Bert Kelly, “Eccles lifts the tone of the argument,”
The Bulletin, April 2, 1985, p. 80.

Ever since Eccles discovered the link between his name and the book Ecclesiastes in the Bible, he has become a bigger pain in the neck than ever. For years he has lectured me in his thin, arid voice, pointing out the path to economic rectitude, until I have become almost deaf to his urging. But now he knows that the hand of the Lord has been laid upon him and that He expects him (Eccles) to point out the errors of my ways, I have no peace.

Instead of his usual whining voice, he now intones his messages as if he were a high-church Anglican priest in full cry. He has set his face firmly against any light-hearted tendencies on my part. “Levity, levity, all is levity,” he said sadly last week and when I tried to correct him by saying that the Good Book talks about “vanity,” not “levity,” he said sourly that both were equally dangerous.

He is particularly concerned about the way I bring Bruce into my discussions about our industrial relations. “I admit you are right to be concerned about the impact of comparative wage justice (CWJ) on our economy, Bert,” he said generously. “But you must cease chattering away about Bruce. We must deal seriously about serious matters so let us have no more levity.” So I have put Bruce back in his stall and from now on our discussions on CWJ will be conducted on a loftier level and we will certainly frown on any sign of levity. Indeed, we will be as serious as bowlers which is a game I am learning and in which any sign of amusement is regarded with suspicion.

My interest in CWJ was first aroused by Simon Crean’s statement at the Agricultural Outlook Conference when he said:

We have to operate in the real world, conditioned by institutional factors, including the fact that comparative wage justice is very firmly entrenched in the Australian wage system.

So clearly CWJ is regarded as essential by Crean who is, after all, the vice-president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions. But then we have a person of the eminence of Clyde Cameron who was Minister for Industrial Relations in the Whitlam government who writes:

While we have a social system that permits monopolies in control of essential goods and services to compel captive customers to meet the cost of sweetheart deals for over award rates, there can never be such a thing as comparative wage justice without pushing competitive industries to the wall and loss of employment to thousands of honest, hard-working trade unionists.

So Crean thinks we must go along with CWJ because it is deeply ingrained in our wage system while Cameron feels that CWJ is pushing unionists into unemployment. It is all very puzzling to a Modest Farmer.

Eccles says that not many people realise that CWJ is central to our centralised wage system. His argument is that, if CWJ was not in operation and was not the accepted way of fixing award rates for the same skills in different industries and locations, then the task of fixing these rates would be mind-boggling in its complexity.

I realise that people usually endow our arbitration commissioners with almost super-human wisdom but, be he a commissioner or just a plain bureaucrat, just imagine the problems of a person faced with the task of drawing up award rates for a fitter and turner on an oil rig or in a mine, a textile mill maintenance unit, a farm machinery workshop or in a country garage, all with different rates of profitability. You can imagine him grasping desperately at the CWJ straw, saying to himself:

It is quite impossible to do this fairly, so let us treat everyone the same. Australians love equality, love everyone keeping in step, so we are sure to be popular if we stick to CWJ and this is important so that we can have consensus.

I do not know, and I doubt if even Eccles knows, which came first, the chicken or the egg, whether we have this dedicated to CWJ in order to make our centralised wage system workable, or if we have a centralised system to make everyone as equal as possible so that CWJ can reign supreme. But both Eccles and Cameron know, and even I am coming to see, that it is our insistence on CWJ that pushing “competitive industries to the wall and causes loss of employment to thousands of honest had working trade unionists.”

Last week I wrote about my nightmare in which old Bruce mooches along at the head of his slowly moving column, with all his followers keeping in step behind him as CWJ demands. But Eccles has forbidden any further references of this kind, claiming that they show a sinful degree of levity with which a preacher out of Ecclesiastes could not be expected to endure. But I am sure that Eccles is right, our dedication to CWJ is an important reason which prevents us producing a bigger economic cake to cut up. I hope the Hancock Inquiry will expose its baleful influence.