carried further, perhaps, than in any other advanced society, of institutional-
izing the resolution of conflicts over the allocation of values’(that is, of scarce
resources), thereby removing‘important allocative decisions from a process of
ad hoc bargaining or trials of strength...[and transferring them] to a system of
adjudication based on committees, boards, tribunals, agencies, autonomous
corporations and so on’(Parker 1965, pp. 88–9; see also Encel 1962 and
Hughes 1980, pp. 263–89). In areas that ranged from industrial relations to
tariff protection, the effect of thus distancing key decisions from party politics
was to stabilize and dull the destructive political forces Hancock described,
while nonetheless entrenching many of the harmful policies they had put in
place. At the same time, the sheer size and reach of the decision-making
apparatus this pattern gave birth to (going from the Tariff Board to
the Commonwealth Grants Commission), shaped and helped perpetuate a
powerful‘official family’that populated its structures, often with a marked
moderate and ameliorist slant.^10
Hancock therefore tended to underestimate the sociological and structural
levees that protect Australian democracy, albeit at the cost of giving its insti-
tutions a greater degree of insulation from change than would have been
desirable. The system of industrial arbitration and conciliation is a case in
point. Formed mainly under the influence of a heady brew of late nineteenth-
century‘middle-class’ideologies—spanning from Catholic social doctrine to
the cult of expert decision-making and of the judicial paradigm that was
common to the New Liberalism, the movement for‘national efficiency’, and
Fabianism—it not only institutionalized conflict but also defined roles and
careers that were often powerful and lucrative, strengthening the commit-
ment to the system of all those it involved. Hancock was well aware of the kind
of trade unionists that system bred, with their‘pettifogging skill in the hand-
ling of court business’(Hancock 1930, p. 218); but he was less mindful of the
solid phalanx of employers’advocates and judicial officials to whom it pro-
vided not only gainful employment but also high prestige, and who, together
with their union counterparts, formed a‘club’that communicated frequently,
socialized, and developed a shared view of the world.^11 If the‘perpetual
bickering’in the‘Labour movement...between the practical men and the
idealists’was won by the former, who were‘conservative and empirical in
(^10) There is, in this respect, much truth in the view that:‘Federal political (andfinancial)
dominance, combined with a powerful bureaucracy working geographically apart from the
mainstream of Australian economic and social experience, may have introduced a much stronger
element of public sector independence in Australian governing processes’, compared to overseas
(Butlin, Barnard, and Pincus 1982, p. 115). 11
The‘industrial relations club’at the height of its influence is well (albeit entirely uncritically)
portrayed in d’Alpuget 1977.
Henry Ergas