The Pastoral Award helpfully tells farmers that:
“The average ordinary working hours for a farm and livestock hand will be fixed by agreement … but will not exceed an average of 38 hours per week over a 4-week period,”
and then repeats the same rule in a different way:
“The ordinary hours of work … will not exceed 152 hours in any consecutive period of 4 weeks.”
The University Award contains its own classics, including this gem for student employees:
“Where a person is enrolled as a student, employment under a fixed-term contract may be adopted as the appropriate type of employment for … work generally related to a degree course that the student is undertaking within the academic unit … provided that … the contract will be for a period that does not extend beyond, or that expires at the end of, the academic year in which the person ceases to be a student, including any period that the person is not enrolled as a student but is still completing postgraduate work or is awaiting results.”
Try running a payroll with that.
Peter Costello put it bluntly in The Australian (21-11-25): “Unless we push for growth, average real wages will decline.” And the reason we’re not growing is no mystery — our workplace rules have hardened into a legal swamp. The modern award system is the worst of it, an intricate contraption so confusing even the Fair Work Commission ties itself in knots. When the Rudd Government “modernised” the system in 2010 by collapsing 1,500 awards into 122, it didn’t simplify anything; it merely condensed the chaos into fewer pages.
Australia is now an outlier among advanced economies. While nations such as the UK, US, New Zealand, Ireland and Canada operate with a single minimum wage, a short set of statutory protections and then let adults negotiate their own terms, we cling to an award system that tries to script every microscopic detail — classifications, penalty grids, span-of-hours, loadings, allowances, carve-outs and exceptions to the carve-outs. In most of those countries an employment contract runs to half a page. In Australia it’s a legal booby trap wired to a 100-page award and overseen by a regulator that can’t interpret it consistently. No other developed nation has built anything like it — and none would dream of copying it.
Costello points to the universities as the perfect example of what happens when complexity outruns common sense. These are institutions overflowing with administrators, HR divisions the size of small towns, in-house counsel and industrial lawyers on tap — yet every major university in the country has ended up before Fair Work for underpaying staff by millions. Not because they’re cartoonish wage-thieves, but because the university award is a maze of overlapping categories, contradictory entitlements, bizarre carve-outs and bonus payments for everything short of remembering to breathe.
You practically need a PhD in interpretive dance to work out if a staff member should be paid more for working through morning tea, skipping a meeting or sitting on a committee. Add in cultural leave, ceremonial leave, “sorry business” leave, maternity trade-offs, time-in-lieu triggers, broken-shift penalties and loadings for hypothetical work, and it’s no wonder the smartest people in the country can’t follow their own award.
If they can’t, who can?
And that’s Costello’s point. Productivity cannot rise when hiring someone is treated like a legal hazard and the real cost of labour is multiplied by administrative fear. Every minute wasted deciphering an award is a minute not spent creating value.
If Bunnings, Woolworths and Coles — companies with compliance teams bigger than most country towns — can’t consistently follow their awards, what hope has a small business? Every few months another large employer is marched through the media as a “wage thief,” complete with massive contrition payments. Never mind that most “underpayments” were accidental. Never mind that many workers were overpaid in other categories. The spectacle is the point. The awards aren’t designed to be followed; they’re designed to trap you.
Which brings me to farming. If the big end of town can’t comply, I’ll confidently “surmise” — the word Costello politely avoided — that nearly every farm in Australia has underpaid someone at some point, unknowingly and inadvertently, usually during the peak of seeding or harvest when you’re too busy keeping machinery alive to remember whether a worker was entitled to a 10-minute break at 8:20am or a 12-minute one at 8:40am, depending on which Pastoral Award clause overrode which schedule in 2011, then changed again in 2017, but only for shift workers between October and March.
Worse still, the Pastoral Award — which inexplicably covers everything from grain farms to dairies — reads as though a busload of urban lawyers once visited a farm, didn’t get out, and wrote their rules based on what they imagined rural life looked like on a Victorian polo estate.
In the real world, the desperate farmer trying to read the award on their phone while calculating weekly pays gets this advice from Fair Work after an hour on hold and a run through offshore call centres and “AI assistance”: “If in doubt, pay the highest possible amount.”
That’s not guidance — that’s a confession. The awards are now so complex even the regulator won’t interpret them. And that suits the unions and the Labor Left just fine. If businesses overpay workers out of fear, well, that’s capitalism getting what it deserves. Meanwhile productivity flat-lines, labour costs climb and business confidence collapses.
The “simplification” of awards into 122 Modern Awards was like compressing a dysfunctional encyclopedia into a dysfunctional dictionary. The nonsense wasn’t removed — just condensed. Pick any award and you’ll find contradictions sitting side by side. One clause says one thing; the next contradicts it. A schedule contradicts both. A Fair Work Ombudsman fact sheet then contradicts all three.
At some point we must stop pretending this is normal. It’s killing the country.
Costello’s conclusion is the only sane one: simplify the entire system.
If adults can buy a car on Gumtree and write an agreement via an email back and forth, sign a house contract in five minutes or manage their own finances, why can’t an employment relationship be just as simple? A minimum hourly rate. A clear penalty structure. Or better still let them work out their own agreement on rates for overtime or weekends like we negotiate everything in life.
One page. I work; you pay. If either of us isn’t happy, we part ways.
No legal trench warfare. No industrial tribunal poring over a missed RDO from three months ago. If the government wants to protect workers, focus their efforts on driving productivity and economic growth. When unemployment is low, workers have power. When labour markets are tight and the economy pumping, employers compete. The best protection for a worker isn’t a 100-page award — it’s more jobs than workers.
While the Coalition finally finds the courage to toss failed ideas like net zero in the bin, it should also pick up a broom and sweep the awards system into the same pile. At the very least, let employers and employees opt out of the whole circus and negotiate like adults — which they already manage perfectly well in every other corner of life.
Costello is right: we’re losing the growth race because employment has been turned into a regulatory minefield. This isn’t a system that needs tweaking, reviewing or “further consultation.” It needs dumping. Scrap it and join the rest of the English-speaking world with simple, one-page employment contracts.
