Self Employed Australia

"Everyone needs an Advocate"

“Everyone needs an Advocate”

Self-Employed Australia

A spaghetti bowl of complexity. The new IR Bill

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spaghetti-bowlLast Monday (4 September) I was in Parliament House, Canberra ‘walking the halls’, knocking on the doors of independent Senators and others. I was handing out an easy-to-read ‘package’ of information on our objections to the ‘employee-like’ laws proposed by the Albanese government. Here’s the handout package.

Around 3pm on Monday, Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke presented to parliament the new IR law called ‘Closing the Loopholes’ Bill. It’s 280 pages long with a 521-page Explanatory Memorandum. It’s a highly complex Bill that wraps multiple industrial relations agendas into a massive piece of legislation. It’s a spaghetti bowl of legislative confusion.

The first thing to note is that this is NOT a law to close loopholes. It is a hugely radical agenda that will change the fundamentals of the Australian economy and how business people, particularly small business people, can operate. Further, it will impact the core of consumer and competition protections and law in Australia. This is a critical aspect that is not receiving any media commentary.

The impacts are so fundamental, far-reaching and complex that we’re not going to rush into our own commentary. First, we’re going to split the Bill into its many agendas so we can understand and address each ‘bit’. This is important because there seem to be many disguised sub-agendas that need to be identified. When we’ve done that, we’ll supply you with our assessments in what we hope will be a logical and digestible way.

Parliament sits next week then takes a four-week break. This gives us time to progressively give you our assessments without overloading you. We’ll be supplying these assessments to the Senators and MPs with whom we’re working. Parliamentary debate on the Bill will become intense in the sitting days 16–26 October.

It’s important to understand that these laws can fail if rejected in the Senate, but it requires nearly all independent Senators to decide to oppose the laws individually. And each independent Senator will form their own view on which aspects they oppose (if they do). We hope that our views and assessments will make sense.

Right to be your own Boss Petition

Don’t forget you can sign the petition to Defend Your Right to be Your Own Boss.

The petition is at this link (scroll down the  right-hand side).

Right to Be Your Own Boss – Sign the Petition

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petitionYour Right to Be Your Own Boss is under attack.

We are endorsing a campaign started by others to defend that right. Check out the Defend Your Rights website here.

We encourage you to sign the petition. (Scroll down on the right-hand side of the website.)

This is important. Please take five minutes to sign it and encourage others to do so.

An update on our campaigning (see our website page)

It appears that the legislation intended to deny you your right to Be Your Own Boss is likely to be presented to Parliament in the next two-week sitting (starting on 4 September).

We’ll be in Parliament House on 4 September, ‘walking the halls’ and knocking on Senators’ doors with updated information on our objections to these planned ‘rights’ denial laws.

A key part of our campaign is to seek to extend and strengthen self-employed, independent contractors’ existing rights and protections under commercial and competition law. A key part of this is the application of Unfair Contract law protections. These laws are receiving a major upgrade in November this year, with serious sanctions for breaches.

Here’s our briefing paper on the ‘beefed up’ unfair contract law protections.

What we think is (frankly) scandalous is that this law does not apply to government departments. That is, government departments can quite lawfully impose unfair contracts on small business people whereas the private sector cannot do this. Talk about a recipe to repeat Robodebt anytime a government department goes rogue!!!

But we have a simple fix involving a straightforward amendment to the Competition laws that would read as follows:

Application of Act to Commonwealth and Commonwealth authorities
(1) Subject to this section and sections 44AC, 44E and 95D, this Act binds the Crown in right of the Commonwealth in relation to the unfair contract provisions of the Act in so far as the Crown in right of the Commonwealth engages in trade or commerce, either directly or by an authority of the Commonwealth with a small business.

Our briefing note explains the background.

This one-paragraph amendment to the Competition law would require government departments to comply with the Unfair Contract laws.

We’re starting our campaign promoting this legislative amendment to the independent Senators first.

There’s a simple principle here: Where government imposes obligations and responsibilities on the private sector, the same obligations and responsibilities should apply to the public sector.

In praise of self-employed people – Common sense needed

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Bruce-BillsonFederal parliament sits again for two weeks from Monday, 4 September. We’ll be back there ‘walking the halls’, knocking on the doors of parliamentarians, and ‘selling’ the good news about being self-employed—that is, of people like us who want the right to be our own boss.

