning over “the legitimate interests of small business” became pervasive. ⁸⁵

Landlords did receive qualified support from some free-market Liberal Party politicians. They noted that planning regimes were responsible for creating retail hierarchies in particular locations, and landlords could not be blamed for this constraint on retail supply. Contracts, too, they pointed out, were freely entered into, and prospective tenants were ill-advised if they did not read their leases thoroughly. ⁸⁶ However, even they were frequently persuaded that there was a significant problem in the sector. Most alarming was the idea that market power was being deployed to inhibit the entrepreneurial drive of small business. In Victoria, one Liberal noted that using turnover clauses to demand a “share of the [tenant’s] profit” was an action “unconscionable in this society.” He called for a “clamp down on those people who are exploiting the little tenant and the little shopkeeper, the backbone of private enterprise, and the Liberal Party.” ⁸⁷ In South Australia’s Parliament, a self-described “free-marketer” read extensively from a retail pharmacy journal article entitled “Big Landlords Trying to Crush Small Tenants.” He argued that “unusual developments in the [retail] market place”—that is, the rapid growth of the preplanned shopping center operating under unified ownership as the dominant retail trading environment—required the introduction of controls to avoid a “tragedy for many people” ⁸⁸ Such emotive language directly reflected the narratorial power of tenants’ stories that were being used to galvanize action. As one Queensland Liberal argued in 1983, “It is important that when this Parliament comes to decide about the future of many small businessmen in this State we should listen to what they say.” ⁸⁹ Other Liberals called for some intervention, so long as it was “not taken too far,” ⁹⁰ in order to encourage “development and enterprise” and “enable small business to be given reasonable opportunities to participate in the market-place.” ⁹¹

Center-left Labor politicians, as well as traditionalist, National Party conservatives tended to reiterate the claims of tenants more fully and to push more strongly for legislative regulation. ⁹² Their calls for action explicitly referenced the narrative put forward by tenants that small business was suffering at the hands of big landlords. ⁹³ One Queensland National Party member declared that “onerous practices were … [being] instigated by major corporations … [on] hard-working small business retailers.” ⁹⁴ A Labor counterpart suggested that the shopping center model placed an “unfair burden on small business.” ⁹⁵ In Western Australia, the Labor Party’s minister for small business was convinced that there were “serious and unresolved conflicts … between retail shop owners and tenants [that worked] … against the commercial interests of the small business sector.” ⁹⁶ To illustrate the “naked exploitation” of tenants, MPs recited their stories at length, including personal circumstances and the emotional and financial toll individuals had experienced in their dealings with landlords. ⁹⁷ In almost all cited examples, small tenants with promising business models were undone by the greed, trickery, or unscrupulousness of landlords. ⁹⁸ Stories about entrepreneurial journeys leading to “heartbreak” suggested that second-class business citizens were being stymied by structural forces outside of their control. One sympathetic politician suggested that small business operators simply did not have the time to improve their management skills and that they were “intuitive business operators … [reliant] on their judgment and rule-of-thumb business methods.” ⁹⁹ A Victorian Labor MP citing stories of disgruntled retailers was asked whether these tenants had sought advice before signing their leases. He admitted they had not, but echoed the retailer line, declaring that they “were conned by a smart, smooth-talking real estate agent or developer.” ¹⁰⁰

The practice of charging percentage rents was again used to highlight the injustices at play and the dangers posed to small business enterprise: by “tapping the entrepreneurial skills” of individuals, landlords inhibited innovation and constrained growth. ¹⁰¹ Some politicians were moved to present historical analogies. The small business community, declared one, was “unprotected from the demands of rapacious landlords … [locked into] the type of contract that existed in the past between the lord of the manor and the peasant.” ¹⁰² Another described the modern shopkeeper as “virtually a serf … [working] from dawn to dusk.” ¹⁰³ During parliamentary debates in Queensland, landlords were compared to “feudal barons extracting tribute.” The only difference, a Labor member claimed, was that “the serfs had at least one day to themselves and one day for prayer. The [shopping center] landlords [in contrast] want the tenants to work seven days a week to provide more grist for the mills.” ¹⁰⁴ In Queensland, BOMA was chastised for recommending “arbitration where the tenant must refer the problems to the landlord’s body—Caesar unto Caesar, that is what it is!,” one MP derided. ¹⁰⁵ These highly unfavorable comparisons with preindustrial economic hierarchies characterized Australian retail property owners as exploitative, rent-seeking firms operating outside of the market. They also reinforced the impression that there were systemic problems in the sector, encouraging the view that regulatory intervention was required to restore competition and facilitate the flow of market forces.

