Compulsory Arbitration and the Australasian Model of State Development: Policy Transfer, Learning, and Innovation

Policymakers transfer knowledge about policies, ideas, and institutions between political systems, learning from one another in a process of policy learning;¹ lesson drawing;² diffusion;³ or policy transfer.⁴ As Dolowitz and Marsh observe: "While terminology and focus often vary . . . studies are concerned with the process by which knowledge about policies, administrative arrangements, institutions, and ideas in one political system (past or present) are used in the development of policies, administrative arrangements, institutions and ideas in another political system."⁵ The literature on policy transfer has mainly addressed how policymakers glean potential lessons and use those experiences to devise reforms.⁶ It asks questions about why policy transfer occurs; who was involved; what was transferred; from where; the extent of the transfer; and how the process of transfer is "related to policy 'success' or 'failure.'"⁷ Greener distinguishes this from policy learning, where policymakers make deliberate adjustments in response to experience or new information, and learning is evident when policy changes as a result of this process. Some scholars see policy transfer as a subset of policy learning, since these are often part of the same procedure.⁸ Oliver and Pemberton advance a model, for example, of how ideas are absorbed through learning, in which bureaucratic battles ensue to institutionalize a new policy, and reformers' success in securing support can be critical in determining the extent of policy learning and transfer.⁹

Processes of policy transfer and learning are not new phenomena. They have a history, as Rodgers showed for the transatlantic world between the 1870s and World War II. Just as "transnational traffic in reform ideas, politics and legislative devices" flowed around the North Atlantic economy,¹⁰ so did traffic in ideas and policies flow across the Pacific Ocean, linking Australia, New Zealand, and California, and between New Zealand and Australia across the Tasman Sea. The seven colonies of Australasia, which became the British dominions of Australia and New Zealand, are still recognized as the "showcase of progressive politics in the 1890s."¹¹ Their pioneering enterprise of "building a New World,"¹² driven by utopian ideals, necessarily entailed policy transfer, learning, and innovation.

Our contribution to policy history is to show how the adoption of compulsory arbitration—where industrial disputes were settled in a tribunal, with attendance and rulings legally binding on both unions and employers—resulted from a process of policy learning and transfer within the trans-Tasman world of Australia and New Zealand over two decades. The traffic in ideas was international and traveled both ways along imperial networks between Britain and continental Europe, Canada, the United States, and the settler colonies of British Australasia, so that the Antipodean experiments influenced political and social debates even in the democratic exemplar of the United States.¹³ Progressives such as the American Henry Demarest Lloyd highlighted compulsory arbitration as one of Australasia's "advanced institutions"; as not merely a "novelty in a subordinate field of legislation" but, as Lloyd wrote in 1900, "a new growth of the living organism of modern society."¹⁴ After reporting Lloyd's visit to New Zealand in 1899 and his praise of the "foremost civilized country in the world, in its ability to use the common resources for the common good," the New York Times advertised his forthcoming volume, A Country Without Strikes, in 1900, which studied the workings of the New Zealand Arbitration Court.¹⁵ The compulsory arbitration case of policy transfer, learning, and innovation across the trans-Tasman world provides a key example of a shared exceptionalism that is overlooked by national histories. Whereas the Australian narrative portrays compulsory arbitration as the "distinctive Australian solution to industrial warfare," it is often claimed as distinctive to New Zealand.¹⁶ A policy-transfer approach unravels why and how the seven colonies of Australasia as a region of the British world departed from the British model of "collective laissez-faire" in their pursuit of what Beilharz terms an "alternative modernity."¹⁷

The architect of compulsory arbitration in New Zealand, William Pember Reeves, later explained why...