The planned legislation to force self-employed people to be employees has not yet been released. We want the Senate to block this legislation. At this stage our advocacy is on concepts plus practical things to ‘protect’ self-employed people.

For example, we want government departments to be subject to the unfair contract laws. Yes, it’s staggering. The laws make it illegal for businesses to have unfair contracts, but it is perfectly legal for government departments to impose unfair contracts on people. Talk about hypocrisy! We are putting it to Senators that unfair contract laws should be extended to cover government departments.

In this aggressive political environment, with all the attacks on self-employed people, it’s super refreshing to read independent comments in praise of the self-employed. Bruce Billson is the Federal Small Business Commissioner. He’s published an opinion piece “Why it’s time to celebrate our hard-working self-employed”.

We’d really like to quote the entire article, but here’s a selection:

Self-employment already allows 1.6 million Australians to earn a reliable income while preserving autonomy and choice.

We need to understand and recognise the difference between self-employed Australians and vulnerable workers. Self-employed people are not vulnerable… there is a risk if we allow that misconception to grow – we will snuff out the flexibility that’s so valued and important to the success of self-employment.

We need to reaffirm the sound and long-standing legal distinction between ‘contracts of service’ and ‘contracts for services’… We already have rules to stamp out sham contractors…

…we must make sure we do not generate legal and compliance confusion by conflating commercial and competition matters with employment matters.

Let’s honour and value self-employed people and independent contractors for mapping out a livelihood that works for them…

Self-employed people make a valued contribution, complement the employer-employee workforce, add agility to the economy that increases productivity, delight customers and clients, and deserve to be celebrated – not strangled.

The Small Business Ombudsman is really just talking common sense. We hope that common sense will win the day over the foreshadowed small business ‘attack’ laws when they come into parliament.

And remember that if you have a small business issue (say a dispute), the Federal Small Business Ombudsman and the State Small Business Commissioners provide great, practical support services.

Here’s our four-page summary of why we oppose the proposed anti-self-employed laws, including the practical reforms we say are needed.

Inside the Truth Police

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truth-policeIn late July we alerted you to the planned Misinformation and Disinformation laws. The laws will require social media platforms (Facebook, etc.) to determine what is ‘true’ and to warn people for posting ‘untruths’ and then ‘cancelling’ them.

Here’s the government’s information sheet on the law.

We mentioned that we, Self-Employed Australia, have had experience with such ‘truth’ suppression. A member put up on their Facebook page a post we made commenting on the outcome of our Supreme Court action over hotel quarantine. Facebook had its ‘truth police’ sanction the member. We’ve now completed a detailed analysis of that experience.

The full detail is available on Ken’s Substack post here: ‘The Truth Police are here’.

It’s a detailed analysis of how Facebook imposes its ‘truth’ on the public and suppresses dissenting ‘truths’. We go into the detail because it gives an insight from a real experience to which anyone could be subjected.

The essence is that Facebook took an objection to the exposure of this statement by a judge in the ruling on SEA’s court action. The judge said:

“If SEA is not granted an extension of time the individuals referred to in the First Request will be freed from the not insignificant stress of potentially being subjected to prosecution for serious criminal offences… the 20 individuals identified in the First Request may suffer considerable prejudice if SEA is granted an extension of time…”[emphasis added]

That is, the opinion could be reasonably formed that the judge was commenting that if a person subject to potential prosecution was under stress, then that was a reason not to proceed.

Facebook sought to close down and suppress that comment in our view, and we explain in detail how Facebook’s outsourced ‘truth police’ approached this. Rather than determining what Facebook says is ‘fact’, our analysis is that they were in fact expressing an opinion on SEA’s opinion on the Court’s judgement. That’s okay if opinion is presented as opinion. It’s a different matter altogether, however, to present opinion as ‘fact’.

We say that it’s fine if Facebook wants to determine what is true for its platform. It owns the platform. It can do what it likes. But it is something entirely different for parliament to pass a law that all social media platforms must do as Facebook has done.

