The Australia of Citizenship: industrial relations, labouring ideals and alternative paths to 2025

By Dr. Carla Lipsig-Mummé

In Australia, in 2005, we are focusing, right now, on the radical transformation of the institutional framework for work and employment.

We are in profound disagreement as a society as to whether these changes will impoverish or enrich working people; whether they will destroy workplace citizenship or liberate entrepreneurial individualism; make Australia a more decent place to live or Americanise it, when 'Americanise' is code for all that we do not want to be.

Lipsig-Mummé concludes:

If we are to make the Australia of 2025 a society of citizenship, we might well begin by considering what the societal priorities of a new nationalism would be; what changes Australians need to make in institutions and the ethics of political action in order to make those changes occur; and how we go about beginning this process of quiet revolution.

(Keynote presentation to Work, Ethics and Values: Labouring Ideals in the 21st Century, A Conference of the Melbourne Catholic Commission on Justice, Peace and Development, September 8, 2005)