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UNIONS IN A CONTRARY WORLD: The Future of the Australian Trade Union Movements Ry David Peetz. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1998. xi, 243 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$65.95, cloth, ISBN 0-521-63055-X; US$25. 95, paper, ISBN 0-521-63950-6.
AUSTRALIAN society underwent major changes during the last decades of the twentieth century. The 1980s witnessed the collapse of ideas that Australians had adopted at the beginning of the twentieth century and that had shaped Australian society for most of that century. These ideas included "White Australia," industry protection (tariffs), wage arbitration (centralised wage fixing), state paternalism (the welfare state in particular), and imperial benevolence (the belief that Australia's prosperity and security were underwritten by association with the British Empire). At the federal level, successive Australian Labor Party governments between 1983 and 1996 moved away from traditional Labor values and embraced much of the economic rationalist thinking of the time. Since 1996 a Liberal-National Party coalition government has continued the shift away from a collectivist approach to a more individualist one in many areas of endeavour. In this environment, Australians have witnessed a retreat from the welfare state, the slashing of budgets in a host of policy areas, especially...