Bert Kelly, “A bigger cake but for Bruce,”
The Bulletin, October 30, 1984, p. 121.

I returned from my weekend at home to the wilderness headquarters of the Rough Cruel World (RCW) group with the simple message from Mavis that we had to convince the Living in the Past (LIP) people that we have to cook a bigger economic cake if ordinary people were to get bigger slices. This information was not new to the good and great but they agreed that it was better than Eccles lecturing the LIPs or Fred belting them on the earhole. We are convinced that we cannot get a bigger economic cake until we have a more flexible wage system and this is why we are crying in the wilderness.

The RCW is not actually at war with the LIP; we just want them to see things more clearly. There is quite a lot of communication between our two groups, in the course of which we see many of their activities both inside and outside their city walls. For instance, we have been very interested to see that they keep a big and ancient animal which our Professor Blandy says is an Industrial Relations Dinosaur but the LIPs call Bruce for some obscure reason. About once a week they bring Bruce out of the city into the wilderness, I presume for exercise and a feed of grass. But poor Bruce’s joints are so stiff and his feet so big and clumsy and the ground in the RCW so rough that the poor animal just stands pathetically there while rabbits run between his legs, eating his grass. Either his front legs are too long or his neck is too short, so he has to be fed in a high manger where his dedicated handlers give him bushels of grain to eat. I was puzzled why they fed him so much grain until I noticed that his handlers, whom Blandy says are members of the Industrial Relations (IR) Club, not only ply Bruce’s front end with grain but they also are assiduous with shovels and sacks attending to his back end. The city slickers in our group were puzzled about this but we bushies understood what the club members were about. You may have heard the phrase: “Feeding sparrows through horses.” This is a practice very popular with both horses and sparrows but it is not really the most economic way to feed sparrows.

Then Blandy gave us a lecture about the Industrial Relations Club. He says that there are four main classifications of members. First, there are the Arbitration Commission and their courtiers, stiff with robes and other panoplies of power. They have a great natural affection for the Industrial Relations Dinosaur because they depend on him for their position in life which is a lofty one indeed. They live in Melbourne.

The staff of the Department of Employment and Industrial Relations are important members of the IR Club. They also live in Melbourne. Their main duty is to look after Bruce with tender loving care. They are essential to Bruce’s health and happiness because his maintenance manual, the Conciliation and Arbitration Act, is so complex that only departmental people can understand it. So their future is assured while old Bruce is with us.

By far the most important members of the club come from the Australian Council of Trade Unions. These, too, mainly live in Melbourne. Although they are in theory only ordinary club members, they really rule the club roost. It is well known that the commission’s awards are not enforceable if the unions do not approve of them. Only the employers have to obey the commission’s judgements. For instance, when the commission ruled in favour of wage indexation in October 1983, it admitted that it knew its ruling would do the economy harm but it felt that placating the unions was necessary for the sake of industrial peace.

The fourth and least important members of the IR Club are the representatives of the employers. These work for the Confederation of Australian Industry (CAI) or the big companies, as industrial officers. Most of them live in Melbourne and they get on very well with the other club members. They drink in the same pubs and go to the same VFL matches and so on. They fight valiantly and ostentatiously for their employers when fighting is necessary but they are always careful not to overdo it, lest they spoil the friendly atmosphere in the club. And they have been far too quick to urge their employers to give in gracefully to wage demands from unions and then to go to Canberra to get another serve of tariff protection to make it better. This is the main reason why the National Farmers Federation left the CAI.

This, then, is the picture Blandy gave us of the IR Club which is so devoted to the well-being of Bruce, the Industrial Relations Dinosaur. They certainly love him. It is a pity he won’t work any more. He was quite useful in his youth, in 1907 or thereabouts, but is well past it now. But he creates a lot of employment for those who care for him.