It is in the handling of management–staff relations that the different
natures of the three public services are revealed, with the unions gaining
their strongest foothold in Australia.
One of the most distinctive features of the Commonwealth was the early
and formidable influence of organized labour. The Labor Party was, as it still is,
a trade-union-based party. It was successful in rapidly establishing itself in the
new parliament, and Labor was not alone in its sympathy with collectivism
and state interventionism: it had a number of willing allies among the Pro-
tectionists. It is not therefore surprising that a part of the early legislative
programme created a new Court of Conciliation and Arbitration that
amounted to a substantial and very formal intervention of the state into the
business and industrial life of the nation. The significance of this realization of
Commonwealth power is underlined when it is recognized that the judges on
this new labour court were drawn for several decades from the bench of the
High Court of Australia. There was no parallel to this institutional arrange-
ment in either the UK or Canada. Even when, later, there were similar inter-
ventions, they were much less formal and lacked the sustaining force of
judicial prestige. Canada followed the US practice of direct bargaining
between management and labour; third-party arbitration was a feature of
the structure but it was engaged after negotiation between the parties and
did not involve anyone with judicial rank or titles. It was not until 1948 that
the Canada Labour Code was adopted.
The passage of the conciliation and arbitration legislation through the
Australian parliament was contentious and the occasion for defeat and resig-
nation of thefirst two governments, the Protectionist ministry in April 1904
followed by Watson’s Labor government in August. The Protectionist defeat
was expressly on the question of access of government employees to the
proposed Court of Conciliation and Arbitration.
In 1910, Labor won majorities in both Houses for thefirst time in Com-
monwealth history, and public servants won access to the Court of Concili-
ation and Arbitration. So great was the workload from the public service that,
in 1920, a separate arbitration jurisdiction (the public service arbitrator) was
created and lasted for more than half a century.
The UK civil service resisted formal structures for management–staff rela-
tions until after the First World War. There was resistance for a time on
the basis that the Crown did not negotiate with its servants, but eventually
the consensual Whitley philosophy provided a framework in which honour
was maintained but the right to negotiate effectively conceded.
The Canadian public service, though there were discussions between man-
agement and employees about remuneration and employment conditions,
held out in a formal sense until 1967. In that year, as part of a major restruc-
ture of the public service, a legalistic collective bargaining regime was
Australia’s Distinctive Governance