PART 1: RAY EVANS AND HR NICHOLLS

It is truly an honour for me to deliver the Ray Evans Oration, at this, the 2025 National Conference of the HR Nicholls Society. We are just shy of its 40^th Anniversary. Ray would be so pleased to see that. I wish he were here.

Ray was an inquisitive character who read widely. Like many of his generation he had been raised on the great works of English literature, the King James Bible and the plays of Shakespeare. Many of the titles for HRN Conferences originate in these works:- “For the Labourer is Worthy of his Hire” (Gospel of Luke), “Fair is Foul and Foul is Fair” (Macbeth), or my favourite “Our Careful Wives” taken from Henry V: “Let us our lives, our souls, our debts, our careful wives, our children and our sins, lay on the king”.

Sometimes Dr Johnson got a look-in, hence the speech: “I Pride Myself on Being a Clubbable Man”. At his funeral Ray was rightly described as ‘Valiant-For-Truth” the name of a memorable character in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress- another great work of English literature.

Ray could quote English poets from memory. Once we had a spirited argument about Blake’s poem “Jerusalem” and the meaning of the “dark satanic mills”. Ray maintained the dark satanic mills was a reference to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. I went for a more prosaic meaning. The thing that amazed me about this love of literature and poetry was that Ray was an Engineer. Most of the Engineers I knew hardly graduated from comic books!

I assume the Evans’ were originally Welsh. Ray could certainly sing in a fine Welsh Baritone voice. You may have heard the Welsh hymn: Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah? It has a chorus “Bread of Heaven, Bread of Heaven”. The Welsh fans sing it at football games. Ray and Jill had a House in Marysville that burned to the ground in the Black Saturday bushfires. Miraculously the shed at the back survived. This was a great stroke of luck since it was housing all the papers of Bert Kelly at the time. The Bert Kelly records were saved intact from the fire. Ray would describe it in song as: “Shed of Evans, Shed of Evans, Keep them safe for evermore”

Ray’s younger brother Derek was an ordained Methodist Minister and a Chaplain at Monash University. The Evans were very much a Methodist family. Old time Methodists were against sin, dancing and alcohol. They became much more liberal in the latter half of the 20^th Century and joined the Uniting Church. Ray always claimed they lost their distinctiveness and unique identity: “It was all downhill once they gave up their opposition to the grog” he told to me.

On one occasion Ray and Jill were coming to our house for dinner, and he called to see his elderly mother on the way. He told me that she was failing and nodded off during the visit. He tried to rouse her. He told her he was going around to have dinner with the Treasurer: “You know him Mother-the Treasurer Peter Costello”. She roused. She sat bolt upright. She opened her eyes. She looked at him fiercely and said: “Be careful Raymond. He may offer you alcohol!”

I am sure I did. But let me assure you that Ray never needed me to lead him astray!

Ray was born in September 1939 the week war was declared. His full name was Neville Raymond Evans. Family lore has it that he was given the name “Neville” after British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. After the defeat of Poland and the occupation of Norway, Churchill became Prime Minister and Chamberlain came to be regarded as weak and a dupe. So, the name Neville was never used and he became Ray.

He studied engineering at Melbourne University and later taught electrical engineering at Deakin University. He started off on the moderate Left as President of the Melbourne University ALP Club. One has to remember this was different to the Labour Club which was the hard left at the University and pro-Communist.

When the ALP member for the Federal Seat of Batman, Sam Benson, was expelled from the Labor Party for refusing resign from the Defend Australia Committee (a group associated with BA Santamaria) Ray resigned from the ALP and ran Benson’s 1966 re-election campaign. Benson won as an Independent. From then on Ray was a pariah with Labor. To be truthful, he was probably a pariah much before then. And he moved closer to the DLP.

Ray had lots of funny stories of his time as an undergraduate student alongside communists and others on the far Left. One related to PP McGuiness. The young Paddy, an Anarchist at the time, was down from Sydney for a public meeting on nuclear disarmament or the American Alliance or some such. According to Ray, uninvited at a public meeting, he mounted the stage, held up his arms, looked out on the audience and wailed “Stop the Bomb. I want to live”. He kept this wail up as he was grabbed and forcibly removed from the building.

Paddy did live, of course, and went on to work for the Whitlam Government. Later he became Editor of the Australian Financial Review and even later in life ended up as Editor of Quadrant. I think Ray was Chair of Quadrant or at least on the Board at the time.

Ray attributed one of his favourite sayings to those communist students.

As things went badly the communist leadership would summon the comrades and boost their morale by reminding them; ‘Remember comrades, worse is better”. According to Marxist theory, crisis would provoke the proletariat to rise and hasten the Revolution.

Marxists believed it. For Ray it was gallows humour. When things were going badly Ray would often remind us that worse is better.

Ray came up with the idea of the HR Nicholls Society and plucked Henry Richard Nicholls out of historical obscurity, and made him, for a time, famous again!

In January 1986 he drafted a letter suggesting a Seminar on Industrial Relations reform, and recruited John Stone, Barrie Purvis, and me to sign it. It was a most mischievous idea to invite Sir John Kerr to address the inaugural dinner – such naughtiness! None of us anticipated the reaction to the Conference. It was a public relations triumph.

We did not expect condemnation of our very small event would extend all the way to the Prime Minister (Bob Hawke) or that our efforts would become the subject of Questions without Notice and rebuke in House of Representatives!

After such a smashing success, Ray used the model for other causes –the defence of the Constitution (Samuel Griffith Society) the pitfalls of Indigenous separatism (the Bennelong Society) and the Lavoisier Group named after the French Scientist Antoine Lavoisier who is credited with discovering the role of Oxygen in combustion.

