0:08
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our webinar today on Wednesday, the 28th of July 2021. Is Clint Indrele, Managing Director of On Demand HR, we often put on webinars for a very topical items such as this. Obviously, there’s been significant disruption in business over the past four to five weeks in New South Wales. Obviously, some challenging times for businesses, we’ve been working very closely with our members to guide them through these times. And obviously now we want to provide an opportunity of certainly giving back to our accounting network and obviously other businesses that want to know more about some of the, I guess, learnings of the last few weeks some of the challenges, I’d also like to introduce you to our operations manager, Andrew Koleda, is also on the lawn Andrew has been with us for the best part of year and a half now. He’s our expert when it comes to government related announcements and technical aspects of these various different things. So I’ll just get Andrew just to quickly say hello to the group before we get started.

1:33
Hello, everybody. I guess just like all of you, one of the challenges that we’ve found in recent times as, as advisors in this space is, you know, trying to learn and become on top of all these changes in regulations and eligibility and business support methods at the same time as our clients. So it’s definitely challenging times that we’ve experienced. But I’ll do my best to add any insights that I possibly can.

2:03
Thanks very much, Andrew for that. So I’m assuming that everyone can see the presentation that we’ll cover today. That should be all up on the screen in front of you. If you’ve got any. If you’ve got any questions throughout it, feel free to ask them Andrew will answer some of the questions on the chat. Also take some of the questions on the live discussion as well. Good to see a good turnout for this one as well. So really appreciate you coming on for this, I’m sorry to take you take you away from your your daily dose of nonsense from the New South Wales government that’s also on an 11 o’clock today. But I’m not expecting anything significant come out of that I will donate other than probably an extension of the time. So I don’t think any of the technicals will really change. So hopefully we’ll be progressing, we’ll be able to provide you with something a lot more interesting than the premier wheel. So we’ll get through these key points today. And we want to make a start, actually, we’ve got some well over 30 people on the line, we’re expecting a few more, but let’s get stuck into it. So today’s presentation is going to be about job saver in the lockdown Workplace Relations challenges. So email presentation today, we’re going to cover the following topics, we don’t cover the Workplace Relations challenges, we’re going to try and make sense of some of the lockdown restrictions for business. Now bear in mind, we’ve had various scenarios that we’ve been working on in the past four weeks, so we’ll be able to share some thoughts and knowledge and insight into those things. We’re going to cover New South Wales business support, employment considerations, or Andrew will probably talk a little bit about eligibility. And then I’ll talk a little bit about some of the WR challenges that we can see this is going to bring about questions and answers throughout guys. We’d love these to be interactive. So please, shoot us any questions throughout. If we don’t get to any of your questions, or you don’t feel the questions being adequately answered during the session. You can always email us at advice at on demand hr.com.au. I think probably three guiding principles out of today’s discussions is that the first thing I think that businesses should take the attitude with these restrictions is an end and also how to approach things like job Sabre, is I think, forgiveness, not permission. Sure. I think that what we look at in these situations is often what we can’t do that, that I think we should be more focused on trying to look at what we can do, and try to work within the limits of both restrictions or premises our employees, but also working within the limits of what we think may be allowed under these particular job Sabre rules as well. So that’s probably the first thing I would say. The second thing I would say is that I think it’s important for businesses to be continuing to just make decisions and get on with life through all of this. I don’t think businesses should be delaying decisions because they’re unsure about restrictions, and I really want to encourage businesses to not to not fall into this trap of being complacently compliant. So what we what we sometimes hear with businesses is that they, they’re sort of all they’re not sure. And they think, Oh, well, I’m not unlike not be able to do this. So I just won’t do it. And unfortunately, in this in these times, I mean, there’s some businesses that are obviously doing it really tough at the moment, and this is the second lockdown they’ve had in the in the in, you know, following on lockdown last year. So there may not be the financial position to just be complacently compliant. So we’ll talk about some of those scenarios. A little bit later on. In this session, I’ll give you know, we’ve navigated some of those challenging scenarios for our members that we work with. So yeah, so that’s, that’s certainly what we will look at. Throughout today’s session.

