ADVANCING AUSTRALIA FAIR: THE AUSTRALIAN FAIR PAY AND CONDITIONS STANDARD Peter Waring, Alex de Ruyter and John Burgess 1 Beneath our radiant Southern Cross We’ll toil with hearts and hands 2 Few could seriously claim that Australians are not toiling with ‘hearts and hands’. Per capita hours worked by Australians are now amongst the highest in the OECD and there is evidence that work has intensified for most (see Watson et al, 2003). There are high levels of temporal, numerical and functional flexibility and corporate profits are booming (ABS, Catalogue 5676.0, 2005). It is, therefore, unsurprising that the Howard Government’s WorkChoices industrial relations reforms have been greeted with widespread antipathy by all but fractions within the business community (Lewis, 2005). The efforts of the Howard government to prove an impetus for these reforms seems unlikely to accord with the actual working experiences of Australians, many of whom have already traded away conditions and provided employers with considerable flexibility under previous bargaining rounds or individual contracts or through the award simplification process. The $50m. saturation advertising campaign, designed to sell the reforms to the electorate, has had little impact on public sentiment (Humphries, 2005), Nonetheless, the Coalition’s slim majority in the Senate means that WorkChoices is likely to proceed into law with few concessions. In 1 The authors would like to thank the journal editors for their useful suggestions. Editorial support was provided by Kate Flint. 2 Second verse, Advance Australia Fair