The Corporatist Origins of Neoliberalism: Australia’s Accord, the Labour Movement and the Neoliberal Project

Abstract

This thesis examines the relationship of the vanguard period of neoliberalism in Australia to the Accord social contract, the latter being an agreement between the Australian Labor Party and Australian Council of Trade Unions from 1983 to 1996. The investigation focuses on the consensual incorporation of organised labour into a state-centred political project to revive capital accumulation after the economic crisis of the 1970s. It develops a theoretical framework regarding the state–civil society relationship, utilising the perspectives of Marx and Gramsci. It then deploys this in support and extension of Panitch’s theorisation of corporatism. The thesis finds that the Accord and vanguard neoliberalism were internally-related elements of class rule, challenging the predominant view that they were distinct or competing policy frameworks. The coterminal relationship is described as simultaneously deepening corporatism and advancing neoliberalism. The thesis finds that the origins of vanguard neoliberalism in Australia, sit uncomfortably alongside the dominant understanding in the scholarly literature of neoliberalism’s global development. The prevailing account posits that neoliberalism’s global origins are based in a project of the New Right and chiefly coercively imposed on trade unions. While vanguard neoliberalism in Australia did share many of the key elements attributed to it by the dominant narrative—most particularly the multi-layered disorganisation of labour and state-led restructuring of the economy to restore conditions for stable capital accumulation—the thesis establishes, by way of contrast, that a social democratic government in a consensual agreement with the labour movement was primarily responsible for its implementation. The thesis finds that destabilising the dominant narrative, through highlighting commonality and divergence across geographic locations, can further specify and enrich the conceptualisation of neoliberalism.