Labour-centred Politics and Judicial Institutionalisation: The Lineaments of an Early Proto-Regulatory State Model in Australia

Celal Bayari

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Australia, since the early 1980s, has been a leading advocate and practitioner of the neo-liberal economic model, also known as the Anglo-Saxon (or Anglo-American) model due to its geographical origins in the UK and the US, and its subsequent ascendancy in Australia, New Zealand and Canada, prior to its global hegemony (Bayari 2012a). A major component of this model has been the deregulatory market policies that have come to dominate all aspects of life. There are prior discussions of Australia’s deregulation dogmas and practices that this paper does not cover (Bayari 2012c, Bayari 2012d). Interestingly, Australia was a pioneer of a proto-regulatory economic model at the turn of the twentieth century. The emergence of the federal state in Australia in 1901 led to a level of hitherto unseen level of intervention in the market. Australia, like Canada, the US and New Zealand inherited the political, legal and other institutions of the UK. However, the Australian state followed a different path by regulating capital and labour relationship through the enforcement of compulsory conciliation and arbitration (Bayari 2012b). This proto-regulatory state model of the Antipodes preceded the post-Second World War regulatory state in the West by decades. The 1941-1949 Labor governments, under John Curtin and Ben Chifley, created new institutions for welfare, and health care provision, and attempted to create a new society, such as in terns of defining the content of citizenship, and creating the notion of entitlement to non-market wage, while the governments of the period from thereafter until 1972 can be characterised as calculatingly inert.

Keywords: Australia; institutions; labour; proto-regulatory state; unions. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B2 B22 B25 B41 B52 D13 D14 D6 D63 I18 I3 I31 I32 I38 J2 J21 J22 J31 J32 J38 J4 J41 J42 J43 J48 J5 J51 J52 J53 J58 J6 J61 J63 J64 J68 J78 J81 J83 K12 K23 K4 K42 L10 L12 L5 L51 N3 N30 N37 N4 N40 N47 N57 N67 P1 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-03-16, Revised 2014-06-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in Discourses on Global Studies 4.1(2014): pp. 42-60

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