ABSTRACT
For the past five or six years in Australia the need to redress perceived skills deficiencies among workers, end restrictive work practices and industrial relations, heighten productivity levels, and diminish both the lack of competitiveness of Australian capitalism, and the failure of education, have all been widely accepted. There have been dire warnings of the consequences of allowing Australian business to slip further behind its international competitors, of a failure to orient education and training closely and explicitly to the demands of capitalist rationality and the values of the ‘free’ market. More often than not this urgent need is expressed in terms of economic imperatives and the ‘national interest’. To this extent, Australia mirrors the experience of other advanced industrial states, such as the USA and Great Britain, over much the same time scale (Aronowitz and Giroux, 1986, pp. 200-1).
