‘Militant’ unions are a thing of the past — just like strong wages growth

One of the hardest things to learn as you get older is how difficult it is to persuade someone with facts alone.

Have a look at the graph below.

It shows how many working days have been lost to industrial disputes in Australia since early 1985.

The most recent data is for the September quarter this year, when 11,700 working days were lost.

The peak of 699,200 days lost was in the December quarter of 1992.

Notice how something dramatic occurred after 1992 that severely reduced how many days were being lost to strikes?

That was a watershed moment in Australian industrial relations.

In 1993, the Keating Labor government passed the Industrial Relations Reform Act which legislated the full introduction of enterprise bargaining, and for the first…