Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

Australian Politics and Policy
industries were no longer protected by government (the Whitlam government had
started to dismantle protection during the 1970s) and would be exposed to
internationalcompetition.Uptothispointintime,thenatureofthegovernment–
business relationship in Australia was heavily focused on industry assistance, and
competition regulation had only seriously been pursued since the establishment of
the Trade Practices Act 1974 (Cth).
Beginning in 1983, the market liberalisation agenda had gathered pace under
the Hawke Labor government and the economy began to change significantly.
Following on from the introduction of the Prices and Incomes Accords, a series
of agreements between the Australian Labor Party and the Australian Council
of Trade Unions, the government facilitated a tripartite, consensus-based power
sharing arrangement between government, business and trade unions. This
tripartite arrangement, facilitated by institutions such as the Economic Planning
Advisory Council, became known as corporatism and attracted much study from
government–business relations scholars. 19 A key principle of corporatism was consensus
building between the three parties, with the major groups in the economy
(theoretically) participating in decision making. As trade union membership
represented about half of the workforce at the time, it was generally representative
of the interests of labour. 20 With the election of the Howard Liberal–National
(Coalition) government in 1996, however, corporatism was quickly dismantled, 21
and the decline in compulsory union membership saw union membership
declining steadily from 1992 from traditional levels of almost 50 per cent of the
workforce, to 14 per cent of the workforce by 2018. 22
At the industry level, business scholars such as William Byrt 23 developed
approaches to understanding the interaction between business and government
by focusing on various elements of the relationship that affect business, such as
regulation, consumerism, trade unions and public enterprises. There are a number
of different approaches to studying government–business relations, but these
approaches are much more than an analysis of the struggle for dominance between
the two monsters – Leviathan (government) and Behemoth (business) – as the two
tend to merge ‘in complex and specialised arrangements, producing a pattern of
interaction which brings together both government and non-government bodies’. 24
One of the major industry-level studies of the ‘protective state’ and its ‘gradual
transformation’ of the manufacturing industry in Australia 25 was conducted by
political scientists Capling and Galligan in 1992. 26 More recently, scholars
19 Bell and Wanna 1992, 4; Wanna 2003, 421.
20 Hall and Soskice 2001, 20.
21 Head 1997.
22 Gilfillan and McGann 2018.
23 Byrt 1990.
24 Colebatch, Prasser and Nethercote 1997, xviii.
25 Wanna 2003, 423.
26 Capling and Galligan 1992.
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