The compulsory silencing of opinion on the basis of political ‘fact’ determination by appointed ‘truth police’ heralds an era of oppression of the people. We have seen this far too often in the history of human activity. The consequences are always ugly, sometimes horrifyingly so.

The full analysis is here.

Working from Home is making us our own bosses!

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working-from-homeThe Work From Home (WFH) movement has been coming under attack. Office real estate valuations are crashing globally and ‘workers’ are to blame, it would seem.

But what is WFH? It’s nothing more than millions of workers taking advantage of technology that allows office work to be done anywhere, anytime. Effectively ‘we’ workers are acting like consumers and exercising our individual choices as to how we earn our incomes. In truth, we’re witnessing the crashing of market forces (millions of people making billions of individual choices) into the labour environment. To real estate moguls I say: ‘suck it up’ and adapt!

WHF goes further. It’s challenging the underpinnings of labour law and management, at least in the office setting. It is a moment in time, a revolution!

Even if you’re legally tagged an ‘employee’, in fact working from home takes on more of the features of self-employment (being your own boss) than employment. Progressively more and more WFH people will become formally self-employed.

I discuss this in greater length (in between putting on a load of washing – I work from home as a self-employed person!) on my Substack site. You can link here (it’s free).

But there’s another angle I don’t discuss on Substack—the gig economy. Quite often substantial aspects of WFH involve gig work. Think of WFH translators, transcriptionists and private tutors. They almost exclusively work from home, sourcing and managing their work through gig platforms. And they are almost universally self-employed. Yet the federal government’s agenda is to attack these people.

You’ll probably be well aware of our campaign to attempt to have this agenda blocked in the Australian Senate. The WFH movement adds further weight to our argument that the government’s agenda is nonsensical and defies the choices that workers (people) are making to have control of their own working lives. This is a ‘movement’ of individual choices by huge numbers of people.

Here’s the summary of our other reasons for opposing the government’s anti-gig, anti-worker agenda.

And a quick campaign update for you…

  • We’ve been in contact now with all of the seven independent Senators’ advisers. Discussions have been very professional and constructive. At this stage of advocacy our experience is that it’s necessary to engage with the Senators’ policy staffers.
  • There’s no legislation at the moment, but when it appears we’ll be doing further analysis and briefings.
  • We need the Opposition and six of the seven independent Senators to oppose any legislation in order to block it.
  • So far, we’ve conducted three trips to Canberra to meet Senators’ policy staffers in person. When the legislation appears, the pace of this will pick up. Phone calls, emails and Zoom chats have been frequent.

Touch base with me if you’re interested in more information.

Full campaign details here.

Einstein is dangerously wrong. Silence him with a new law!

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einsteinWhen Albert Einstein published his new theories around 1905 he challenged the established ‘truth’ of Newton’s laws of physics. Einstein was attacked by the scientific establishment at the time who were wedded to, and career-dependent on, Newton’s laws. Many sought to stop him. However, Einstein’s theory ultimately became the new ‘truth’.

This is how humans advance. ‘Truth’ is a view or perspective that is universally held, until such time as it is challenged, found to be faulty and replaced by a new view that becomes the new ‘truth’.

The Australian government is proposing a law that will force digital platforms (Facebook, etc.) to be the determiners of what is ‘true’. The government has put out a ‘Fact Sheet’ about this planned law and they are asking for your input.

The ‘Fact Sheet’ is here (with our markups)

We think it’s important that the government receive many responses and we encourage you to do so.

The planned law is very broad in its reach covering “Misinformation and Disinformation” that will “cause serious harm”

  • It defines misinformation as “content that is false, misleading or deceptive” but doesn’t define what those things are, leaving that open to interpretation.
  • It doesn’t define what is ‘harm’, leaving that open to interpretation.

But

  • The ‘Fact Sheet’ talks of “harm” that “…affects a significant portion of the Australian population, economy or environment, or undermines the integrity of an Australian democratic process.”

That is:

  • The law will cover almost anything that anyone says or thinks and that what is ‘true’ is to be determined by ‘truth authorities’ that supply ‘truth’ determinations to Facebook and other digital platforms.
  • The law will not be constrained to criminal or potential criminal incitement, or to issues of defamation and so on. The law will cover anything.

