A New Province for Law and Order: Assessing One Hundred Years of Industrial Arbitration in Australia (Contributed ARTICLE‪)‬

1. Introduction The use of conciliation and arbitration to resolve industrial disputes in Australia stands as one of the great social experiments of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries anywhere in the world. While the experiment with industrial arbitration was not new (Mitchell 1989), the manner in which it was established in the Australian context and subsequently evolved, is a unique and extraordinary story (Gahan 2005a). Now, a century on, this very timely volume, edited by Joe Isaac and Stuart Macintyre, provides a broad ranging institutional history of the development of the federal system of conciliation and arbitration and its profound impacts on Australian politics, economy and society.