Just months after retiring as a senior Fair Work Commission member, Brendan McCarthy has launched an extraordinary attack on the tribunal's role and operation, claiming it is not the appropriate body to establish minimum standards, its members lack economic competence, and it misallocates resources.
The Productivity Commission has denied it is "sceptical" of the need for unfair dismissal laws, and says the questions it will ask in its IR inquiry is whether they achieve their purpose and if there is a better way of doing things.
The body charged with reviewing the Fair Work Act has suggested that centralised wage-setting under awards might hamper the effectiveness of market signals and lead to artificially inflated pay rates, in a recently-released report on labour mobility in Australia.
