Moulding Federal Arbitration: The Employers and the High Court 1903-1935–

The passage of the Conciliation and Arbitration Act 1904 did not establish a stable industrial tribunal system, or predispose Australia to a system of centralised industrial regulation. Instead, in the Arbitration Court's for Mative period, employer litigation and High Court decisions were as instrumental in shaping federal arbitration as was legislation. With High Court blessing employers succeeded in frustrating compulsory arbitration for over a decade. They established the legal superiority of collective bargaining over compulsory arbitration, and of state law and wages boards' determinations over awards of the federal system. After 1914, however, earlier gains were lost and the federal tribunals' pre-eminence was increasingly established. This High Court reversal reflected its changed composition. Following the failure of the Bruce-Page Government in 1929 to repeal the Act and the failure of non-Labor High Court appointments in the 1930s to reverse the growth of federal arbitration, employers finally accommodated federal arbitration.