Let’s try the chill winds « Economics.org.au

Other entries featuring Bert Kelly»

Bert Kelly, The Bulletin, January 22, 1985, p. 97.

I wrote comparatively cheerfully recently because Eccles insisted that economic laws, with industrial relations as with other economic affairs, would win in the long run.

That is all very well for Eccles in his ivory tower, but I remember Keynes’ saying: “In the long run we will all be dead.” Perhaps I shall be dead long before Bruce, our industrial relations dinosaur, dies.

My anxiety in this matter has been reinforced by reading a paper by Justice Michael Kirby who was chairman of the Law Reform Commission. He recounts the awesome difficulties facing anyone who tries to make fundamental changes to almost anything in Australia — particularly legislative changes.

Kirby clearly has been frustrated by the masterful inaction and inertia of those who would leave things be. For instance, he says:

Comitology (the science of committee meetings) is an old method of playing for time, Parkinson’s Law of Delay cannot, of course, be avoided; it is as inevitable as the law of gravity. But, just as it was within the bounds of human ingenuity to accomplish human flight, so perhaps there will always be a right way of getting news ideas off the ground.

Then he gives more details of the options open to those who want to delay changes that a brave or innovative minister would make. Remember that marvellous British television program Yes Minister. You can imagine how the smooth departmental head, Sir Humphrey — assisted by young Bernard and almost everyone else — would put pitfalls in the path of progress. Sir Humphreys would say:

Of course you are right, Minister, but have you really considered the political effects of getting the unions offside? Votes are at risk, Minister — though, of course, we know you are far above base political considerations.

Kirby describes many of these delaying tactics and then says:

The sixth impediment arrives after the reform proposals are made. This is the fundamental problem of getting the reform ideas through the filter of bureaucratic, governmental and legislative consideration.

Outside these official filters there are others, acutely important in any proposal for industrial relations reform. They include the powerful lobby interests of the trade union movement and the employers’ organisations, many of whose senior officers have intellectual, emotional and — dare I say it? — career commitment to the present system. They know it. They grew up with it.

This is Kirby’s refined way of describing how the Industrial Relations Club can frustrate any change to a system that has served it well but Australia badly.

So, clearly, it will be much harder than Eccles thinks to alter the laws that control old Bruce. Perhaps it is possible to cut a few corners and reach the same goal by a different route. For instance, we might have stopped the recent TAA engineers strike by passing laws to make it illegal, but that would have led to a lot of ill feeling. It would have been far better to cancel the two-airline agreement which is such a barrier to cheap fares and which encourages engineers, pilots and flight attendants to think that no other airline can sneak up on them while they are busy bleeding their’s to death.

I have often referred to the agreement as the feather bed that flies (sometimes). Well, as long as there is a comfortable bed handy that encourages questionable behaviour on it, we must expect industrial strife. If the strikers knew that one or two Easts-Wests were able and willing to elbow their way in, however, we would have less of this nonsensical behaviour.

So perhaps it is not essential to alter the industrial relations machine to lessen strife. If the metal employers and employees knew that there was no likelihood of increased tariff protection to compensate for over-generous increases wrung from employers, they may not have given in as they did at the end of 1982 and the unions would have been more responsible lest they killed the good that laid the eggs.

Then we would have been spared the ludicrous sight of the chairman of the Machinery and Metal Engineering Council, John Halfpenny, writing to the metal employers asking them to extract more government aid to compensate for the damage caused by the union when it was under Halfpenny’s control shortly before. And look how BHP’s steel-workers picked up their performance when they found that imports were putting their jobs at risk.

Putting poor old Bruce down would be messy and take much time and effort and he would no doubt lash about a lot with his long legs. The chill winds of competition might work much better.

(in order of appearance on Economics.org.au)

ONE WORD

ONE SENTENCE

Name	Required.
Email	Required. Won't be published.
Web
Comment

ONE PARAGRAPH

"The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant or pine for something they can’t get, and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods."
~ H.L. Mencken

"[T]he crucial question is not, as so many believe, whether property rights should be private or governmental, but rather whether the necessarily 'private' owners are legitimate owners or criminals. For ultimately, there is no entity called 'government'; there are only people forming themselves into groups called 'governments' and acting in a 'governmental' manner. All property is therefore always 'private'; the only and critical question is whether it should reside in the hands of criminals or of the proper and legitimate owners."
~ Murray Rothbard

"The most absurd public opinion polls are those on taxes. Now, if there is one thing we know about taxes, it is that people do not want to pay them. If they wanted to pay them, there would be no need for taxes. People would gladly figure out how much of their money the government deserves and send it in. And yet we routinely hear about opinion polls that reveal that the public likes the tax level as it is and might even like it higher. Next they will tell us that the public thinks the crime rate is too low, or that the American people would really like to be in more auto accidents." ~ Lew Rockwell, Speaking of Liberty, p. 281.

"A tax-funded protection agency is a contradiction in terms — an expropriating property protector — and will inevitably lead to more taxes and less protection. Even if, as some — classical liberal — statists have proposed, a government limited its activities exclusively to the protection of pre-existing private property rights, the further question of how much security to produce would arise. Motivated (like everyone else) by self-interest and the disutility of labor, but endowed with the unique power to tax, a government agent’s answer will invariably be the same: To maximize expenditures on protection — and almost all of a nation’s wealth can conceivably be consumed by the cost of protection — and at the same time to minimize the production of protection." ~ Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Economics.org.au

You are reading