Fair Work Laws
Australia’s workplace relations framework must become a truly decentralised system of collective and individual agreements underpinned by a simple safety net of minimum standards.
A genuinely fair workplace relations system must be pro-employment, small-business friendly, responsive to changing domestic and international conditions and receptive to the needs of the unemployed and underemployed.
Our Fair Work Policies:
1. A flexible, simple safety net comprising:
- Legislated minimum standards.
- Appropriately balanced minimum wage and industry rates of pay.
- Other minimum employment conditions, where adopted by agreement.
2. Penalty rate reform.
3. Simplified agreement making, through a bargaining framework with:
- A range of agreement-making options, including statutory individual agreements.
- Clear statutory requirements for agreement-making that minimise reliance on precedent set by those approving agreements.
- Processes that drive cooperative and productive negotiations.
- Agreement content limited to matters that pertain to the employer/employee relationship and the circumstances of the enterprise concerned.
- Sensible limits for taking industrial action in support of bargaining positions.
- Streamlined agreement approval processes.
- Common sense capacity to overlook or correct minor procedural/paperwork errors.
4. Unfair dismissal laws that discourage speculative claims and see more matters determined on the merits of the employer’s decision to dismiss, and an effective exemption from unfair dismissal claims for businesses with fewer than 20 employees.
5. Regulate workplace bullying within the work health and safety framework.
6. Restore longstanding protections on freedom of association and unlawful termination.
7. Ensure effective enforcement of workplace relations laws in the construction industry through an adequately funded and empowered Office of the Australian Building and Construction Commissioner (ABCC).
8. Balanced right of entry laws.
9. Restore balance to transfer-of-business rules.
10. Recognise the right to engage in contracting and labour hire arrangements.
For more detail, view the workplace regulation section of Getting on With Business 2016.