'Deregulation' of Labor Relations in Australia : Toward Command and Control

The Coalition Government and various business groups continue to argue that the need for more labor market "deregulation" or "reform" justifies further changes to Australia's labor relations system. However, one of its more recent legislative initiatives, the Building and Construction Industry Improvement Bill 2003 (Cth) (the BCII Bill), appears on its face to be inconsistent with the rhetoric of deregulation. Using a decentred understanding of regulation drawn from scholarship in regulatory studies, this paper compares the BCII Bill with the federal labor relations system governed by the Workplace Relations Act 1996 (Cth) and its predecessors. The findings presented in this paper suggest that the regulatory framework proposed in the BCII Bill represents a highly centralized and legally prescriptive model of "command and control" regulation. In comparison, notwithstanding its extensive legal framework, the federal labor relations system has historically been a relatively decentralized and participatory regulatory model