Retail tenancy legislation was introduced in Queensland (1984), South Australia (1985), Western Australia (1985), Victoria (1986), and New South Wales (1994). This generally reduced the number of complaints about misinformation and egregious behavior, which were outlawed, but could not solve the perennial question of rents. Moreover, retailers and their trade associations began reflecting on the failure of retail tenancy legislation to solve the power imbalances that they believed still defined the industry. In an interview with Inside Retailing in 1984, the executive director of the Queensland Retail Association declared that “we thought that the new Retail Shop Leases Act might bring about a more reasonable attitude by landlords, but there is still a tendency to whack up rents by tremendous amounts and it is occurring right throughout Australia.” ¹⁰⁶ A year later he contacted Inside Retailing, describing rent reviews as “horrific” for tenants, and suggested that landlords were finding ways to circumvent the Queensland Act. ¹⁰⁷

Connecting Evidence, Stories, and Stakeholders

In an effort to document ongoing problems, retail trade associations began conducting surveys with their members, producing reports that they sent to journals like Inside Retailing. ¹⁰⁸ Claims of rental increases in excess of 20 percent per annum were frequent. ¹⁰⁹ Some reports declared that annual rent hikes of 40 percent of more were common. ¹¹⁰ A group of retailers in Queensland claimed in 1985 that their rents had jumped more than 90 percent over a twelve-month period. ¹¹¹ These reports rarely indicated survey methodology and relied on self-reported figures, but toward the end of the decade, retail property consultants and leasing agents also began documenting rent increases, releasing reports containing more specific data. ¹¹² In 1988, for example, Inside Retailing summarized a report by real estate agents Hillier Parker that claimed rents for regional shopping centers over the previous twelve months had grown by 29 percent in Sydney, 20 percent in Melbourne, and 33 percent in Perth. ¹¹³

Reports from such firms represented a more organized and professional approach to the question of shopping center leases. Retail trade associations also evolved, establishing state-based tenants’ associations in the mid-1980s to concentrate on issues relating to retail property occupancy. In 1988, a national body, the Shopping Centre Tenants’ Association of Australia (SCTA) was formed to publicize ongoing issues, mediate disputes between tenants and landlords, negotiate with BOMA, coordinate lobbying efforts with state and federal governments, and push for amendments to retail tenancy legislation. ¹¹⁴ Other retail trade groups, like the Pharmacy Guild of Australia and the Hardware Association of New South Wales also became involved, submitting reports and providing interviews to publicize the leasing conditions of their members. ¹¹⁵

These public relations efforts were supplemented by increasingly vocal chain stores that sought to “explain their dilemma to the range of people who directly influence their operations [including] … governments and landlords.” ¹¹⁶ They provided reports and interviews to demonstrate the ways in which trading environments negatively impacted their operational capacities and tried to connect their problems to the concerns of other stakeholders. This included, for a short time, an argument that high retail occupancy costs were having an inflationary impact on retail prices. ¹¹⁷ Correspondence on this issue was frequently submitted to the Prices Surveillance Authority (PSA), which had been established by the federal government in 1984 to limit the influence of market power in determining prices. ¹¹⁸ Chain-store executives also pushed this line in interviews, suggesting that while retailers faced pressure from governments to control price rises, landlords escaped any sort of scrutiny about their contribution to the problem. ¹¹⁹ However, this argument failed to gain support from the PSA, which claimed there was sufficient competition in the supply of retail space to prevent noncompetitive profit-taking by the industry—although it did acknowledge that this might occur in specific locations. ¹²⁰

