Report on HR Nicholls Society XXIX Conference:
Fair is Foul and Foul is Fair

Des Moore

Speakers at the HR Nicholls conference on 27-28 March at Morgan's, 401 Collins St ranged across a wide area, including a presentation by a speaker the Society brought to Australia from the US to outline the union-friendly, employment-deterring regulations being proposed by Obama. Speakers also identified many seriously worrying and potentially unemployment-increasing aspects of the horrendous new Federal legislation regulating our employer/employee relations, most notably the new award system (sic), as well as the shocking components of the grave situation which has developed in NSW. That state appears to have almost reached the point where it is not being governed in the manner one might expect in democracies in Australia---"the existing government is functioning in name only", as one speaker put it. The NSW union movement was revealed as playing a powerful disruptive role not only in NSW but in the Federal election campaign, with the dictatorial NSW industrial relations legislation (decisions under which cannot be appealed) being used as a model for the federal Fair Work Act.

Surprise was expressed at the Opposition's failure to be up with the games being played by the union movement during and before the election and, despite the failure of Labor to accept the mandate notion when it was in opposition, its (the current Opposition's) absurd decision to agree that the current Government has a mandate for the legislation.

More broadly, the conference had dinner addresses from two speakers (Messrs John Stone and Hugh Morgan) whose assessment of the general economic outlook is that it is shaping to be considerably worse for Australia than portrayed in official sources and by almost all commentators. This, it was suggested, reflects not what might be described as a "conventional" recession but one in which balance sheets have become swollen with debt that will have to undergo an extensive de-leveraging process. In turn, the fact that the debt was allowed to build up to such an extent indicates a failure of monetary (and other) policies for which governments bear responsibility. Reference was also made to the labour market regulations imposed under Roosevelt in the 1930s, which undoubtedly contributed to the US having higher unemployment than other major countries at the end of the 1930s.

PS The OECD's belated acknowledgement that there will be a major recession this year is "progress" of a kind. But it may well result in our leaders adopting policies that will make the situation worse.