OPINION: Thursday’s summit needs to start reframing the entire workplace narrative for the modern world, not just fiddle with a broken system from a century ago.
Anthony Albanese’s jobs and skills summit draws its “consensus” inspiration from Bob Hawke’s national economic summit of nearly 40 years ago.
and opened the door to 1970s-style pattern bargaining that helped produce the early 1980s recession and its 10 per cent jobless rate.The source of Mr Hawke’s 1983 summit was the economic disaster of the previous Labor government under Gough Whitlam whose crash-through-or-crash big-spending platform collided with a global commodities boom.
But, for all the talk, Mr Fraser did not repeat the supply-side resolve of Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan. Mr Fraser’s industrial relations minister, the West Australian Ian Viner, promoted the “Americanisation” of Australian workplace regulation. By then, the leading policy alternative to both the Keynesian breakdown and failed Fraserism became an “incomes policy” based around a high-level agreement between government, business and unions to simultaneously tackle high unemployment and high inflation by restraining wages, prices, executive salaries and dividends.
But, as the jobless rate again climbed above 10 per cent, the Labor-ACTU accord delivered enterprise bargaining, pushed by both Mr Keating and ACTU secretary Bill Kelty, as a revolutionary replacement of both centralised wage fixing and pattern or industry-wide bargaining.
Importantly, the Reserve Bank started to gain much-needed anti-inflation credibility by adopting its 2 per cent to 3 per cent low inflation target and after being made politically independent by Liberal treasurer Peter Costello. The Keating era requirement that there should be “no disadvantage” for workers on enterprise bargains compared to awards was replaced by the higher bar of a “better off overall test” .As interpreted by the Fair Work Commission, this ruled out any agreement that made just one worker – even a hypothetical future worker – worse off. As a result, enterprise bargaining has collapsed, coinciding with the productivity and real wage growth slowdown of the decade to 2020.
Mr Albanese says the summit will focus on reviving productivity growth, but this would take things backward. It’s all looking like a stitch-up that divided business groups should refuse to indulge at this week’s summit.
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