All News

We’re mighty proud of our achievement in securing unfair contract protections for self-employed, small business people. It was a campaign we started in 2009. Here’s our campaign history. It was tough work.

The Australian Bankers Association strongly opposed us and we had several polite but unsuccessful meetings with them. They fought to kill the Bill in 2015, but thanks to some hard work and the Senate our campaign succeeded. The laws started in late 2016. More...

We’ve come to the conclusion that the truth about the Australian Taxation Office’s bullying of self-employed people will only come out in a full Royal Commission inquiry.

We’ve been strongly prompted to this conclusion by an article in The Australian yesterday by the doyen of business columnists, Robert Gottliebsen. Robert is correct in his article 'The ATO is repeating the hideous mistakes of bank boards'. More...

2017 was a hugely busy and transformational year for Self-Employed Australia on many important fronts.

Since forming in 2000 under the name Independent Contractors Australia, we have focused on one thing—advocacy for the rights of self-employed Australians. In this respect, we have had major successes even though we are entirely a volunteer group. More...

Yes, we have to feel sorry these days for employees who are forced to attend the staff Xmas party. All the merriment has changed.

First, employees have to undergo HR training and briefings on how to behave or not behave. Hugs are banned. Be careful who you smile at and how! No sitting on Santa’s lap. Conversations and greetings must be religiously diversified and non-judgmental. Champagne is replaced with sparkling non-alcoholic lolly water. Sorry, no jokes! More...

First we said that NAB had ‘trashed its own small business brand’. We said this in March this year because of NAB’s lie that it had made its small business finance contracts comply with the unfair contract laws.

Last week we expressed tentative praise for NAB after it had ditched its bad contracts and come up with new ones. NAB’s self-congratulatory PR seemed to indicate a major step forward. But we said we’d check its standard form contract first.  More...

More good news on the unfair contract front! But first some background.

Back around 2009, when we were talking to big businesses about having fair contracts, the chief legal counsel for one of the big banks said to us, “We’ll do what we’re made to do.” We realized then how difficult our campaign would be. But we succeeded. The new small business unfair contract laws we pushed for started at the end of 2016. More...

We don’t know if the two are related, but More...

We’re delighted to report that the Vulnerable Workers Bill passed the Senate on the evening of 4 September. This is the new law resulting from the 7-Eleven worker wages fraud scandal exposed by 4 Corners/Fairfax in late 2015.

The Bill passed with only minor amendments, but that kept the integrity of the protective measures in place. Here’s our analysis of the Bill from May. The law will not only protect low-paid workers but will: More...

We’re mighty proud of the work we did, over close to a decade, to achieve the 2015 unfair contract laws protecting small business people. Here’s the tracking of our campaign from 2009. And it’s pretty fair to say that, without us, the laws would not have come into existence.

In that long struggle the banks consistently opposed the unfair contract laws. During that campaign one bank, NAB, was found by the courts to have engaged in ‘misleading and deceptive conduct’ in relation to a business mortgage. In our view NAB’s bank officers arguably behaved as they did because NAB’s small business finance contracts seemingly gave them unfair power. More...

The former Abbott Government Small Business Minister, Bruce Billson, has admitted to the ABC that he was receiving payment from the Franchise Council of Australia while still a Member of Parliament. The admission came on the 7.30 Report viewable here.

You might remember that we did battle with Abbott and Billson back in 2015 when they brought in the Unfair Contract Bill limiting it to contracts up to $100,000.  More...