This evaluation of the Fair Work Act 2009 and the Workplace Relations Amendment (Transition to Forward with Fairness) Act 2008 was formally assessed as meeting the requirements of a post-implementation review by the Office of Best Practice Regulation. 

The review was conducted by a panel comprising Reserve Bank Board Member Dr John Edwards, former Federal Court Judge, the Honourable Michael Moore and noted legal and workplace relations academic Professor Emeritus Ron McCallum AO. 

Over the last 20 years, both the legal framework and the nature of Australian industrial relations have profoundly changed. Arbitration has given way to bargaining, and more recently a federal system has given way to a national system. While there are important distinctions between each of the four legislative frameworks for industrial relations since the shift towards a greater focus on enterprise bargaining in 1993, they also have a good deal in common, including an emphasis on bargaining at the enterprise level, constraints on resort to arbitration, a safety net of minimum conditions, and recognition of a right to strike in pursuit of a collective agreement.

The Panel concluded the effects of the Fair Work legislation have been broadly consistent with the objects set out in s. 3 of the FW Act. It also found the legislation is operating broadly as intended.

After considering the economic aspects of the Panel concludes that since the FW Act came into force important outcomes such as wages growth, industrial disputation, the responsiveness of wages to supply and demand, the rate of employment growth and the flexibility of work patterns have been favourable to Australia’s continuing prosperity, as indeed they have been since the transition away from arbitration two decades ago. 

The exception has been productivity growth, which has been disappointing in the FW Act framework and in the two preceding frameworks over the last decade. The Panel is not persuaded that the legislative framework for industrial relations accounts for this productivity slowdown.

The report details 56 recommendations. Some of the most important of these are intended to encourage productivity growth, and others to enhance equity in the workplace. Many other recommendations are to correct anomalies that have been revealed in the operation of the FW Act or to remove defects in the machinery of the legislation.