President s introduction

Fair Work Commission Annual Report introduction

Transcript President's introduction

Welcome to the first online annual report by the Fair Work Commission. This is an initiative which we hope will make the information we provide more accessible to the community.

This past year has been a very busy one for the Commission. We’ve seen the introduction of a new anti-bullying jurisdiction; the conferral of additional functions on the Tribunal, as well as the continuation of our change program, Future Directions.

Anti-bullying jurisdiction

The new anti-bullying jurisdiction commenced on the first of January this year. But well before the new jurisdiction came in, the Commission was hard at work with its key stakeholders to develop an appropriate case management model to ensure that the new jurisdiction worked effectively.

We also published a range of information materials on our website about the new jurisdiction including a benchbook to assist the parties. I am pleased to say that most of the cases that we’ve dealt with have been successfully resolved by conciliation facilitated by the Commission. We will continue to review and improve our processes in this important new jurisdiction.

Among other changes the Fair Work Amendment Act provided the Commission with an important new function—to promote cooperative and productive workplaces and to prevent disputes.

We’re developing a comprehensive strategy to enable us to effectively implement this new function. At its heart it’s about assisting the parties at a workplace level to create a more productive workplace and one that’s more adaptive to change. It’s about dispute prevention, rather than settlement. It’s about responding to the wishes of parties when they seek the Commission’s involvement and about facilitating a better outcome for all parties.

There’s a case study in this year’s annual report about Sydney Water that provides you with an example of our work in this important and growing area.

Our future directions

The past 15 years has seen a significant change in the type of matters that come to the Tribunal and also in the nature of the parties that appear before us.

Increasingly, we are dealing with individual grievances and with self-represented parties. 15 years ago two thirds of our work was collective dispute resolution, where the parties were experienced players—they understood the Act and the Commission’s processes.

Increasingly we’re dealing with self-represented parties who have limited experience with the Tribunal. We have an obligation to explain how the Act works and how our processes work to self-represented parties.

Over the past 12 months we have developed and implemented a comprehensive change program called Future Directions to better meet the needs of the parties who now appear before us.

The focus of Future Directions is on delivering public value in four key areas:

Promoting fairness and improving access
Encouraging efficiency and innovation
Increasingly accountability
Improved productivity and engaging with industry.

By December 2013 we had successfully implemented all 25 initiatives in the initial phase of the Future Directions change program. These initiatives included a range of new benchbooks dealing with unfair dismissals, general protections, and the new anti-bullying jurisdictions.

These benchbooks provide in simple language a summary of the key principles from the most important decisions in each of these jurisdictions. They provide important information to assist, particularly, self-represented parties, in understanding the cases in which they are going to be appearing in.

We have also launched a new website with an easier navigation structure for particular users including employees, employers, organisations and small business. We will continue to develop and improve the website in response to feedback we receive from the users.

For unrepresented parties and first time users, coming to the Commission can be a daunting experience. With that in mind, in 2013 we launched a virtual tour of the Commission. This is intended to give parties—particularly to unfair dismissal matters—an insight into how their matter would be heard and determined by the Commission.

By giving parties this sort of information we hope that it will make our processes more accessible and also increase their understanding of the Commission’s processes. We intend to extend this initiative to other jurisdictions such as general protections and anti-bullying over the course of the next two years.

Future Directions is an ongoing change program. In May this year we launched a further 30 initiatives that we intend to implement over the course of the next two years. Details of those initiatives can be found in our annual report. They are all directed at making the Commission a more efficient, fair, accessible and accountable national institution.

Our performance

In last year’s annual report we announced that we had introduced two important timeliness benchmarks—one dealing with reserved decisions and the other dealing with the approval of agreements. I’m pleased to report that we are continuing to make improvements in these areas and have consistently shown improvement across a range of these benchmarks. Not all of the timeliness benchmarks are meeting their target. We will continue to work hard in this area to improve our performance.

We have also introduced new timeliness benchmarks particularly in relation to dealing with appeals both in terms of the time taken to get an appeal heard and the time taken to deliver a decision in relation to an appeal. The introduction of these benchmarks and an increased focus on the efficiency of the appeal process has improved our performance in this area.

All of these initiatives provide greater certainty for parties. They can lodge an application with confidence that it will be dealt with in a timely way and we will continue to focus on this important area of our work.

The year ahead

As public institutions, courts and tribunals depend on the support of the community for their legitimacy. Accountability and transparency are vital to ensure that support.

We will continue to review our processes and the services we deliver to ensure that we are meeting the needs of the community. We will also continue to report on our outcomes and on our timeliness to ensure that we are accountable to the community that we serve.

