Legal academic Ron McCallum predicted the laws would be replaced as employers, workers and unions struggle with "a huge wall of law" running to 1700 pages.
"It is this very legal edifice which carries some of the seeds of its destruction," he told the NSW Law Society.
The dean of law and professor of industrial law at the University of Sydney said employers would resent being told what they could and could not include in workplace agreements, under new "prohibited content" rules.
"Employers will sidestep the laws and make their own private arrangements," he said.
"When laws are overly prescriptive, people usually bypass them in one form or another," he said.
Professor McCallum predicted the Howard Government would be engulfed by legal battles because its workplace laws had failed to consider international conventions on freedom of association signed by Australia in 1973.
A number of provisions were hurriedly drafted and likely to be declared invalid, he warned.
American employers would rightfully regard a list of prohibited bargaining matters imposed in Australia as a gross interference with their liberty to contract, he said.
Workplace Relations Minister Kevin Andrews' spokesman said: "It's well-known that Ron McCallum is more comfortable in the company of the IR Club of the 1970s and 1980s, and we'd be staggered if he said anything different."
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