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I was in an Uber the other day and got talking to my driver. He was a Sikh. We had quite a conversation about his religion and the importance of it to his everyday life. I’ve never met a Sikh before! He was most interesting. I asked him why he drives Uber. His response was quick. He loves being his own boss. He can make his work fit around his family commitments.

My Sikh driver reminded me of why we at Self-Employed Australia have been doing what we do for almost 20 years. We’ve been defending the right of people to be self-employed. We’ve seen attacks from many directions. The attackers always seem to argue that somehow ‘we’ are being exploited. They can’t seem to contemplate that in self-employment there is economic liberty and freedom! My Sikh driver knows and lives that reality.  More...

The Victorian government is looking to push its new Labour Hire Licensing Bill through Parliament, starting this week. The Bill is a legislative scam pretending to do one thing, but in reality will do something else—namely, open new doors to corruption in Victoria.

The Bill is supposedly a (long overdue) response to the exposé by the ABC's Four Corners programme on 4 May 2015 about the exploitation of migrant workers on some Australian farms. What Four Corners exposed was illegal migrants, working below legal pay rates and organized through some small, illegal 'labour hire' businesses.  More...

I'm afraid we're seeing a big political swing against freedom in the workplace. The most obvious driver of this agenda is the Australian Council of Trade Unions.

Essentially, what unions want are changes to the Fair Work Act to force businesses to do deals with unions. The FWA was created by the Rudd Labor government in 2009. But it has not worked to the advantage of the unions in the way unions had expected. The key to union/business deals is that unions offer businesses corrupt deals that either (a) reduce workers' wages and/or (b) make life more difficult for the businesses' competitors. Businesses pay money to unions for this 'service'. More...

Corruption is at its worst when it becomes institutionalized as ‘acceptable’ even ‘required’ business behaviour. It’s at its worst when corruption has political patronage and cover. More...

Last week we expressed our strong support for the deal to bring forward to this year the implementation of the Building Code for the construction sector. We billed the move as the Senate independents again demonstrating their common sense and willingness to listen to the ‘little people’.

Today we’ve lodged a submission to the Senate Inquiry into the Bill explaining why we support the deal.

Our submission is here. More...

Yesterday we congratulated the Senate independents for moving the implementation date forward for the Federal Construction Code to this year. This will be a big help to small business construction subbies.

Today we noticed some commentary in The Australian that big builders will have difficulties negotiating new compliant agreements with the building union, the CFMEU. We think that’s rubbish. We’ve seen before how quickly these agreements are changed when winning or losing business is on the line!!! More...

We were delighted to see in The Australian yesterday that the Senate independents are backing a deal to bring forward the implementation of the Australian Construction Code. This is a huge win for small business subbies in the construction sector. 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...

Readers may have noticed the somewhat messy outcome with the Federal Government’s ABCC legislation last week. The key killer is that the associated federal construction code will not have application for two years. That means that big construction firms will have two years to continue to collude with unions to screw over small business construction subcontractors.  Here’s commentary from Judith Sloan in The Australian showing why it’s a mess.
 
But riding in from the West is a different player! More...

It’s been quite a week on the construction anti-corruption front:  More...