I think I’ll just want to cover to start off with some of the real headline Workplace Relations challenges. So probably the biggest challenge that we face this time around, we’ve got these lockdowns in New South Wales. We’ve also got some in other states as well, Victoria, I think Queensland and prayer is even got something in that in the next as well, even though one or two cases. But basically, the biggest challenge we’ve got is that section 789 of the Fair Work Act, that was a temporary measure that was put in place by the government last year. And what that section allows is, it allows businesses to essentially reduce employees hours without agreement, there was a number of other things that was the main power that was given to employees or given already employed hers, to reduce employee hours without agreement that those provisions ended at the end of March 2021. And you’ve kind of got a wonder why why the logic was to win them at that particular time. Yes, it was attached to job keeper. But to think that there was never going to be another lock down in Australia, particularly with the attitude these hyperactive and premiers that we’ve got, was pretty naive. And now we’ve got a situation, which is quite unfortunate, where businesses don’t have the ability to simply reduce hours without agreement, they have to basically seek agreement to reduce hours, or alternatively, they have to go down this path of section five to four, which is what I call the all or nothing stand down, because basically, you’ve either got enough work, or you’re continuing work with your employees as normal, or you’ve got zero work, and they’re completely stripped down. And as we all appreciate, look, a lot of businesses in this situation just not, not not cut out. And those situations are just simply not that black and white. I mean, to give you an example, we’ve got a client that’s in the meat industry, they have a situation where obviously some of their clients can be serviced. And a lot of their clients can’t. So they’ve got people who need to work some hose, but not necessarily all of their hours, are not taking a question. And it talks about here. With regard to the service, enterprise micro business grant happens 30% decline in turnover. locked down period does not align with best reporting period, I might kick that one off to you, Andrew, if you could answer that one in the chat for Joseph, that would be great, I’m happy for you to take that one, I might go back to the the slide and cover the continued recover content. So what we have a situation now where if you are wanting to reduce hours, you’re going to have to do it by agreement, because you don’t have the provisions of Section 789 that you did have last year to reduce hours unilaterally. So what we sort of the positioning for this, I think in most businesses will simply be decided this is the number one, we are either going to slow you down completely, because we don’t have enough work for you to do unless there is an ability for us to agree on reduced hours. And I think that when section five to four Stan nouns were written into the Fair Work Act, we virtually saw no use of it whatsoever for about 10 years. And then we saw so many different uses for it in the last 18 months. And then we’ve had the fires we’ve had the floods, event COVID-19. And so many reasons that businesses have standing up stood down employees without pay for reasons which are out of the control of the employer ultimately. So that is something that businesses will continue to need to do is and that is to negotiate reduced hours by agreement with employees. And the other narrative that you can always say in those situations is that ultimately, if employees are not agreeable to reducing their hours, well then the other thing you should be really saying to the employees as well, that might force us into a restructuring situation which could trigger redundancies. Now, for some employees that might be welcome news, it means pay apps but for others, particularly businesses that have less than 15 employees, obviously, there’s no redundancy pay. That’s automatic in less than 15 employee businesses impacted most Small businesses there isn’t redundancy pay. So that could be sometimes the catalyst for employees to get on board with the mutual agreement to reduce hours. So that’s another tip on that. The other thing that we’re hearing a lot about is that businesses are being asked by their employees to provide guidance on the individual support. And that is a really challenging, challenging one, we had a situation with a client,

