1. The problem labour monopoly might solve -- 2. The fall and rise of labour monopoly theory -- 3. How a wage bill hill creates a wage rate floor -- 4. Why the floor will fluctuate -- 5. How bargaining may build a ceiling instead of a floor -- 6. How foresight may (and may not) defeat the floor...

Like many industrialised economies in the pre-depression era, Australia elected to maintain a highly protectionist trade policy regime and hence to retard its integration with the global economy. The rationale for Australia’s protectionism was, as elsewhere, the enhancement of worker welfare....

Australia is notably, if not notoriously, a land of much space but few people. Its population density is, correspondingly, almost the lowest of any country in the world: only Namibia and Mongolia record a lower figure. Australia's extreme divergence from the common human experience has been a...