way to go, mark. keep it up. the more you try to sell howard's dickensian poison, the longer the liberals will wander blind through the political swamplands.

Mark Christensen forgets that liberty is nothing without equality and fraternity. He is arguing from the false premise that Bill Kelty, Paul Keating and other pre-Work Choices advocates of reform envisaged a time when employer and employee could negotiate freely, unmediated by unions or government, each to their mutual advantage and convenience and consequent to that the common good. Neither Keating nor Kelty would accept this Utopian version of their industrial relations philosphy, and "the Liberal party couldn't paint this big picture" of Work Choices simply because it wasn't true. The "freedom ideal" for employees and the left has always been about the freedom to organise with others to achieve optimum working conditions for the majority. The "freedom ideal" for employers and the right is about being free of regulation and controls to achieve maximum efficiency and profitability. Management of the tension between these "freedoms" in a western industrialised democracy obviously requires more than political idealism and more than political skill. John Howard, was no idealist, but an ideologue with political cunning who exploited the disunity of the disheartened ALP for over a decade, but his heartlessness and lack of scruples ultimately made him lose his head in pushing through Work Choices. So how astute was that? Hopefully in Rudd we'll get some combination of leftish idealism and moderate realpolitik. He is after all promoting the Australian "fair go" and fairness is not about libertarian ideals, but about an agreed optimum outcome for all parties. I think his combination of heart and intelligence will bring real balance and progress in the complexities of our federal industrial system. His diplomatic skills won't go astray either.

I am proud to be a union official.
Proud to be labeled thug, evil, anti competitive, what ever those who ran last in the election called me and my proud movement.
I am proud to have been invited no not an invasion, to draw up workplace agreements by good honest bosses who wanted nothing to do with workchoices.
I look at a growing list of me too, isms from todays Liberal leader including the admission workchoices is dead.
I wonder how far some would go in lowering living standards of so many so some can prosper.
I question the understanding of high to middle income earners of impacts of workchoices on already low income earners.
I find the author needs to get out and meet those victims then tell me why we ever expected they should suffer so our country would prosper.
Last workchoices is dead so too is the government that imposed it on us without notice.
The Australian Labor Party must never so badly treat its country like workchoices architects did.
I hope those low income workers will drink a beer to the return of a fair go at work this Christmas.
You can rest easy this ALP government is here for a long stay and will never so badly use its mandate to impose something so unfair on us.

Disclosure: I've worked with Rudd (who's also my MP), attended a semi-private economics seminar with Howard, and knew Mark Christensen for some years.

I agree with Mark's drift, and one of my biggest disappointments with Howard was his failure to lead in developing more widespread understanding of what constitutes good economic policy, policy in the public interest. For example, once when he had an opportunity to explain the merits of free trade, he pandered to protectionist ignorance and said "We have to make concessions to other countries so that they will take our exports." What absolute nonsense! We import because we can raise our living standards, with greater variety, better quality and lower prices for goods and services we want. We export so that we can import! In addition, trade raises our productivity and incomes because we can focus on things which we do well, such as coal-mining, and buy in things, such as tvs and small cars, which we can't make competitively. The community as a whole derives greater benefits the more open is the trade.

Finland was mentioned above. It's transformation began with rapid, unilateral reductions in border protection in the '70s, that was a far bigger factor than the government's role in the economy.

As an employer, my attitude towards employees was (1) they were people first, employees second; (2) that they would be most productive and most likely to stay if they were happy and fulfilled in their work and felt that they were improving their prospects for future employment, e.g. through high degree of responsibility and access to training. One of my daughters now works as an engineer with a global consulting firm which takes a similar approach. In an innovative, knowledge-based economy, you need to be a "good" employer to succeed. Competition rather than IR regulation is the best way to drive that.

The article shows a lot of ignorance and naïvety about human nature.

<<...free market principles aren’t a cold, heartless policy setting.>>

Initially, no. But that's certainly what they'd become given enough time to create a society with a clear and sharp division between the super-rich and the desperately poor.

<<Their shunning of state-sponsored paternalism actually commends a resounding faith in humanity.>>

A humanity that would soon be replaced by predatory capitalism if we had a totally free market devoid of any regulations at all.

Balance is what's needed. Dreaming of a socialist utopia is no more absurd than dreaming of a capitalist utopia.

It is complete garbage to say that employees and employers can bargain on a level playing field. Employees need more than just bargaining 'ability', they need bargaining 'power'. But when it all becomes an employer's market, very few would have any bargaining power at all. Anyone who believes otherwise must be either living in a kumbaya fantasy where greed doesn't exist, or they know full-well the consequences of a totally free market and don't care, because they're in the wealthy minority who'll benefit.

I couldn't stop shaking my head in disbelief of the short-sightedness of the miners in WA wanting Workchoices to stay; obviously not realising how much worse those AWAs would to look once the mining boom was over.

It was argued that the best job security is the ability to get another job immediately if you're sacked, or that any job is better than no job. But personally, I'd rather be living on the dole, while furiously searching for work that was scarce, than be forced to work 100 hours a week and never see my children for a pay check that didn't even cover the rent – all because the economic cycle had decided that it was now going to be an employer's market.

Free market zealots must have a very narrow view of what liberty is. They seem to believe that liberty is something to be afforded. The rest of us can have all the our liberty the rich decide we can have.

With most things in life, there is some good and some bad. With work choices, the negative aspects overwhelmed the good.

However, the previous labour legislation had numerous faults that made hiring people very risky for small business. I have seen friends held financial hostage by employees fired for gross misconduct.

The cost of an HR / paper trail systems routinely employed by large businesses to prevent against such litigation is crippling for small businesses. The new legislation has the opportunity to:

- Provide uniform and simpler legislation,
- Provide exemptions for small mom and pop business of say less than 20 people.

To reverse all the changes from the last 10 years would be to forget why the people dumped the labor party then as they have the coalition now.