hmmmm, me thinks... we suddenly have a PM with a barrow to push. Is this, the same person who said " we will never support a GST" who is now standing up and saying "Trust me! we can fix the Australian IR system!"....while the country is starting to suffer a shortage of skilled employees in certain industries,along with a brain drain in others, due to taxation and training policies.
Suddenly, the whole IR system is biased towards the employer and we may have a NZ style reaction in our employment market , irrespective of what lil' John says.
There is nothing to stop employers removing 'low performing' employees and looking for replacement employees at wages offered at lower levels. The only certainty appears to be that total unemployment will rise as the unskilled or low skilled cannot find permanent jobs and so, government outlays on unemployment benefits will rise. Meanwhile employers struggle to fill jobs.
This is made worse by the lack of negotiating powers employees have, as we all move towards workplace agreements. All the noise that politicians are making about this being the fair way ..ignores industrial reality. The difficulty I have, is that all this comes from those who are not subject to these provisions and who are in the envious position of being able to set their own emplyment conditions.

.....and what happens if Labor gets in at the next election? The country will go through IR turmoil again when they reverse everything the Coalition is now proposing. ...ugggh!

The Melbourne Institute is, unlike say the Institute of Public Affairs or the Tasman Institute or the Centre for Independent Studies, a bona fide academic organisation with academic standards. The Deputy Director of the Institute, Mark Wooden, is a highly regarded scholar. That said they do rely on contract work and the piper is being paid for the tune. More importantly they are mostly economists, with all the blindness this implies.

I haven't seen the actual report, rather than the bits being used for propaganda, but if you ask managers do they want more control over any of their inputs (and from a managerial point of view that's what labour is) of course they will say yes.

The question is do we want to live in a society where people's livelihoods depend even more on their flexibility as an input?

Moreover, the unfair dismissal laws are quite fair, workers are on probation for three months during which they can be terminated without the usual procedure. I would say if you can't say whether an employee is likely to work out after that time you aren't much of a manager. And even within them the procedure for terminating an employee is quite straightforward.

However, what is most "historic" about the proposed changes is the final annihilation of the distinctive nature of the Australian political economy, the notion of a fair wage. I notice that, 1984 newspeak style, Howard is calling his new tribunal a "fair wage commission" or somesuch. In fact the underlying proposition in arbitration in Australia was the concept of a "living wage". The idea being that employers who could not pay their workers sufficient to be able to live decently in our society would just have to go out of business.

Howard's new principle privileges wages being set at a market clearing rate, the underlying logic being that employers shouldn't have to pay wages that erode, or don't allow them to make, profits. Over time this will certainly create a trend towards a "working poor" in Australia similar to that in America. This is indeed the antithesis of Australia's history and culture and is obviously not fair in the sense fair has been understood in Australia.

Another aspect that hasn't been mentioned for a while, but was definitely in the proposals for change that couldn't get through the Senate in the last parliament, is changes to the "right to strike". Basically third parties affected by the strike will get the right to sue. Thus anyone inconvenienced by a strike can sue the workers and the union involved. Thus the right to strike becomes a truth in the abstract but a fiction in reality, since a strike that affects no-one else is almost impossible.