The role of the Commonwealth government in industrial relations, 1923-1929

Abstract

Twenty years before S.M. Bruce became Prime Minister of Australia, the Ministry led by Sir Edmund Barton took the decision to establish a Commonwealth industrial arbitration system. In the following years successive Prime Ministers and Attorneys-General found that they had to devote an enormous amount of time to resolving the difficulties that arose from industrial regulation and industrial conflict. Thus most of the problems faced by the Bruce-Page Ministry in the field of industrial relations were not new and its decisions and actions were influenced by the ideas and the constitutional, legislative and administrative acts of earlier governments. Consequently, it will be necessary in this thesis to make a very general survey of the role of the Commonwealth Government in industrial relations in the period 1903-1923. This survey will be followed by a few comments on the Ministers and public servants who determined the Government's arbitration policy in the early years of Bruce's Prime Ministership. It will then be possible to turn to the main subject of the thesis and study the ways in which the Government, in the years 1923-1929, interpreted and responded to the role that it had inherited in the unhappy and difficult area of industrial relations. Show more