THE Australian industrial relations (IR) system is based on industrial awards that go back to the early 1900s.
The modern system began with the Hawke-Keating era's wages and income accord of the 1980s, followed by enterprise agrements from 1991.
The Howard government introduced Australian Workplace Agreements or AWAs in 1996, followed by "Work Choices" a decade later.
This stripping away of the "safety net" was deeply controversial and ultimately unpopular enough to help usher in the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years, in which Labor nudged the settings back toward the centre.
Initially, IR was seen as too toxic after Work Choices for the Abbott and Turnbull Coalition governments to do much about.
But now, with the globalising digital age a dominant economic force, and casual labour a basic feature of the so-called "gig economy", the Morrison government is unveiling a series of IR reforms with the potential to again radically remake Australia's workplace laws.
As Attorney General and Minister for Industrial Relations, Christian Porter is both the nation's principal legal officer, and the politician in charge of workplace reform.
Mr Porter is selling this package as a post-COVID necessity, but work began on it well before the virus.
Regardless of its fine print, it is driven by a couple of imperatives. One is the Coalition's long obsession with the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union, and particularly its construction division.
As it happens, the mining division has also had enough, and its president Tony Maher wrote to members yesterday saying they might be asked to vote on withdrawing from the merged union at their convention next March.
The Withdrawal from Amalgamation Bill seeks to replace that narrow timeframe [to withdraw] with an appropriateness test. Given the current state of dysfunction within the CFMMEU nationally, this is a proposal we welcome, and we will consider if it applies to our circumstances.
Tony Maher, CFMMEU mining division president to members yesterday
But the big driver is a perceived need to change casual labour laws after test cases in the coal industry created potential flow-on effects for other industries, with an estimated cost of almost $40 billion in back payments.
As we report today, the federal government has become a prolific user of labour hire, a little-remarked upon feature, until now, in the IR debate.
Hopefully, the government is acting in the national interest, and not its own self-interest.
Regardless, IR is a hard reform to balance because the political parties themselves - no matter what they say - still represent the two halves of the equation: the Coalition the employers, and Labor the employees.
Now, as ever, labour versus capital is still society's primary tussle.
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