Melbourne Law School - Theses
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ItemGovernment promotion of job creation in Australia : regulatory objectives, instruments, and law( 2004)Direct job creation programs were a key element of the Australian Commonwealth Government's response to the policy challenge of persistent, high unemployment between 1974 and the year 2000. The emergence of job creation programs coincided with an evolving debate over the extent and legitimacy of the state's role in economic regulation, especially in relation to the labour market. Notwithstanding this coincidence, there has been no systematic effort to explore the purposes and nature of job creation programs from a regulatory perspective. Using three case studies of job creation programs implemented in Australia, this thesis tests propositions that are generated from regulatory theory, a field of scholarship broadly concerned with the relationship between the state, law and society. First, it was expected that job creation programs would serve a multiplicity of state objectives, including the immediate job creation goals of each program, as well as a number of broader labour market purposes. Second, it was anticipated that job creation programs would be implemented through a diverse range of economic and other non-legal regulatory strategies or instruments. Third, notwithstanding the broader regulatory character of job creation programs, it was expected that the programs would be expressed and constrained by various legal measures performing important regulatory functions. Finally, it was expected that the case studies would reveal interaction or responsiveness between policy objectives and the different legal and non-legal elements of each program. It is found that these propositions are largely borne out in the context of job creation programs. The immediate job creation objectives of each program were to assist people who were unemployed and considered to be disadvantaged in the labour market to obtain at least temporary employment positions. It is demonstrated that these immediate objectives reflected broader goals, such as the desire of the Commonwealth to redistribute employment opportunities to those people otherwise excluded from labour market participation. The Commonwealth Government relied upon a diverse range of regulatory instruments to achieve these goals, including financial subsidies or incentives to non-government employers, and contracting out of certain services, each supported by public sector management and oversight. Notwithstanding that these regulatory strategies were largely non-legal in nature, it is revealed that legal measures such as policy guidelines and contracts were used to ensure that regulated actors were accountable to the goals of each program. It is concluded that there was a significant degree of interaction between legal and non-legal forms of regulation in the context of these job creation programs. The findings in this thesis are significant for a number of reasons. Most importantly, this thesis establishes that job creation programs were significant state regulatory initiatives. This contradicts any notion of the state playing a lesser or somehow insubstantial role in labour market formation and regulation during the period studied. These findings have important implications for future studies of the job creation function of the-state, and point to new and potentially more insightful ways of theorising the relationship between the state and the labour market in Australia.