Acting Prime Minister makes major announcements about workplace reforms at Monash-run conference

Acting Prime Minister and Workplace Relations Minister, The Hon Julia Gillard MP, made some important announcements about the Government's workplace reform proposals at the Australian Labour Law Association's Fourth Biennial Conference in Melbourne on 14 November 2008. The conference was organised by several members of the Department of Business Law and Taxation's Workplace and Corporate Law Research Group, primarily Professor Richard Mitchell, and the Australian Labour Law Association.

During her keynote address to the Conference, Minister Gillard said that Australia needs a stable, balanced, truly national workplace relations system that is easy to understand and to apply.

"Instead of the legal artifice of the conciliation and arbitration of inter-state disputes power, the system will rely principally upon the corporations' power, as well as referrals from the States.

"One aspect of the Constitutional underpinnings of the new system relevant to the role of Fair Work Australia is the separation of powers doctrine. The constraints of the Commonwealth Constitution mean judicial functions, dealing with breaches of instruments and the determination of existing rights will be exercised by the Fair Work Divisions of the Federal Court and the Federal Magistrates Court.

"The creation of new rights and obligations, the arbitral functions, will rest with the arbitral body, Fair Work Australia. The focus of the Fair Work Bill will continue to reflect the move away from the automatic arbitration of disputes by the industrial umpire." Minister Gillard said.

However, she announced for the first time that Fair Work Australia would have the power to arbitrate in relation to collective bargaining disputes in certain limited situations – including where a party engages in serious and persistent breaches of ‘good faith bargaining' orders, and where parties in the new low-paid bargaining stream are unable to reach agreement.

In another Monash Faculty of Business and Economics event leading up to the introduction of the Rudd Government's substantive reform legislation into Federal Parliament, a select group of academics, policy experts and IR practitioners took part in a roundtable discussion on 10 November 2008 led by Professor Keith Ewing of Kings College London. Professor Ewing is one of the UK's leading labour law scholars, and has written extensively on union recognition, collective bargaining and international employment standards in the UK and Europe.

The centrepiece of Australia's new workplace legislation will be a statutory collective bargaining framework, based on the principles of ‘majority employee support' in the workplace and ‘good faith bargaining'.

"Australia can learn a great deal from the UK experience, where collective bargaining rights founded on a statutory union recognition procedure have operated for the last 10 years," Anthony Forsyth, Director of the Workplace and Corporate Law Research Group said. He and Peter Gahan, Director of the Work and Employment Rights Research Centre, jointly convened the roundtable with Professor Ewing.