Australia's Second Arbitration Act

Abstract

One of the features that has distinguished industrial relations in Australia from those of other countries in the twentieth century has been the legally binding awards of industrial tribunals. These have occupied the place of collective bargaining elsewhere and the Australian peculiarity has usually been traced back to the great strikes and the defeat of the unions in the 1890s.1 Nevertheless, the events leading up to B. R. Wise's very successful arbitration act of 1901 have received only cursory consideration. The New South Wales Trade Disputes Conciliation and Arbitration Act of 1892, which followed by three months Victoria's Councils of Conciliation Act of 1891, was the second such measure to be passed by any Australasian colony and as a pioneer ing and useful experiment should not be dismissed merely (in the words of William Pember Reeves) as 'an amiable and nicely drafted measure' and 'a not inexpensive piece of waste paper'.2 One line of Labour historians has seen conciliation and arbitration as a Labour achievement. George Black wrongly included it among the planks of the Labor Electoral League platform of 1891 which Henry Parkes promised to implement and he considered J. H. Cann's amendment bill of 1893 to be a Labor party bill, although in fact eight Labor members voted against it.3 L. G. Churchward asserts that the Labor parties provided the main drive for compulsory arbitration in the 'nineties,4 but it should be pointed out that not until 1898 did Labour as a whole press for compulsory awards. The other line of Labour thinking is exemplified by Brian Fitzpatrick who saw that, 'the arbitration system was of the masters' making, not the men's', and that the acts of 1892 and 1901 'were not Labor measures, nor did they necessarily owe much to the Labor Party'. Here the word 'necessarily' converts a precise into an unclear statement, and Fitzpatrick's account shifts uneasily between a denial of Labour paternity for the acts and an admission that Labour pressed for and influenced the legislation. Fitzpatrick did not distinguish between Labour's attitude to voluntary conciliation and to compulsory arbitration and he gave an erroneous account of the act of 1892 which later historians have repeated.5 In seeking the origin of the arbitration system in Australia almost infinite regression is possible. English practice and precedent came