7th Dec 2023, 12:24 PM – Senate Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes) Bill 2023 - Second Reading - Agree with the bill's main idea

The majority voted in favour of a motion to agree with the main idea of the bill. In parliamentary jargon, they voted to read the bill a second time.

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.