Many people in Australia are concerned with the apparent trend towards the increased casualisation of the Australian workforce. In a recent paper published in this journal, for example, Campbell and Burgess (2001) reported on survey-based figures on the extent of casualisation collected by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), Australia's central data collection agency. These data indicate that persons employed on a casual basis represented 26.9 per cent of the workforce in 1998, double the level sixteen years earlier.