Securing Everyday Fairness? Rights, Knowledge and Regulatory Responsibility (Symposium) (Economic and Labour Relations Review‪)‬

The Economic and Labour Relations Review has always had a social justice orientation. It is appropriate that the symposium in this 20th anniversary issue reflect that orientation. This article and the four that follow address aspects of the state's responsibility for securing and monitoring citizens' rights to equitable resource use and outcomes. From the time of the Federation of the Colonies in 1901, argues Gregory Melluish (1998: 20), the new Commonwealth of Australia became a 'social laboratory' in which the state was deployed to encourage citizens to develop their potential. The citizen at the heart of this 'positive doctrine of social progress' was tellingly named by Melluish, 'John Citizen. The policies associated with this version of a commonwealth focused not only on state intervention and initiatives, but also on the maintenance of 'the family as the fundamental institution in which future Australians would be raised' (Melluish 1998: 20). The positive aspects of the social laboratory encompassed protective legislation designed to secure equal rights for women and men, state pensions for the aged and invalids, and rights for mothers (Lake 2009). As well, the state would provide public education for children and prevent the exploitation of their labour, and ensure worker safety and minimum pay. However, the social laboratory was underpinned by inequitable principles and a variety of exclusions. These were enshrined in the White Australia policy and the 1907 Harvester wage decision which established needs as the dominant paradigm for wage determination in Australia and which formalised the male breadwinner norm. Inclusions and exclusions from the benefits of citizenship were fundamental to the maintenance of the country's relatively high standard of living. Yet as Gail Reekie (1992: 151) points out, this standard was made possible by women's paid and unpaid labour. Indeed, in her view, 'the image of the social laboratory failed to encompass' some important aspects of social existence because it maintained the dominance of masculine culture, denied women's economic contribution and failed to address issues of relevance for women's domestic circumstances. Spectacularly, it is also built on dispossession of the rights of the members of Indigenous nations. Although the depiction of Australia as a social laboratory has long since passed into the annals of history, and many of the achievements associated with the social laboratory era have been eroded (Jamrozik 2004: 62), the vision of the nation as an egalitarian democracy has continued to inform the espoused national culture, and a variety of government initiatives have focused on the promotion of equity as a means of overcoming disadvantage. The notion of the 'fair go' that once underpinned expectations of the state's duty to protect the rights of workers, of women and of children still echoes in the country's political and related institutions, even though most would agree that the echo has had a hollow ring for some time, as notions of fairness, of human rights and of social justice were tempered by the demands for economic efficiency. Nevertheless, the advent of Fair Work Australia not only harks back to the aims of the social laboratory, it also provides mechanisms for addressing social exclusions based on pay equity, migration, discrimination and so on.