relations that the appearanceof change is most illusory.’Enterprise bargaining’
is in several ways simply the old‘consent awards’procedure in a new bottle.
Bargaining remains the legal monopoly of‘registered’trade unions. And if
tribunals cannot now be obliged to arbitrate the wages and conditions of
‘enterprise bargains’, a swathe of matters that could once be altered by appli-
cation to a tribunal are now entirely beyond even their arbitration, and require
the resolve of two chambers of national parliament to change.^13 Tribunals
themselves remain directly occupied in determining wages and conditions in
contexts ranging from Alpine Resorts to Wool Sampling. Some 935 pages of
legislation govern the whole system.
There is, then, a great deal of‘changing same’in Australia (Macfarlane
1978). Rather than being temporary aberration, the present work maintains
that Australian exceptionalism is better described as enduring. This endurance
is underlined by the contrast of Australia with two countries that, until
recently, seemed to have travelled in parallel with Australia over the most of
the twentieth century: Sweden and New Zealand. Both were—like Australia—
small, marginally located, trade-dependent economies, composed of well-
educated populations working on favourable resource endowments, commit-
ted to egalitarianism, with very significant labour parties, and with large
state involvement. And both—like Australia—began pruning state structures
in the 1980s.
Australia differs from Sweden and New Zealand in that the shift, since 1980,
to‘the market’has been deeper and more enduring in the two smaller econ-
omies. New Zealand today has highly deregulatedfinancial, product, and
labour markets, a cleanlyfloating currency, and substantially lower income
tax.‘The streets of Stockholm are awash with the blood of sacred cows’
(Micklethwait and Wooldridge 2014, p. 171), and‘Sweden and Denmark...
now lead the world in privately run hospitals...and...schools...run by
profit-making companies’(Moore 2014, p. 21).
In this writer’s analysis it is Australia’s much vaunted period of‘microeco-
nomic reform’of the 1980s that has been temporary and passing. That period
was more of a holding, or stalling, manoeuvre than an embrace of the new.
Australia is the country that won’t move on, which is stuck in its way.
Australia is not the world’s‘social laboratory’; it is a sacred grove dedicated
to the dogged observance of customary gods.
But must this inertia be for the bad? The merit of Australian exceptionalism
has been episodically contested, and, in turn, hotly defended. But this volume
is not directly concerned with whether the way is good or bad; or whether it
(^13) Maximum weekly hours, redundancy pay, long service leave, parental leave, annual leave,
public holidays, notice of termination.
William O. Coleman