Regulating Decentralized Industrial Relations: The Niland Prescription

Abstract

On assuming office in March 1988, the Liberal-National Party appointed John Niland, Professor of Industrial Relations at the University of New South Wales, to prepare a Green Paper on the transformation of industrial relations in New South Wales. Niland has been perhaps the most consistent and longstanding academic advocate of a shift towards collective bargaining and away from the institutionalized framework of the Australian industrial relations system. The first volume of his report appeared in February 1989 and the second volume a year later. The response presents an opportunity to examine, in depth, the process of policy making in industrial relations. In particular, the principal direction of the report, the attempt to shift the focus of industrial relations away from central institutions towards enterprises, provides an opportunity to examine how a partially decentralized system can be erected alongside the existing centralized system. This paper will argue that what is being proposed is not a new deregulated form of industrial relations, but rather a new form of regulation: a state regulated, but partially decentralized, system. In doing so the paper examines the difficulties involved in that process. It also considers the contradictions involved in proposals to maintain the notion of equity in an en terprise focused system and the implications for the industrial regulation of public employment.

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