The past year has also seen some changes in the composition of the membership of the Commission. We’ve seen the retirement of Commissioner Macdonald and the resignations of Deputy President Parsons and Expert Panel Member Allen. We’ve also seen the appointment of Deputy President Kovacic. I thank those that have left the Tribunal for their work over many years and I welcome Deputy President Kovacic to the Commission.

I’d also like to thank our key stakeholders for their contribution to the work of the Commission, particularly in the implementation of the Future Directions initiatives.

And finally, I’d like to thank all of our Members and staff for their hard work, commitment and dedication and for helping make a great institution better.

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Justice Iain Ross AO

I am pleased to introduce the Fair Work Commission’s annual report for 2013–14. The past reporting period has been busy, with the introduction of the new anti-bullying jurisdiction, a significant change to the Commission’s functions, as well as our ongoing focus on our Future Directions change program.

The new anti-bullying jurisdiction commenced on 1 January 2014. The Commission published a Case Management Model and benchbook prior to this to assist employers and workers to understand the new jurisdiction. The Case Management Model was developed having regard to the particular nature of the new jurisdiction and followed consultation with the peak industrial organisations (ACCI, the ACTU and Ai Group), Work Health and Safety regulators and professionals working in the field.

Our approach aims to deliver a practical, efficient and fair process, and has enabled us to meet our statutory requirements regarding timeliness, as well as assist parties to resolve matters through more informal processes where appropriate. We will, of course, continue to review and refine the process over time.

The Fair Work Amendment Act 2013 also conferred a new statutory function on the Commission, ‘to promote cooperative and productive workplace relations and prevent disputes’ (section 576(2)(aa)). To give effect to this we have been working on significant workplace engagement projects to assist parties at the enterprise level to resolve issues before they become formal disputes. The Sydney Water and Orora Fibre Packaging case studies in this annual report provide examples of this work.

Last year we launched our comprehensive change program, Future Directions. The objective of this is to enhance the public value provided by the Commission through a focus on four key objectives:

promoting fairness and improving access
encouraging efficiency and innovation
increasing accountability, and
improving productivity and engaging with industry.

The first stage of Future Directions was launched in October 2012 and contained 25 initiatives, all of which have been successfully implemented, including:

the introduction of new plain English resources explaining key provisions relating to individual disputes, such as unfair dismissals and unlawful terminations
the launch of a series of videos providing a virtual tour of the Tribunal
running a pilot program with providers of pro bono legal services in unfair dismissal jurisdictional hearings, to provide greater access to legal advice for self-represented parties
updating application forms to provide more detail about the types of information to include and how to lodge and serve the documents
allowing all application forms to be lodged electronically
trialling SMS alerts for upcoming hearing and conference dates, and
upgrading video conferencing facilities to allow greater accessibility to the Tribunal and decrease costs for parties and the Commission.

The implementation of the first stage of Future Directions has significantly improved the services we provide to the community. There is, of course, always more that can be done. Accordingly, in May 2014, the Commission launched Future Directions II which sets out 30 initiatives we intend to implement throughout 2014 and 2015. These include:

exploring ways to provide better services to small businesses
piloting a program to provide clients with selected application benchmark information as a guide to how long their application may take to be dealt with
providing access to audio files of most Commission hearings
conducting the Commission’s first paperless annual wage review, and
conducting and publishing qualitative research to identify clauses in enterprise agreements that enhance productivity or innovation.

These new initiatives are directed at ensuring that the Commission fulfils its role as an accessible, fair, efficient and accountable national institution.

Like any court or tribunal, the Commission depends on community support for its legitimacy. Accountability and transparency are fundamental to that support. To support this, we currently report against a range of timeliness benchmarks including the determination of agreement approval applications, listing of appeals and delivery of reserved decisions. In 2014 we will develop an enhanced performance indicator framework to provide greater accountability across a broader range of matters and will have that performance framework externally reviewed. We intend to introduce a new range of performance measures from 1 July 2015.

All of the Future Directions initiatives aim to respond to the changing nature of our work, from a tribunal dealing predominantly with collective disputes between represented parties, to an increasing number of self-represented citizens pursuing individual rights-based disputes. The initiatives also recognise the continuing importance of the Commission’s role in promoting cooperative and productive workplace relations.

I wish to acknowledge and thank our key stakeholders for their contribution to the work of the Commission, in particular, in relation to the Future Directions program.

I would also like to welcome Deputy President Kovacic who joined the Commission in September last year and to thank and acknowledge those Members who retired or resigned their appointments during the reporting period: Commissioner Macdonald; Deputy President Parsons and Expert Panel Member Allen.

Finally, the Commission’s commitment to serving the Australian community would not be possible without the ongoing hard work and dedication of our Members and staff. I would like to take this opportunity to extend my thanks to them for their commitment and ongoing efforts to support the work of the Commission.

Justice Iain Ross AO

Fair Work Commission

Australia's national workplace relations tribunal

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