5.
(g) ensuring that awards provide minimum safety net entitlements for award-reliant employees which are consistent with Australian Fair Pay Commission decisions and which avoid creating disincentives to bargain at the workplace level; and
(h) supporting harmonious and productive workplace relations by providing flexible mechanisms for the voluntary settlement of disputes; and
(i) balancing the right to take industrial action for the purposes of collective bargaining at the workplace level with the need to protect the public interest and appropriately deal with illegitimate and unprotected industrial action; and
(j) ensuring freedom of association, including the rights of employees and employers to join an organisation or association of their choice, or not to join an organisation or association; and
(k) protecting the competitive position of young people in the labour market, promoting youth employment, youth skills and community standards and assisting in reducing youth unemployment; and
(l) assisting employees to balance their work and family responsibilities effectively through the development of mutually beneficial work practices with employers; and
(m) respecting and valuing the diversity of the work force by helping to prevent and eliminate discrimination on the basis of race, colour, sex, sexual preference, age, physical or mental disability, marital status, family responsibilities, pregnancy, religion, political opinion, national extraction or social origin; and
(n) assisting in giving effect to Australia's international obligations in relation to labour standards."
8 The constitutional basis upon which the "framework for cooperative workplace relations" is constructed is revealed by the definitions of "employee" and "employer" in ss 5 and 6 of the new Act. Those definitions are central to the operation of much of the new Act. The definition of "employee" in s 5(1) is an individual so far as he or she is employed, or usually employed, as described in the definition of "employer" in s 6(1), by an employer. Section 6(1) provides the "basic definition" of "employer" which applies unless the contrary intention appears (as it does in certain provisions). The definition is:
