Canberra 2012

ALLA 6th Biennial Conference 2012

The sixth biennial ALLA national conference was held in Canberra on 16 and 17 November 2012.

Appropriately, given its location in our national capital, the theme for the conference was working in the public interest. The public interest has always been a central theme in Australian labour law, and recent disputes involving QANTAS and Victorian public hospital nurses have served to highlight the impact that our labour laws have, not only on the direct workplace participants but on the community more broadly. Debates concerning the content of our labour laws and the interests which they should protect continue to be played out, most recently in the Fair Work Act review process.

We were delighted to have three outstanding keynote speakers for the conference, who discussed collective bargaining from a domestic and international perspective – Justice Iain Ross, President of Fair Work Australia, Professor Keith Ewing of Kings College London and Judge Graeme Colgan of the Employment Court of New Zealand. Following the three keynote speakers, there was be a panel discussing collective bargaining under the Fair Work Act, including the role of Fair Work Australia in the bargaining process. Panelists included FWA Commissioner Barbara Deegan, Stuart Wood SC and Associate Professor Anthony Forsyth of RMIT.

For more information about the conference, please visit the conference website: http://law.anu.edu.au/coast/events/lablaw/conf.html

Pre-conference workshops on teaching and research

Prior to the formal commencement of the ALLA National Conference, two workshops – one on teaching and one on research - were held at the ANU College of Law, on Thursday 15 November 2012.