New research by a leading workplace economist suggests the crisis in ''insecure work'' presented by the Australian labour movement in recent years may have been overstated. Instead, more Australians are favouring part-time and casual work over punishing full-time jobs.

At Melbourne University on Wednesday night, Flinders University economist Sue Richardson presented the university's annual Foenander lecture on industrial relations.

In her speech, Professor Richardson pointed to widespread evidence that more Australians are opting out of full-time work, often because of the long hours.

''People are choosing flexible forms of employment as a way of fitting the way they want to work with the other dimensions of their lives,'' Professor Richardson said, speaking before Wednesday night's speech.

Many households now have at least two people earning a wage, making job security less critical than it was when there was a predominantly male breadwinner supporting an entire family.

Today, of all male employees, just 9 per cent are the sole earner in a couple with children. (Four per cent are women.)

The ACTU and many unions have campaigned hard on the negative effects of increased casual, part-time and contract work since the 1980s. About 40 per cent of Australia's workforce is now employed in a non-permanent job.

Professor Richardson, who sits on the Fair Work Commission's expert panel that sets the nation's minimum wage levels, said many people in non-permanent jobs suffered extreme difficulties from uncertain hours and variable income.

''I'm not saying that the current way that everybody works is ideal at all,'' she said. But Professor Richardson said the overwhelming quantitative evidence showed shrinking numbers of Australians wanted to work full time. ''Particularly the way Australia organises full-time work, which is long hours of work … compared to other OECD countries. Working longer hours than you want to is much more harmful to your mental health and your job satisfaction than working zero hours,'' she said. ''And yet all we hear about is under-employment.''

She also argued that Australia's system of providing casual workers with an extra payment of about 25 per cent - which she said was virtually unique in the world - provided protection from the low wages seen in other developed nations with high levels of insecure work. ''I'm not saying everybody is doing fine and that these flexible forms of employment are completely harmless, because that's not what I think,'' she said. ''But I do want to shift the way we think about this to say that, ideally, people will have choice among reasonable options, and [that many], given choice among reasonable options, will choose forms of work other than full-time.''