Contrary to senator Murray’s belief, CCI does support the concept of a single, national industrial relations system, or at the very least the harmonisation of the state and federal systems – but not blindly as an end in itself.
Employers, more than anyone else, want industrial relations in Australia simplified. But they would only support a single system provided it had flexibility and productivity as its focus and involved as little bureaucracy and third-party intervention as possible.
The WA reforms of the 1990s (which the Gallop Government is about to roll back) was a very good model. The workplace agreements system gave employers in this state an option to the traditionally highly regulated arrangements and helped deliver employment and wages growth and improved business competitiveness.
By frustrating reform attempts at the federal level, the Democrats’ contribution to date has been to further complicate and compromise the industrial relations system.
The examples used by senator Murray demonstrate the barriers to achieving a single system. While less intrusive than the Gallop proposal, the “right of entry” provisions which he cites continue to allow abuse by union bullies, which the Australian Industrial Relations Commission complicitly ignores.
The senator’s view that federal award simplification has been a great success is not shared by many employers. Much of it has been an overdue office tidy-up by the AIRC – for example, the scrapping of defunct awards from which the majority of small businesses has gained nothing. Those same businesses continue to be strangled, however, by “simplified” awards that still have dozens of clauses and hundreds of pages.
Little has changed since 1996, when the Democrats acknowledged the federal Act was evolutionary, not revolutionary. Whilst harmonisation sounds good in practice, the terms on which it is proffered in 2002 offer little benefit to employers.
If the Democrats’ aim is to promote and achieve a single IR system, they should be working to make the flawed federal system more attractive to employers than it currently is.
