Disillusionment with the system led to a royal commission. In 1899 a new law made under the Conciliation and Arbitration Act. which gave the Minister for Labour of the New South Wales Government the power to mediate any industrial dispute. However, this also failed because employers were not legally bound to follow the directions of the Minister. In proposing change, Bernhard Wise said:“I believe that those who have most experience of courts of law will be the first to admit that their machinery is unsuitable for dealing with these subjects. Not only are they overburdened with business – and so there would be delay where urgency was of the utmost importance if we would prevent industrial warfare – but their forms of procedure and their rules do not readily lend themselves to dealing with these delicate questions, half of fact or entirely of fact, that would have to be determined by the tribunal called upon to interpret an industrial agreement. It is not our judges who determine facts under our system, but our juries; and surely everyone will see that there would be a waste of time, a needless cost, and in the end a most unsatisfactory result, if it were necessary to refer on every occasion to a jury, or even to a bench of lawyers, the question whether or not an industrial agreement had been broken, or whether the altered conditions of a trade required the rate of wages to be lowered or raised.”
