Long after Australia has hung up on the Telecard affair, our horribly inefficient industrial relations system will continue to taunt us. This week the Minister for Workplace Relations, Peter Reith, issued two discussion papers on industrial relations. At the press conference no journalist took the slightest interest in them. Pity.
For a century, industrial relations in Australia have been dogged (literally, sometimes) with unnecessary conflict, complexity, procedural madness, federal-state overlap hand high costs.
Tax, corporate law, trade practices, financial institutions and nearly all family law have been brought into national schemes, but industrial relations remains fractured between the state and the Commonwealth, with the twin sins of overlap and voids. There are four main reasons. The first is that the constitutional base is flawed. In the 1890s Australia was hit by a series of prolonged major strikes. Those framing the Constitution saw a need for a system of compulsory, independent conciliation and arbitration to avoid them. However, states rights still ran strong. The Commonwealth was not given full power. The states could have their own systems. The Commonwealth could only have power to set up arbitration bodies to deal with interstate industrial disputes. So Section 51 (xxxv) was put into the Constitution:
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