Australia’s Industrial Relations Reform Agenda

The institutional arrangements that underpin industrial relations in Australia today are markedly different than they were just 20 years ago. Nevertheless, the current federal government has long made it clear that its industrial relations reform agenda is incomplete, and now that it has a majority in the Senate has announced that it will introduce a new package of reforms. This paper describes the historical context in which these reforms have arisen, summarises the likely nature of the reforms, announced in broad terms by the Prime Minister in May 2005, and examines whether the reforms can be expected to produce the desirable outcomes claimed