The accord and employment.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)

SIR: Your editorial on "Industrial Relations Reform and Sunday Observance" (November 2005)is rightly critical of the "firm belief amongst lawyers that the law can not just affect human behaviour but change the realities of the economic system", You name Henry Bournes Higgins as one whose wage decisions (including what became known as the basic wage) were based on trying to achieve social standards while ignoring or not understanding the adverse effects on employment. Judicial names still occupying tribunal and court benches should also have been identified in the same vein, along with those of many others.

Justice Michael Kirby, for example, proclaimed at the centennial celebration of Australia's compulsory conciliation and arbitration system that "there is no room in this nation for industrial ayatollahs ... who see no future whatever in the Australian Industrial Relations Commission", who want it "closed down lock stock and barrel". Such people, he judged, "tend to live in a remote world of fantasy, inflaming themselves by their rhetoric into more and more unreal passions, usually engaged in serious dialogue only with people of like persuasion". By contrast, the determination of the minimum wage "remains an ongoing function Australians expect of their national tribunal for industrial conciliation and arbitration".

One would have thought that, having made such comments, His Honour would have recused himself from any industrial relations cases coming before the court. But undeterred, His Honour subsequently sat on the High Court hearings on the constitutionality of the government's spending on advertising its workplace relations proposals and reportedly drew a comparison with the advertising of the propaganda ...