Australia’s highest-flying employment lawyer has offered up a savage assessment of the state of industrial relations journalism and discussion in Australia, zeroing in on the role played by national broadsheet The Australian in distorting the terms of the debate.
Maurice Blackburn principal Josh Bornstein, in a speech delivered to the Australian Industry Group today and obtained by Crikey, unloads on the standard of public dialogue, slamming it as a “debate that occurs without any scientific, factual or empirical basis. It lacks rigour, logic, fact and integrity. It is enough to make a cretin weep.”
Bornstein, who recently represented Peter Slipper and whose court victory over stevedoring company Patrick in the waterfront dispute was immortalised in the hit ABC miniseries Bastard Boys, gives three examples of distortions: unfair dismissal laws, individual contracts and the productivity-workplace flexibility stoush.
But he reserves his sharpest barbs for The Australian — that he agrees is a “right-wing blog” — and its “editor-at-large” Paul Kelly. He highlights a 2011 Kelly feature “Bell Tolls for IR Law” as a “spectacular illustration of all that is wrong with the IR debate”.
Instead of applying “rigour, science, research, scepticism or factual inquiry to test the assertions of a link between the Fair Work Act and productivity performance”, Kelly “embellishes the assertions” of the usual suspects from the business lobby like Michael Chaney and Heather Ridout.
Kelly’s take, Bornstein says, was “simplistic, misleading, lazy and hopelessly partisan” and “economically illiterate”. “The article comes from a journalist who has won a Walkley Award for ‘journalism leadership’ and is now described as ‘editor-at-large’ of The Australian,” he said.
Australian editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell hit back hard this morning, branding Bornstein a paid-up member of the “IR club”. “He would say that wouldn’t he?” Mitchell mused.
But he might be on to something with productivity. As Crikey has repeatedly demonstrated, labour productivity has grown at an average of 2.1% a year over the last two decades, including by 3.7% in 2011-12 (its highest rate since 2002). The real issue, if there is one, is multi-factor productivity and how that dovetails with pro-employer legislation. That case is less than clear cut.
Rapid productivity improvement occurred in the 1990s, when labour regulation was much tighter than it is now. And this graph delivered up by Saul Eslake last year says the big “reforms” of WorkChoices had less-than-spectacular results and weren’t “productivity enhancing”.
Bornstein says the unfair dismissal debate is often erroneously framed as if the inaction of stronger laws could lead to more unemployment when there is little evidence to back it up. Print journalists and “a conga line of shock jocks” defer to right-wing ideologues who find themselves without a leg to stand on when pressed for actual evidence.
“The idea that unfair dismissal laws have any significant bearing on unemployment has not been established since the first such laws were introduced in South Australia. In other words, we have had over 40 years experience of such laws without a single, credible piece of peer-reviewed research that would support such an attack,” he said.
And he says the idea that Howard-era claims about the supposedly vigorous employer/employee negotiation over individual employment contracts “is about as rare as a mortgage contract negotiated by a bank and a customer”.
“What is notable about these events is the lack of scientific rigour or integrity in the arguments put by the business community, politicians and employer groups. This is compounded by the echo effect experienced when reading a newspaper,” he said.
Bornstein’s media criticisms also reflect the ailing ranks of serious IR journalism. As this helpful report from May’s ACTU congress showed, there are now only a few industrial relations scribes remaining in Australia. In the 1970s, Sydney alone boasted 15 dedicated roundsmen.
Ben Schneiders at The Age is an experienced chronicler and often weighs in as a senior writer; the paper’s day-to-day industrial coverage is helmed by workplace editor Clay Lucas. The other leading lights were Ewin Hannan on The Oz (who escapes Bornstein’s sabre), hard-bitten AMWU chronicler Mark Skulley on The Australian Financial Review and Newcastle Herald veteran Ian Kirkwood.
As an aside, Bornstein accurately recalls that union-buster barrister of choice and HR Nicholls society vice-president Stuart Wood, who recently represented Kathy Jackson in her HSU fight, was once a left-leaning student at Melbourne University in the late 1980s and early ’90s.
And they’ve got a PCP – like Howard’s “Ministerial Code of Conduct” – for “when they run out of toilet paper” too?
So Andrew, we’ll get the plain objective truth we are denied in that “right-wing-blog” The Australian from good old labour lawyer and paid up IR club member Josh Bornstein from rusted-on Labor law firm Maurice Blackburn……who are you kidding?!
High wages drive the application of labour saving devices which lead to higher productivity.
It must be apparent that those of whom the leading industrial lawyer complains do not know the author of the above sentence.
High wages reduce the interest rates upon which the idle rich live hence the need for the idle rich to deceive and oppress the public, who benefit from high wages and low interest rates. Author! Author! Author?
It follows that those of whom the leading industrial lawyer complains are not interested in productivity.
Their game is low wages, low savings and high interest rates and happiness for their employers, the idle rich.
In contrast the management of the burgeoning Asian region have studied the father of economics and reject the complacent and destructive mediocre productivity of Australia’s politicised management.
The latter have no lessons to learn, they already know everything without ever having read the “Wealth of Nations” and their misplaced pride and arrogance cometh before their fall.( Abbott’s foot planted firmly on top of a children’s meal table in Indonesia is typical of the mind set)
Just getting a flunkey government elected to serve only the narrow (minority) interests of their ultimate employers
is their version of productivity.
It simply won’t work.
An interesting study by Goldman Sachs published in 2009 actually showed an inverse relationship between capital productivity and GDP growth, while Labour productivity and MFP track GDP growth quite well.
Why more productive capital should be bad for economic growth, I’m not sure – perhaps because it indicates existing capital being used more intensively, rather than investment in new capital which is not yet online?
The graph is Chart 23 of the Goldman Sachs report “Australia’s Hidden Resource: The Economic Case For Increasing Female Participation”
I have always thought that all the Ltd News newspapers need a department of “fact checking”. Ditto the Fin Review of recent times. After all, if it’s good enough for Alan Jones….
There is always a deep sense of anger when you read an article in The Australian, and half way through it, you know that what you are reading is just NOT true. If you are reasonably intelligent, a little research quickly proves the point. Josh Bornstein (or anyone else with half a brain) is right to point this out. I don’t care what side of politics they come from, blatant misrepresentation of the facts, is just not on!