Labour Hire Licensing Regulation 2018

The Labour Hire Licensing Regulation 2018 (Qld) (“the Regulations”) was released on Friday, 6 April 2018 to support the recently implemented Labour Hire Licensing Act 2017 (Qld) (“the Act”).

Summary of the Act

The Act introduces a licensing system for labour hire providers throughout Queensland.

The Act provides that:

• Any person providing ‘labour hire services’ in Queensland without a licence to do so will have committed an offence.
• ‘Labour hire services’ is broadly defined to mean supplying a worker to another person to do work. Examples of labour hire service providers include contractors who supply workers to a farmer or fruit grower to pick produce.
• Licences must be renewed annually, and applicants must pass a ‘fit and proper persons’ test before a licence will be issued.

The Regulations

The Regulations have been introduced to provide further guidance as to how the labour hire licencing scheme will operate, and how the Act should be interpreted.

Limiting the Scope of the Act

Section 4 of the Regulations provides a list of individuals who are not considered to be ‘workers’ under the Act. Any person supplying these individuals to another person to perform work will not be a provider of labour hire services and therefore will not need to obtain a licence.

Importantly, the relevant classes of excluded workers are:

• An employee:
  • whose annual wages are equal to or more than $142,000.00 per annum (being the high income threshold under the Fair Work Act 2009  (Cth)), and
  • who is not covered by either a state award, a modern award or an enterprise agreement.
• Where the provider is a corporation, an executive officer (usually a sole director) of that corporation who is also the only employee supplied by the provider to perform work.
• An in-house employee* of a provider who is supplied to another person on a temporary basis on one or more occasions.
  • *An in-house employee is an individual engaged as an employee by the provider on a regular and systematic basis, with a reasonable expectation of continued employment with the provider, who primarily performs work for the provider other than as a labour hire worker.
• An individual who is provided to another person if the provider and the other person are each part of an entity (or group of entities) which carries on a business collectively as one recognisable business. For example, a business operating a group of medical centres will employ workers through a trust entity, and will then supply those workers to the various medical centres to perform work.

Licence fees

The Regulations have also confirmed the licence fees that will be applicable for a labour hire licence under the Act. These fees are determined according to the wages paid by the business in the financial year prior to the relevant application. New businesses will be charged licence fees on the basis of their projected wages for the coming financial year.

The Regulations have split businesses and the corresponding licence fees into three tiers, as follows:

• Tier 1 Businesses (pay wages of less than $1.5 million): $1,000 licence fee
• Tier 2 Businesses (pay wages more than $1.5 million but less than $5 million): $3,000 licence fee
• Tier 3 Businesses (pay wages more than $5 million): $5,000 licence fee

The Commercial Law team at Wallace & Wallace Lawyers can assist you in preparing the relevant application material for labour hire licenses and advise you on any changes which may need to be implemented in your business processes.

For further information, please contact a member of the Commercial Law team on (07) 4963 2000 or via our online contact form.