Chapter Five From Workplace Bargaining to Workplace Relations: Industrial Relations in the Australian Public Service under the Coalition Government

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the implementation of the Workplace Relations Act 1996 (Cth) (the ‘WR Act’) and the potential impact of the Workplace Relations Amendment (Work Choices) Act 2005 (Cth) (the ‘Work Choices Act’) within the Australian Public Service (‘APS’) — where the Coalition government has the greatest opportunity to influence the working conditions of its own employees. The chapter argues that when governments seek to regulate the working conditions and wages of their own employees in a decentralising industrial relations environment, there is potential for tension between the roles of government as employer, as policy generator and financial controller. A government’s financial and political responsibility requires that it control the cost of its own employees; its industrial relations policies may also require that more direct relationships between employers and employees be facilitated by the regulatory system. Nevertheless, as an employer, the government needs to retain ultimate control of its own employees. In the APS, the Coalition government attempted to resolve these tensions by providing policy ‘parameters’, via the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (‘DEWR’),1 to its managerial agents within agencies and departments of state. These parameters devolved some autonomy to the government’s managerial agents, but also required them to adhere to a process of centralised oversight of agency agreement-making by DEWR.