The State against Unions: Australia’s Neo-liberalism, 1996–2007

From 1996 until its electoral defeat in 2007, Australia’s conservative national government prosecuted what can be called a neo-liberal agenda across a range of fields including industrial relations, as well as in welfare and the economy more generally. Couched in terms of ‘choice’, ‘deregulation’ and, more broadly, a reduction in state activity, this programme actually involved new forms of state intervention and high levels of legislative prescription, just as it did in other countries (see Harvey 2005 for an overview of this political strategy). As Polanyi (1944: 45) famously observed: ‘there was nothing natural about laissez faire’ in the making of market economies, nor was there in their remaking with the collapse of Keynesianism in so many counties from the 1980s onwards. In the Australian case, changes in industrial relations followed persistent lobbying by some local and global business interests which had grown increasingly opposed to collective bargaining. The government joined them in insisting that unions had no place in a globalised and services-based economy. The Work Choices laws of 2005, which built on legislative changes of 1996 and judicial interventions thereafter, rendered the rights of workers to freedom of association all but meaningless and undermined effective collective bargaining wherever employers chose to act on the laws.