The Lavoisier Society was an early contributor to the debate on greenhouse gases. Ray wrote a polemic called ‘Thank God for Carbon”.  The front cover of the pamphlet bore a copy of Michelangelo’s magisterial fresco: the creation of Adam. The point was that without carbon there would be no Adam.

What would Ray say if he were here today and surveying the industrial relations landscape?

I think he would begin by saying: remember comrades, worse is better.

PART 2: WHERE HAS PRODUCTIVITY GONE?

In Victoria taxpayer funded projects run tediously late and massively over budget. Organised crime has infiltrated building sites and is extracting protection money. All this is built into the cost which is ultimately paid by the taxpayer.

In Sydney, an ABC Radio host contracted to fill-in on five shifts was taken off air after three. She sued for political discrimination and was awarded $70,000 in damages. The ABC tells us it has spent $2.5 million on the case. That’s an expensive couple of shifts. Of course, taxpayers pay for that too.

The OECD average growth in labour productivity between 2010 and 2024 was a paltry 0.9% but in that period, Australia managed to average only 0.5% per year. The OECD average is poor but compared to it we are a laggard. In Australia, labour productivity is around the same level it was eight years ago.

By contrast, in the decade 1995-2005, labour productivity in Australia grew at 2.2% per year. It underpinned real wage increases year on year. During the eleven years I was Treasurer to June 2007 average real wages grew 21.5%.

If you look at the last eleven years in Australia, average real wages have fallen. Today in 2025 real wage levels are at the level they were back in 2012. No wonder people feel they can’t get ahead- no real wage increase in a decade and more of what they get is taken away in tax.

Let me take another example of how our workplaces operate. I quote from a recent newspaper report (The Australian 25 September 2025):-

“Since announcing in 2022 that addressing systemic non-compliance in the University sector was a priority, the Fair Work Ombudsman has entered into enforceable undertakings with Latrobe University, the University of Sydney, the University of Melbourne, the University  of Technology Sydney, the University of Newcastle, Charles Sturt University and Griffith University; it has secured court penalties against University of Melbourne; and it has opened legal action against the University of NSW. About $128m has been paid back to 50,000 employees….

The National Tertiary Education Union says this has become a $278m national scandal affecting more than 100,000 university staff across Australia…”

Now all parties, employers, unions, and employees should abide by the law. That is a fundamental principle of the HR Nicholls Society. And the FWO is doing its job.

But Universities are run by highly intelligent people. They have enormous resources. They have HR Departments and lawyers on tap. How is it that these Universities all failed to comply with Awards? Do you suppose these citadels of woke sat down individually or together to prepare a cunning plan to cheat their employees?

Hardly likely.

These non-profit organisations are funded with taxpayers’ money. Complying with an Award doesn’t cost any person in university management anything at all. It doesn’t cost a shareholder or investor a cent. They have no incentive to cheat. This wasn’t malevolence.

Universities have been caught just like Coles and Woolworths, and the National Australia Bank by confusing complexity. The “Modern Awards” that apply to these Universities, and to these companies, are so vague and so complex that despite best efforts no-one is really sure how to comply strictly with them. Employees are at risk of under payment. Employers are at risk of prosecution. This is a system that is in neither’s interest.

There is nothing ‘modern” about these Awards. A better name for them would be “Arcane Awards”.

And these are the big employers. What do the companies that can’t afford expensive HR Departments, and the fancy lawyers do? They are in a legal minefield.

This is where the complexity of Australia’s workplace laws lands us. Businesses and Universities are scrambling to figure out what duties can be done by what classifications, what hours trigger what breaks and what penalty rates start at what times. No wonder productivity is waning. Let me repeat. No-one is trying to cheat anyone here. They run the risk of non-compliance because sane rational people cannot clearly work out what it is that they have to do to comply.

Does anyone in a position of influence think this is a problem?

We recently had a high-profile Roundtable convened by the Treasurer to discuss Australia’s productivity failings. Was there a focus on these sorts of issues? Was our system of workplace relations even raised?

You can imagine that having created this framework, the Government would not be keen to have it examined and measured for its productivity outcomes.  But did any of the handpicked participants raise it? What about our “Productivity Commission”? Does our Productivity Commission think that Arcane Awards, same job same pay legislation, legislated work from home, right to disconnect laws, the state of commercial building sites, has an effect on productivity?

Does it?

It had nothing to say about this at the Roundtable.

I am told, for tactical reasons, the PC doesn’t raise things likely to get a hostile reaction from the Government. These days the PC has gone pc (politically correct).

The Productivity Commission was established in 1998 as an independent statutory agency. Members have statutory protection and can only be removed for misbehaviour. The reason they have this protection is so they can tell the Government and the public “home truths” when they are needed. If the PC is not going to use its statutory independence to tell inconvenient truths, then it is not going to be of much use. The Treasury Department has become adept at telling the Government the things it wants to hear. The PC will not add very much if it goes down the same path.

The Productivity Roundtable came up with no outcomes which will significantly boost our productivity. It managed to avoid talking about things that really might make a difference like:-

-lower energy costs for business;

– real tax reform (as opposed to smash and grab raids for revenue);

-ending wasteful Government spending;

-reforming workplace relations.

How can we hope to break the productivity drought when there is no honest analysis of the factors contributing to it?

We should discuss the real things holding back productivity, and then, more importantly, we should urgently reform them.

Leave aside the gallows humour. Worse is not better. Better outcomes will only come from better policy.

Our drift into decline will only continue if we choose to ignore its causes.