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We’re really worried about one aspect of a Shorten Labor government.

Bill Shorten plans to bring back trucking laws that will destroy the businesses of around 50,000 independent truck drivers across Australia. If they can attack the legitimate small businesses of one group of self-employed people, we have to ask, where will Labor stop?

Our use of the words ‘destroy businesses’ is not extreme. Under the now-repealed Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal (RSRT), independent truck drivers’ businesses were wiped out. Several confirmed suicides occurred.  More...

Looking at politics at the moment one might wonder at how anything functions! And this political dysfunction flows through into government department dysfunction.

Suing the government!
Our truckie friends will be interested in the $600 million class action being organized by farmers over the live cattle export ban in 2011. The Australian’s update is here. More...

Well here’s a turn-up for us! In 2000 (goodness, 18 years ago!) we formed Independent Contractors Australia to advocate for the rights of self-employed people. And in that time we’ve been more successful than we could have envisaged. More...

ICA Executive Director Ken Phillips spoke at a ‘Liberty’ conference in Sydney over the weekend. With over 350 people in attendance and with more than 70 speakers it was a stimulating, ideas-packed weekend. Not everyone agreed with each other, but all present agreed on the right to speak freely.

Ken talked about how we at ICA have used the Australian Constitution to defend individual liberty, specifically the right of people to be self-employed. You might recall last year our:  More...

Owner-drivers
You’ll recall the mess last year in the attempts to destroy the businesses of owner-drivers in Australia.

However, the Victorian government is now reviewing its owner-driver laws, laws that we say are pretty good as they stand. We don’t think the review is looking to set up price-fixing as happened under the disbanded federal law. But Federal Labor voted to keep the disbanded laws. Who knows what the Victorian Labor government’s agenda might be? We urge owner-drivers to keep a close eye on this. More...

A very big Season’s Greetings to all ICA members, supporters, friends and contributors—of which there are many! 2016 has been an impressive year in terms of achieving positive outcomes for self-employed people.  More...

Yesterday, The Australian carried an article reporting that the AMWU wants to ‘represent’ independent contractors. The article quoted Ken Phillips (our Executive Director) who said: More...

The Transport Workers Union and their ‘safe rates’ cronies are not happy. The Federal Small Business Ombudsman, Kate Carnell, has released the findings of her investigations into the Road ‘Safety’ Remuneration Tribunal (now dead thankfully) and its discriminatory attempts to put owner-drivers out of business.  

We covered the issue and campaigned extensively against the RSRT. And you will remember we launched a High Court action to stop the RSRT.  More...

The Australian election outcome is in line with the messiness that’s happening with democratic politics across the globe. It’s good that ‘the people rule'! But what of decision-making?

Sometimes positive things can happen through the political process. We were very pleased with:  More...

Last week we released a statement on the election saying that

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