A cabinet document reveals that the Howard government plotted the 1998 confrontation on Australia's waterfront.
The document urges an "interventionist approach", in which the government would provoke a strike on the nation's docks, allowing stevedores to replace unionised workers with non-union labour.
While the document, Waterfront Strategy, was released in mid-1998, the University of NSW historian Christopher Shiel has identified it as the first of two papers written by the consulting firm ACIL in 1997 and supposedly kept confidential.
The document was initially mistaken as advice from bureaucrats in the Department of Workplace Relations. But Dr Shiel, who has analysed the report for a book to be released this year, said its content had not been generated by public servants.
Dr Shiel said the document: "defines the terms of the activist strategy that the cabinet signed off on. It canvassed the prospect of industrial action that would give the stevedores the option of dismissing their employees. That means cabinet approved provoking a national strike and that is sensational."
The Maritime Union's national secretary, Paddy Crumlin, said the reports would "expose the conspiracy between the Howard government and Patricks that the High Court found was probable".
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