NSW's Modern Slavery Act has won Royal Assent after three years in limbo, imposing reporting obligations on local councils, government agencies and statutory corporations and establishing an independent anti-slavery commissioner.
Federal Labor's 'Same Job, Same Pay' legislation introduced into Parliament yesterday has won the endorsement of IR legal expert Anthony Forsyth, who says it represents the "next necessary step" in addressing the undesirable effects of labour hire workers being engaged for lengthy periods on lower wages and conditions than direct employees.
Federal Opposition leader Anthony Albanese this morning confirmed his determination to make working conditions a major battleground in the upcoming Federal election with his introduction of a private member's bill aimed at erasing the gap between directly-employed and labour hire workers.
Unions have branded further legislation by the Morrison Government to protect migrant workers as "inadequate, given the scale and of nature" of exploitation, a view endorsed by a leading academic researcher.
Three big unions appear to have pulled out of giving evidence to a Federal parliamentary inquiry that will hear from two unregistered organisations that are signing up workers opposed to workplace vaccination mandates.
The Victorian Supreme Court has thrown out an interlocutory bid to quash State Chief Medical Officer Brett Sutton's public health orders that mandate workplace vaccinations and to stop him issuing further orders.
The Liberal chair of a Federal Parliamentary inquiry into the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the workplace and the FWC has billed it as the "nation's only Inquiry into vaccine mandates".
The Federal Opposition has failed to extract an apology from the ABCC following judicial criticism of its handling of a recent case against the CFMMEU, the construction watchdog shooting back that it acted "highly appropriately" for a model litigant.
The Attorney-General's Department will open a consultation process in December on six of the outstanding recommendations in Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins' landmark Respect@Work report, but the Opposition says the timeline leaves no room for legislation ahead of the federal election, expected by May.
FWC President Iain Ross wrote to Deputy President Lyndall Dean after her controversial dissent in the Kimber compulsory vaccination ruling and alerted IR Minister Michaelia Cash to the correspondence, a Senate committee heard this evening.
