The debate included four keynote speakers: International Labour Organisation senior labour relations and collective bargaining specialist John Ritchotte; Minister for Employment and Work Relations and Minister for the Arts, the Honourable Tony Burke; shadow minister, the Honourable Senator Michaela Cash; and Emeritus Professor Ron McCallum AO.

Mr Ritchotte began his keynote by noting that over the last 10 to 15 years, trade unionisation membership has been “relatively stable”.

“Trade union membership has increased globally by 3.6 per cent, according to our estimates over the last 10 years. However, this increase is entirely attributed to self-employed and own account workers joining or forming trade unions. The membership of wage and salaried employees has stagnated or has not kept pace with the growth of employment,” he said.

“Both unions and employers organisations, however, are actively seeking to reach workers and employers who are typically difficult to organise in order to allow them voice and representation. So, this is quite an important trend to keep an eye on.”

Minister Burke highlighted the benefits of the Closing the Loopholes Bill for gig workers and decried the “fear campaign” by business.

“If we want to get wages moving, we can’t have a situation where some employers lawyer up and find a way to evade the legal protections that all their competitors are abiding by and somehow allow that to be the norm. For some businesses, it’s not fair to their competitors, [and] it’s not fair to the workers who miss out as a result,” he said.

“We’re in an argument right now that is really at its core, should we continue to get wages moving or not? And I think the answer to that’s pretty obvious. We had a government previously where low wage growth was a deliberate design feature over how they ran the economy. Workers in Australia are at a distinct disadvantage as a result of that, and we’ve seen what happened with the wages share versus the profit share of the economy over the last decade.

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“To get wages moving and to improve job security for people, you need to do two things. You need to change the architecture to give people a better base from which they’re negotiating and better negotiating rules. And we did that last year. And the second thing you need to do is to shut down the loopholes [that] undercut the principles that apply to every other workplace, and that’s what we’re trying to do now.”

However, shadow minister Cash said that the government had not listened to businesses’ complaints that the bill would increase complexity and uncertainty and discourage casual employment.

“Australia, like many developed countries, is also experiencing an ageing workforce. As older employees delay retirement and continue working, there is a need for industrial relations policies to accommodate the change in demographics. This includes addressing age discrimination, flexible retirement options, and upskilling opportunities for older workers. These are just some of the examples of how our work environment has changed in recent years,” she said in her keynote speech.

“Obviously, there are many more, but what this rapidly changing environment means is that our industrial relations system must adapt and evolve to address these unique challenges and opportunities. What is clearly apparent, however, is that the Albanese government embarking on these challenges and opportunities is reverting to their old playbook.

“I believe the so-called Closing Loopholes Bill will make life tougher for Australian businesses by increasing costs, complexity and confusion and, as businesses have told us, will likely lead to job losses. The big problem is the government is not listening to the employers of this nation.”

Professor McCallum spoke to amendments improving workplaces for people with disabilities – and said that although the royal commission had recommended amendments to the Disability Discrimination Act, he doesn’t “think they’ll do much” and lamented that the workforce participation of people with disabilities had not improved in 30 years.

“In 1993, the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed us that the labour force participation rate, that is, those between 15 and 64 of persons with disabilities, was 53 per cent for persons without disabilities. It was 84 per cent. Let’s go to 2003, still 53 per cent. Let’s go to 2013, still 53 per cent. I don’t have 2023, but 2022, can you guess the number? 53 per cent. Even though technologies have increased and there are huge challenges, what’s the problem?” he said.

“Good amendments are better than nothing, but I think, and I am only speaking here in the disability space, that individual complaints-based mechanisms rarely make huge differences. What we want is for more employers and governments to employ people with disabilities flexible working, remote working should allow this, and we then need people with disabilities to be in areas of work where there can be a change in finishing up.”

Then, in introducing the debate panel of union and business leaders, experts and advocates, Justice Hatcher noted that “the notion of a fair go or a fair go all round has been embedded in Australian workplace relations since Federation”, but, he also highlighted that, as Donald Horne famously observed, “the uniquely Australian benevolence implied by the fair go was not extended to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, nor to outsiders who failed to conform to dominant masculine and cultural norms”.

"The challenge of reinventing the concept of the fair go for today’s diverse Australian society and workforce remains with us,” he warned.

Panellist Karen Iles, a lawyer and advocate for victims of sexual harassment and social justice for First Nations people, said that, after the failed referendum, there had been “a profound breakdown of trust in this country, but also in workplaces”.

Before workplace reform, she argued, we have to “start talking about truth telling and getting to the heart of what racism really looks like in this country”.

Panellist Ai Group director of workplace relations policy, diversity, equity and inclusion Nicola Street said that the argument for the benefits of greater diversity in the workplace had been accepted – “businesses with greater diversity perform better” – but the question now was how to achieve this.

“A common pain point for employers is the sheer volume of anti-discrimination legislation across jurisdictions, which makes it difficult for both employers and employees to navigate. Employers who quite rightly undertake workplace training and design other preventative measures, including safe work design codes of conduct and policies, need to be across the detail of these laws. And the current framework makes this difficult given the current and significant overlap of federal and state anti-discrimination laws and fair work laws,” she said.

“It’s appropriate now, we think, for the Australian government to consider rather than seeking to increase protections in the piecemeal way, rather to look at how anti-discrimination laws can be consolidated while continuing to [offer] the same level of protections and obligations for employers and workers working with the states will be needed for this.”

Further, sex discrimination commissioner Anna Cody noted that Australia was trailing far behind at number 46 in terms of the gender pay gap, which continues to be 22 per cent – and she emphasised that “33 per cent of women have experienced sexual harassment in the last five years. For culturally and racially marginalised women, that’s one in two women.”

“What isn’t working is our individual complaints-based approach. It puts too much emphasis on the individual to uphold human rights to make our system fairer; the 17 per cent with the least amount of resources emotionally and financially bears that cost, and discrimination law in Australia functions as the way in which we assert human rights as we don’t have a bill of rights, and yet only 18 per cent of women make a complaint. So, we are very excited about the positive duty beginning on the 12th of December, as mentioned earlier, and its potential to bring about systemic change; it’s important to recognise that it’s broader than sexual harassment,” she explained.

“We need to pay low-income culturally and racially marginalised women who do our care work a proper wage. We need to pay parental leave to all parents regardless of whether they’re primary or secondary carers. We need to make our boards and our leadership teams gender balance but also include all forms of diversity.

“And that includes First Nations culturally and racially marginalised people and people with disabilities as well. We need to go hard on eliminating that unlawful conduct, sex-based harassment and the conduct [that] creates hostile work environments. And we need to educate judges on the impacts of this behaviour of sexual harassment so that they award proper compensation.”