In ‘truth’, this law is an attempt by government (through third parties) to control what they, the prevailing establishment/s in society, decide/s is ‘true’. It will enable misinformation or disinformation that an establishment wants propagated as their ‘truth’ to be the only authorised ‘truth’.

Take this example from the opinion/‘truth’ website Wikipedia on the flat earth theory:

  • It is a historical myth that medieval Europeans generally thought the Earth was flat. This myth was created in the 17th century by Protestants to argue against Catholic.

That is, one religious group used the ‘flat earth’ allegation to take issue with a competing religious group. This is what humans have always done. ‘Truth’ and ‘facts’ are manipulated for purposes of power and oppression. The only way to limit this is to allow the broadest of human expression and challenge to existing ‘truths’.

The beauty of Wikipedia is that almost anyone can put up an opinion on their ‘truth’. Wikipedia allows competing opinions on ‘truth’ to flourish. But this law will surely suppress this feature of Wikipedia.

Self-Employed Australia has had experience with such ‘truth’ suppression. A member put up on their Facebook page a post we made commenting on the outcome of our Supreme Court action over hotel quarantine. Facebook had its ‘truth police’ sanction the member. Did Facebook’s ‘truth police’ contact us to seek our perspective? No! The ‘truth police’ instead ran with a spin the Victorian government would have wanted.

This is what this ‘truth’ law will enforce—government/establishment-sanctioned ‘truth’, with civil and criminal penalties for breaches.

In addition to responding to the ‘Fact Sheet’ above we encourage you to express your ‘truth’ to your local federal MP and State Senators.

The most effective emails are those that are respectful, to the point and personal. A follow-up phone call to the member’s office adds extra weight.

You can find your local member’s contact details through this parliamentary website. The search functions are good.

Robodebt lies and fraud: How corrupt government works

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robodebtRobodebt was and is a huge a scandal that was eventually investigated by a Royal Commission. We’ve studied the 1000-pages-plus Royal Commission Report—it’s a shocking read—and have written a summary and analysis.

If you read anything of what we write, this analysis stands out as one of the most significant we have written. (9-minute read)

The issue goes to the heart of whether government can be trusted to be honest and accountable.

Frankly, Robdebt should shatter any naivety Australians may hold about the ‘purity’ of government. Robodebt shows that governments will lie and cheat, particularly when transparency and accountability are more a public relations con than reality.

The Robodebt Royal Commission Report details how the government of the day decided that there must by wide-ranging social security fraud. It claimed the fraud to be in the order of well over $1 billion per year, but there were no facts to back that claim. Nonetheless, it was pushed as a political priority and the public service was charged with delivering the policy.

The orchestrated ‘scam’ that the government imposed on 866,857 Australians was pretty simple in its design as was its inbuilt flaw.

The scheme involved the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) providing the Department of Human Services (DHS) with income records of welfare recipients over short periods of time, usually a fortnight. DHS then assumed that the income for the short period applied over longer periods, say a year.

Based on this false assumption, DHS then alleged that welfare recipients had more income than they had declared, and that overpayment of welfare had occurred as a result on a massive scale. DHS aggressively collected the ‘debts’. Great hardship followed. There were even suicides.

The Commission’s Report details systemic and deliberate lying, deceit, fraud and cover-up layered over the top of incompetence, bad management, maladministration and ignoring the law at the most senior levels of the public service and politics.

The extent of the scandal would surprise many, but what we observe are patterns of behaviour by government that we have seen before—particularly by the ATO as just one example.

We offer our view of how this needs to be addressed. We say that relying on internal government department policies to stop such government fraud (which is the current dominant structure) is not enough. Government, instead, must be held to at least the same levels of transparency and accountability as are expected of the rest of the community.

We say that Parliament needs to take charge of the bureaucracy.

How government can harm people – The Robodebt scandal

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RobodebtWe’re currently studying the report of the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme. The report describes a scandal of huge proportions, in which government inflicted enormous damage on individuals—even to the extent of a number of suicides occurring.

The scheme involved the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) supplying income assessment data to the Department of Human Services (DHS) on some 860,000 social welfare recipients. The ATO data reported PAYG income based on employer returns for specific periods during a year. The DHS then used the income data and assumed that the income from one period of time was income across longer periods of time (say a year). They called this ‘averaging’.

