Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes) Bill 2023

The majority voted in favour of a motion to pass the bill as amended in the Senate. In parliamentary jargon, they voted to read the bill a third time. The bill will now return to the House of Representatives where our MPs will decide on whether they agree with the amendments.

What is the bill's main idea?

According to the bills digest:

The Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes) Bill 2023 will amend the Fair Work Act 2009 and related legislation to enact a wide range of measures, most notably including:

• introducing a new definition of casual employee and an employee choice pathway for eligible casual employees to change to permanent employment, if they wish to do so

• effectively reinstating the ‘multi-factorial’ test previously applied by courts and tribunals to determine if a worker is an employee or independent contractor

• preventing enterprise agreement wages from being undercut by the use of labour hire (‘same job, same pay’)

• introducing a new criminal offence for intentional wage theft

• allowing the Fair Work Commission to set minimum standards for some (but not all) ‘gig economy’ workers and road transport industry workers

• introducing a new Commonwealth criminal offence of industrial manslaughter

• introducing a rebuttable presumption that a first responder’s employment significantly contributed to the contraction of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and

• various other measures related to prohibiting discrimination against employees who have been, or continue to be, subjected to family and domestic violence; changing the defence to ‘sham contracting’ from a test of ‘recklessness’ to one of ‘reasonableness’; and a range of other workplace relations measures, which are not examined in this Digest.