In a more sustained narratorial shift, the question of rents began to evolve into a broader discussion about the total occupancy cost of operating within shopping centers. In 1988, Inside Retailing summarized an address by Bruce Gregory, operations manager of the national chain, Katies Fashions. Gregory itemized the operating costs of a hypothetical retailer under seven “non-controllables” such as rent and outgoings and twenty-seven “controllables” such as advertising and wages, producing an “almost spot-on” estimate of a mere 2.9 percent net profit. Given these figures, he said, the average shopping center tenant faced an “occupancy crisis.” ¹²¹ A few months later, Inside Retailing reproduced an address to the Eleventh World Congress of Retailers, held in Australia, by chairman and managing director of the Williams the Shoemen chain, Barry Williams. Suggesting a degree of coordination, Williams also entitled his talk, “The Occupancy Crisis.” Charting a brief history of the industry, Williams argued that for retailers, “the cost of occupancy as a percentage of sales … more than doubled from about 5% to 6% in 1960 to 12% to 15% in 1988 … [and it was now] not uncommon to find retailers paying occupancy charges in excess of 20% of sales.” ¹²²

The production, collation, and citation of specific figures in presentations and reports by chains and retail trade associations provided clarity in a debate that Williams described as a “war of words.” It also spoke to the politically sensitive question of small business dynamism by offering forms of proof about unviable trading environments for “small and medium-sized retailers.” ¹²³ Indeed, despite the increased involvement of national chains in the debate, the central characters in stories about the ill effects of landlords’ market power remained “small businessmen [who were] battling to survive … the crippling effects … of rent increases.” ¹²⁴ (Small businesswomen were never mentioned.) The continued prosecution of this narrative formed a central theme in ongoing lobbying efforts for further legislative intervention in the Australian retail leasing market. Indeed, in 1997, a federal government inquiry into fair trading that examined retail property practices focused specifically on “unfair conduct by big business towards small business.” One witness to the inquiry declared that “small retailers … are bleeding to death and for most of them this inquiry is the last throw of the dice.” ¹²⁵

Conclusion

The 1980s marked the beginning but not the end of a long and heated debate about shopping center leases in Australia as well as a pivotal turn in the public representation of retail landlords. Australian retailers that might once have developed expertise in high street retail precincts, frequently began their retail careers in costly, commercially intensive shopping center environments. The customer traffic that shopping centers generated made them appealing retail destinations, but high overheads, inexperience, strong retail competition, and constraints on their business autonomy placed a great deal of stress on nascent business owners. ¹²⁶ More experienced retailers, as well as national chains, also faced steep rent increases, asymmetries of information, and limited control over their operating environments. Unable to negotiate better terms, retailers publicized their predicament through stories. They were assisted by retail trade associations, which collated and disseminated their accounts, including through retail trade journals like Inside Retailing. Retailers’ stories rendered problems in the industry visible, provided anecdotal evidence that informed lobbying and debate, attracted the attention of legislators, and tapped into broader understandings of small business and entrepreneurship to produce a powerful argument for change.

Charlotte Linde argues that “institutions and their members use narrative to remember. And in remembering … they work and rework, present and represent the past for the purposes of the present and the projection of a future.” ¹²⁷ The depiction of retail landlords as property leviathans proved compelling and colored ongoing perceptions of the shopping center form in Australia. In the 1960s and early 1970s, shopping centers had symbolized the entrepreneurial power of capitalist enterprise, as well as the country’s enthusiastic march down the path of an American-styled modernity. ¹²⁸ In the 1980s, this nation-building story was reworked by retailers into a cautionary morality tale: shopping center landlords were abusing market power, exploiting their tenants, inhibiting the entrepreneurial activity of small businesses, and impeding the free operation of the market. Through this narrative, retailers captured the cultural legitimacy of entrepreneurship from their landlords and deployed it as a highly useful rhetorical tool for producing active political intervention in their sector. ¹²⁹ The telling of stories thus helped reconfigure the regulatory framework in which shopping centers operated and, in the process, inverted their symbolic value as drivers of enterprise in postwar Australia.