Abstract
The State School Teachers decision of 1929 was recently overturned in the High Court (June 1986) thereby opening up the possibility for federal teachers organizations to obtain registration in the federal arbitration system, and eventually obtain one or more federal awards. The 1929 decision by the High Court of Australia was a significant decision in education and industrial relations, because it prevented state teachers and other public employees obtaining access to federal awards for the next 54 years. The decision, however, was veiled in unsettled legal argument, because the High Court overturned much of its expansive thinking of the 1918–25 period. Later generations of academic lawyers described the decision as a ‘bad one’ or ‘an anomalous decision’, but they and the current High Court failed to give any satisfactory explanation of why the Court had reached its decision. This paper offers such an explanation, arguing that the decision was not based on law (or the educational situation) but on the High Court's perceptions of the politics of federal-state relations in the period. The state teachers who had asked for a High Court ruling on the application of the Commonwealth's industrial relations powers (section 51 XXXV of the Constitution) to their work and employment were thus dragged momentarily onto the centre stage of Australian politics and law. They found themselves denied access to a federal award because the High Court felt that the federal arbitration ‘experiment’ had caused too much embarrassment to the federal system of government.