‘A Fair Go All Round’: Workplace Relations in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

It is a great honour and a pleasure to be invited to deliver the Kingsley Laffer Lecture this evening. As a graduate of the Faculty of Economics (now Economics and Business) at the University of Sydney it is also something of a homecoming. I am conscious of the prominence of earlier Laffer Lecturers. These include a former Prime Minister, a member of the High Court of Australia, ACTU Presidents and numerous other distinguished persons. As Chief Executive of the Australian Industry Group, I am also very pleased to be following in the footsteps of Bert Evans, one of my predecessors and a mentor, who delivered the Laffer Lecture in 1994. I well remember that lecture. It was something of a watershed for the Ai Group (then the Metal Trades Industry Association). It marked the final capitulation of our defence of Australia’s centralised industrial relations system. The Ai Group had been a fervent supporter of this system. Our members had long experienced the damaging effects of wages leapfrogging and union campaigns for shorter hours and other improved conditions. The industrial harmony that prevailed during the accord years in the 1980s was a welcome respite. By mid-1994, the Ai Group’s position on the shape of Australia’s workplace relations system had shifted dramatically. It had shifted with the recognition that Australia and Australian industry had taken a new path of global integration where international competitiveness was the benchmark andwhen a ‘uniquely Australian approach’ to markets and their reform would be fundamentally challenged. Bert made the comment that ‘things will never be the same again’ and when I look back, he was clearly right. That speech also explored how viable and relevant the Australian concept of ‘fairness’ was to the conduct of industrial relations in Australia. This was juxtaposed against the challenge of trade being conducted not between countries of similar real wages and per capita GDP levels as had characterised the 1960s and 1970s, but between countries of very unequal cost and regulatory regimes.