Why is Australia’s union movement in decline?

Its detractors called it the “most radical shake-up of Australia’s industrial relations system in decades” — a “throwback from the ’70s” that promised to “cripple” or “bring disaster” to the business community.

The countervailing view was that Labor’s new workplace reforms, secured on the final sitting day of Parliament, constituted nothing short of a “victory for working people” across the country.

But the very prominence of either claim, others say, conceals the reality the reforms are of themselves unlikely to halt the decades-long decline of unions, much less return the union movement to the heights witnessed in its halcyon days.