Australia's top companies are slowly drifting away from the country's single stock exchange: to London, Singapore and Rotterdam, leaving investors in Australia's market to fret that Australia may come to share the status of its near neighbour New Zealand as a 'branch-office economy'.

Formerly reserved as a term of derision by bankers and investors in Sydney for more remote Australian state capitals, in 2001 Australia's top exchange officials now wonder whether the country's whole capital market shares the same fate.