To quote directly from the Royal Commission Report:

“…the way averaging was used in the Scheme was essentially unfair, treating many people as though they had received income at a time when they had not … with the further fiction that they now owed something back to government…”

That is, the income assessments made by DHS based on ATO data were wrong. On the basis of these false incomes, people were sent bills to pay back social security payments they had received.

There is now, of course, a lot of political payback surrounding the issue, much we would observe likely justified. But there is a bigger issue at play.

There is a gross institutional failure in Australia when it comes to government operations being subject to transparency and checks and balance. Much of what are claimed to be ‘check and balances’ is government scamming the people. Take one example.

November this year marks the start of strengthened unfair contract laws for small business people. But government departments are not subject to these laws. That is, Australian governments are not prepared to apply to themselves the same rules which they apply to the community. Australia has a big problem in this respect, and it makes for bad government.

The Royal Commission report runs to over 1,000 pages. When we’ve finished our study, we’ll produce a detailed assessment.

On the issue of contracts, we’ve had a number of people ask us for assistance in devising their own contract or reviewing a contract they have been offered. SEA does not provide legal, accounting or other advice. But we have developed guidelines on contract assessment/construction that many people find helpful. SEA members can access that information here. These give good starting points that can be checked by a lawyer.

100,000 (plus) hear the message – Self-employed under attack

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Spectator-TV-100Recently I was interviewed on Spectator TV where I explained the attack against self-employed people being prepared by the Albanese government. I presented a simple example of how the promise to provide ‘holiday pay’ was in fact a con that will take money away from people.

Someone has taken a 5-minute clip from the longer interview and posted this on Twitter. This has broken through the 100,000 views mark in just over 24 hours of posting and continues to grow.

You can access the twitter post here.

Spectator-TV

We hope this provides a simple explanation.

We started our campaign on this in March this year – the Be Your Own Boss campaign where we provide lots of detail.

We have many more direct discussions in the pipeline with Senators and MPs and their advisers.

War Against Tradies

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war-against-tradiesLast week we discussed the common sense displayed by the Victorian government in its approach to the gig (‘employee-like’) worker issue. Yes—record in you diaries that we’ve actually praised the Victorian government on this issue!

But Victoria’s common sense seems not to be having any impact on the nonsense from the Federal (Albanese) government on the issue. We’ve been explaining in our ‘Be Your Own Boss’ campaign that the Albanese government’s ‘employee-like’ agenda, if enacted in law as it promises, will strip away the right of each of us to be our own boss (self-employed).

Be Your Own Boss

Our current campaigning is focused on trying to block in the Australian Senate the ‘employee-like’ legislation that the Albanese government says it will create this year. We’re having positive, initial discussions with Senators. But a lot of work will need to be done once the draft legislation appears.

Understanding the importance of this issue is remote for anyone not intimately familiar with the legal difference between the commercial and the employment contract. That’s no surprise. So, we need to keep explaining.

I’ve posted a piece on Substack where I describe the predictable impact of the promised ‘employee-like’ laws on Australia’s self-employed tradies. You know, the people who actually do things, like plumbing, electrical work, and so on. Yep, the people who actually make sure that all that stuff actually works!

The promised ‘employee-like’ laws will set up a framework that will force every independent tradie into the clutches of the industrial relations system by imposing a de facto, compulsory unionism on housing tradies through the back door.

Currently, tradies are their own bosses because they work under commercial contracts not employment contracts. The legal trick the government has promised is to create legislation that requires commercial contracts to be controlled by the Fair Work Commission (FWC). Effectively this trashes the notion and structure of a commercial contract, and by legislation turns commercial contracts into pseudo-employment contracts.

Once this is done, construction unions will proceed to impose collective enterprise agreements across the housing sector, just as they do with the commercial construction sector. Read the full explanation here.

ATO

You’ll be well aware of our long-running campaign to have the ATO treat self-employed, small business taxpayers with fairness. The ATO has just released an update to its Taxpayers’ Charter following a review. We had input into the review.

The Charter is supposed to lay out the ATO’s commitment to you in terms of how it will deal with you as a taxpayer and your rights. We’re having a good look at the revised Charter and will put together an analysis soon.