The Australian Council of Trade Unions’ call to scrap the Productivity Commission because of its “long history of pushing failed economic models of privatisation and deregulation” is not just an attack on one of the nation’s great institutional pillars of rational public policy analysis in Australia.

It also shows that the modern trade union movement has rejected the economic reform agenda of the 1980s and 1990s that, under the Hawke-Keating Labor and then the Howard-Costello Coalition governments made Australia a less protected and more outward-looking and prosperous nation.