Think Tanks, Economic Liberalism and Industrial Relations

The industrial relations reforms of the 1980s and 1990s were in no small part influenced by an emerging coterie of “think tanks”. These bodies have played a critical role in promoting the economic liberalism that has underpinned much of the change of the past two decades. This paper examines organisations such as the HR Nicholls Society and the Institute of Public Affairs as examples of the importance of think tank gurus. Economic liberalism, the common usage new-speak of Australian society, is structurally sustained by unaccountable corporate sponsors who are in turn responding to the threat of gradual global economic stagnation since the 1970s. Their ongoing challenge has been how to increase business’s share of declining global profits and part of their solution has been to offset costs in some measure by funding think tank’s ideologues to spread the word – “work harder for less ” – to workers