Curiouser and curiouser: the federal Remuneration Tribunal

Paul Kelly (1994), in The End of Certainty, popularised the contention that Australia’s Deakinite settlement had been largely abandoned under the neo-liberal policy changes adopted initially by the Hawke-Keating governments. Notably amongst these changes was the decline of compulsory arbitration, mainly manifest in the shift to more decentralised bargaining. Since coming to office, the Howard government has further eroded the authority and role of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission (AIRC), a change which it is seeking to accelerate with the changes to the Workplace Relations Act, 1996 packaged under the highly contestable ‘WorkChoices’ moniker.