The failure of the family. (Society).(Archbishop George Pell)

THE FAMILY in Australia once enjoyed a privileged place at law and in social and economic policy. Nothing epitomised this more than the 1907 landmark judgment of Henry Bournes Higgins, president of the newly established Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration, in the Harvester case. As you know, the case established the basic wage, defined as a wage sufficient to support a working man, his dependent wife and three children "in frugal comfort". Higgins set the rate initially at two pounds and two shillings for a six-day week.

I appreciate that mentioning the name of Higgins in this august company is perhaps a little like invoking the authority of the devil in church, although Quadrant has always counted among its supporters a goodly number of social conservatives who support the traditional family. Many things have been said of him, particularly in the 1980s, and not all of it has been friendly. I do not want give the impression that I support everything he did and said over his long and often controversial public career, but I think it is worth reflecting for a moment on the social arrangements that were put in place around the time of Federation to support the family, and whether a similar shield of protection could or should be put in place around the family in our new economic situation where market forces are much more powerful.

My concern is much less with economic theory than with practical living conditions (although Higgins' system lasted for seventy years through a depression and two world wars), but even more with the social consequences for the family of this set of social arrangements. I am sure that defenders of the free market believe it is strong enough to bear examination of its spiritual costs, as well as its financial pluses and minuses.

The Harvester case is usually referred to as one of the key elements in the development of the raft of benevolent laws and social legislation--the "New Protection" as it was called--which Australian governments began to put in place in the wake of the economic crash of the 1890s. These laws were intended to minimise social conflict, especially conflict between labour and capital (thus the compulsory arbitration of industrial disputes before Higgins' court); to ensure a decent standard of living for workers and their families; and more broadly through the system of tariffs and economic protection, to encourage local industry and to maintain Australia's independence.

Higgins' Harvester judgment linked wages to human need, more than to profits or productivity. As historian John Hirst has remarked, it represented "an Australian act of defiance against the dictates of the market and an assertion that the country was to remain a true new world". It was also one of many measures in support of a great social experiment, keenly watched in Europe at the time, to build a peaceful, egalitarian and democratic society without revolution or violent upheaval. By and large that experiment was a tremendous success, and it is perhaps a function of that very success that over the last thirty years we have dispensed with most of the structures put in place to attain it, not just in the area of tariffs or industrial relations, but also in relation to the family.

Harvester placed the welfare of the family at the centre of social and economic policy from the beginnings of Federation. In a new nation concerned to minimise the divisions between rich and poor and to lay a solid basis for social stability this made perfect sense. As I will discuss in a moment, over the last thirty years an enormous amount of empirical work has been done on the relationship between marriage breakdown and family dysfunction, and the rise of the different social pathologies that pose such problems today for all of us, but especially for law enforcement agencies and health and welfare workers. One of the many things this research makes cleat' is that if you want to preserve social stability or to prevent it being slowly eroded, it makes good sense to buttress the stability of the family.

While this fact was not as well documented in 1907 as it is today, there was certainly hard evidence along these lines available to Higgins in forming his judgment, and we know he used it. In particular he drew on Seebohm Rowntree's study of poverty in York in 1898, which challenged the then-prevalent view that the poor were responsible for their own poverty by demonstrating that the more important factor in that city at that time for most of the poor was low wages.