Modernising Australian industrial relations

A further topic is performance. Why not research the wage setting regimes of successful countries and compare them to the outcomes under the Fair Work system? This is what Professor Bernd Fitzenberger, now of Humboldt University, did for this society in his speaking tour of Australia two years ago. His findings were given to the then minister, Eric Abetz, and he was introduced to the minister. The professor's findings should have been placed on the Department of Employment website. Instead the minister ignored everything that was put to him.

Minister Cash's Department of Employment website and her media releases website provide ideal platforms for reasoned analysis of the Fair Work system and the content on both could be greatly improved.

Take the Department of Employment website. It is out of date, eg it only has reference to a national minimum wage made almost three years ago; it still spruiks the Moore/McCallum/Edwards review of how good the Fair Work Act is, though that was a very confined review, a not well regarded review and one designed to serve then minister Shorten; it has nothing on the registered organisations legislation, although the government regards this as a major success. The "latest news" on the Fair Work system is given as the "Government submission to the Fair Work Commission's 2014-15 annual wage review"!!

The minister should take back the website, update it and make it a platform for analysis and ideas on IR. The minister and the website should also say what is to happen to the recommendations of the Productivity Commission on the 'workplace relations framework' and of the Royal Commission into Trade Unions, both given 14 months ago. To have such detailed work sit on the shelf jars with the image the prime minister has set his government.

On the minister's media site there was no response to the national minimum wage decision given on 31 May last year, despite the importance of the decision and the government making a submission to it. People need an assessment of the reasoning in the minimum wage decision and of the impact of the decision.

The Minister for Employment regularly claims credit for increases in employment but she ignores the huge population increase partly responsible for this. These bland releases can be challenged. They offer no comfort to the unemployed. The minister's media releases have to be more topical and more accurate.

The prime minister's address to the National Press Club on 1 February 2017 on the government's program for the coming year covered many topics, from compassion to the coal industry. He said:

Political opportunists want us to turn inward, and revert to higher barriers to trade and investment. But they are doing nothing more than playing on the fears and hardships of those in the community who feel they have not shared in the benefits of globalisation and technological change. They offer the false promise that subsidies and trade barriers, under the banner of Australian first, are the answer to protecting jobs.
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Those who oppose our export deals are really calling for less opportunity, diminished prosperity and fewer jobs.

He supported lower business taxes:

The reality is that we are part of an intensely competitive global economy, …. We cannot afford to get left behind and let Australian jobs go offshore.

He said "We cannot retreat into the bleak dead-end of protectionism" which he said was the policy of the opposition.

What the prime minister said was absolutely right. The Fair Work system is one of these forms of protectionism that he has criticised. It is one of those barriers which he criticises for denying opportunity, prosperity and jobs.

We commend to minister Cash and to the prime minister that consistently with the government's philosophy they dismantle the Fair Work system and that they start this by a proper analysis of the defects of the Fair Work system. By so doing the government will distinguish itself from the opposition.

The HR Nicholls Society has shown that the defects of the Fair Work system can be demonstrated and analysed. It invites the government to do the same.