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  • Assessing the Accord and Labour's Role in Neoliberalism
  • Sarah Gregson, Frank Bongiorno, Ian Hampson, Lee Rhiannon, Tim Lyons, and Elizabeth Humphrys
Elizabeth Humphrys, How Labour Built Neoliberalism: Australia's Accord, the Labour Movement and the Neoliberal Project (Leiden: Brill, 2018). pp. xx + 268. AUD $163.0 cloth (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2018). pp. xx + 268. AUD $39.0 paper.

Introduction: Sarah Gregson, Deputy Editor, Labour History

In 2018, the publication of Elizabeth Humphrys' book How Labour Built Neoliberalism sparked considerable interest with its thought-provoking arguments about "vanguard neoliberalism," the 1983–96 Prices and Incomes Accord, and the significance of this "social contract" for the fortunes of the Australian union movement and working people. The Sydney launch of Humphrys' book, which I attended, attracted a large and diverse range of people, including young students interested in the period as "historical"; older people who had lived through it as workers, activists and academics; and Australian Labor Party (ALP) supporters interested in understanding this crucial element of their party's political path. Given this range of interest, and because the Accord period is so contentious, a single review of this book seemed insufficient and risked prioritising one perspective over the many others we could have solicited. Alternatively, a "roundtable" approach would air a diversity of views that capture the debate about this important period in Australia's history, particularly within the labour movement.

Elizabeth Humphrys is a political economist who teaches and researches in the School of Communication at the University of Technology Sydney. Humphrys' account of the Accord period in How Labour Built Neoliberalism takes issue with those commentators who presuppose that the Accord and neoliberalism embodied radically different tenets. On the contrary, she writes, the project of restoring respectable levels of capital accumulation in Australia after the economic crises of the 1970s involved both a social [End Page 135] contract and neoliberalism operating in tandem.1 Drawing union leaders into a national, or corporatist, effort to increase profitability– and so it was argued at the time, create jobs and allow trickle-down social benefits for workers–laid the basis for an entirely neoliberal agenda that instead prioritised the market, removed industry protections, gutted protective regulation, undermined government obligations for social welfare, and encouraged notions of individual, rather than collective, social responsibility.


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Figure 1.

"Let There Be No Mistake"

[Bob Hawke] "Let There Be No Mistake … Wage Increases Outside the Guidelines Are Definitely Not On!" Courtesy Geoff Pryor (artist). Originally published in Canberra Times, 5 May 1983. Available via National Library of Australia, accessed January 2020, http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-156451026

Humphrys argues that, after seven years of Fraser Liberal–National Party coalition government strategies, the straitjacket of wage restraint could not have been achieved by the business sector acting alone. Although the industrial wars of the 1970s had been to some extent enervating for [End Page 136] the labour movement, union membership density and organisation made it, paradoxically, well placed to deliver the extent of change required by capital. She also demonstrates that labour leaders were attracted to the idea of a social contract with government, swayed by the promise of seats at various influential tables.2 In return, however, the one-sided deal they struck–wage restraint and industrial passivity in return for increases in the social wage–precipitated union membership and organisational decline, fractured delegate networks, delivered bargaining outcomes capped at levels equivalent to wage and condition cuts, and delegitimised industrial action as an appropriate response to capital's onslaughts.

Therefore, Humphrys' work is a much-needed corrective to the celebratory air at the Accord's 30th anniversary celebrations that Humphrys evocatively describes as akin to "a party in a cemetery."3 Her research uses insights from Marx, Gramsci and Panitch to develop an analysis of how the Labor government implemented the Accord process to "enwrap" civil society in a national project of restructuring and, in so doing, effect a significant transformation of the economy, politics and industrial relations.4 In pointing out some of the unique characteristics of neoliberalism's triumph in Australia, Humphrys enriches our understanding of the different pathways and contexts, including the incorporation of...

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