Feature
Issue No. 26 - December/January 2005/06
Blandy on IR Reform
by Professor Richard Blandy
The Commonwealth Government recently introduced its industrial relations legislation into Federal Parliament.
The legislation’s main intent is to grant greater freedom to enterprises and employees to develop their own workplace arrangements, including wages and conditions of work, and to further restrict the right of third parties, like the Arbitration Commission or unions, to intervene in the employment relationship between an enterprise and its employees.
I believe these are good objectives. If they are achieved, they will not only increase the economy’s flexibility and productivity in dealing with a number of major challenges — globalisation, ageing and sustainability, for example — but will better meet our objectives of liberty, equality and fraternity.
In the last quarter of the 18th Century, three revolutionary events took place that have strongly shaped subsequent global history, especially of the Western world, including the West’s outpost in Asia, Australia.
The three revolutionary events were
- The American Revolution in 1776,
- the publication of The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, also in 1776, and
- The French Revolution in 1789.
The American Revolution and the French Revolution are obvious candidates to put on this list, but why The Wealth of Nations?
This revolutionary economics treatise is not principally about economics at all, but about the moral philosophical problem of how to make the powerful serve the needs of ordinary people.
Adam Smith’s answer was to force the powerful to compete with each other through markets for the patronage of ordinary folk. He saw that the competitive market was a profound instrument of liberty for ordinary human beings.
For this reason, he also wanted to minimise the role of government, because he saw that government is always to the benefit of the powerful and organised (and only inci...
