Australian Industrial Relations in 2005 - The WorkChoices Revolution

Industrial relations in Australia in 2005 were dominated by the introduction of the WorkChoices reforms, the most fundamental recasting of the industrial relations system in over 100 years. This analysis examines the rhetoric and reality of the reforms and identifies and summarizes the main features of the changes. It is argued that the implications of the reforms will include an expanded low wage sector, a contraction in collective bargaining and the greater use by employers of individual contracts. The reforms represent a ‘corporatisation’ of industrial relations (McCallum, 2006), commit Australia to a low road labour market development path and signal a new level of politicization of industrial relations. The rhetorical strategies employed by the principal author of the reforms, Prime Minister John Howard, reveal a distinctive construction of the emergent Australian worker - the ‘enterprise worker’ - that is central to Howard's vision of the future.