where the situation to the client last week where they actually had a situation where they wanted to actually pay their employees the difference between what the government was going to give them for $600. And obviously what their normal wave was going to be. So it was really, really tricky around this, because we’re thinking, Well, how do we pay this? Do we pay 18 hours, which means that they’ve lost 20 hours or more, and then the government will obviously kick in the 600 bucks. But then what if the pain rate or one of the total amount of pain for that 18 hours is not the difference? How do we get around that situation? So yeah, that’s a really challenging scenarios like that. The other one is annual leave the use of annual leave, we still don’t have clarity on whether or not annual leave accounts for the purposes of hours worked for the purposes of these disaster payments. So there’s two arguments on the annual leave, you could argue that annual leave replaces work. And that’s normally the notion when you’re talking about things such as you know, superannuation, accruals of bleed and things like that. But there’s another another argument. The other argument is that well, if if it wasn’t for this particular period of time and these restrictions imposed by the New South Wales Government, I wouldn’t have lost the hours, which would which would mean I wouldn’t have needed to take the lead. So there’s that argument as well. We still don’t have clarity on on that. Andrew, was there anything additional, you wanted to say on that particular point?

12:03
Not Not, not so much. I think you’ve really reasonably covered that. Was there anything that you felt that was additional?

12:12
No, not really? Not? Really? I’ll take your question. Actually, I’ve got a question here from our Simon, thanks very much for asking it. We have some staff who work part of their hours in an area that is shut down due to restrictions and the rest of their areas in an area which they are still able to work, are we able to stand them down on reduced hours? Well, yeah, that kind of goes back to what we said before about section 789 no longer exists. So any reduction of hours, either needs to be part working hours part leave, or simply a reduction of hours by mutual agreement. So that could be you know, half the amount of hours and, you know, unpaid leave, or topping up the balance. So the challenge is that, as I said, it has to be by agreement. So going specifically, to your question, you’re talking about that. Some stuff, we’re putting the rails in areas that shut down others where it’s still able to work. So your situation, I would imagine, you’ve probably lost half of those hours, or let’s say, you know, roughly half those hours. So no, you’re not able to stand them down and reduce hours, you would need to agree to mutually reduce the hours, a great friend to take leave the balance, all agree that they will work effectively, that work, reduce hours, get the government payment for the loss of hours. So bear in mind that 20 hours or more. So it might be convenient for you to have the working ad and not working 20 because then I get the maximum payment available from the government. So assignments is a perfect example of why the Workplace Relations response to this has been completely inadequate from the government. And I’ve been very, very critical that I mean, if these premiers want to lock down our states at the drop of a hat, which is what they are notorious for doing, then there has to be the industrial relations flexibility in order to do this. And, quite frankly, Christian Porter should be taking up these reforms in the parliament. And if the Labour Party in the greens are not prepared to vote for them, well, quite frankly, the premiers that sit in those states in those various labor states should not be locking down the states, it’s as simple as that there’s got to be it’s got to be one or the other, you either give them the flexibilities to adapt to these situations because of these drop of a hat lock downs, or or you go the other way and just say there’s not going to be any more lobbyists because because because you can’t have you can’t have it both ways. Let’s have a look. Another question here. Can we pay today’s wages to top up $600 claim by employees? So thank you for the question, Diane on that. So basically, as far as we can see, it’s 20 hours or more. So effectively, if you’re paying 16 hours or 18 hours, then that would you would qualify. We think you would qualify. For the maximum amount of government payments, that’s 20 hours or more. So ultimately, if your hours are 18 or 16, that should qualify you for the maximum payment. Got a question here from another? This one is from Sorry, I’ll just computers just got a question here. This is one from PETA. Hi, Peter. Thanks for joining us. Employees who can’t work because of being in a restricted LGA and cannot work from home, can they be stood down or asked to use the annual leave? So what you’ve actually described? Peter, this is a very common one, by the way, everyone. So Peter is asking here about an employee who can’t work from home and is in a restricted LGA, there’s five LG A’s at the moment, I believe that a restricted it’s Fairfield, Liverpool, Outback cannery, Bankstown, Cumberland, and I think it’s Blacktown is the other one. So that’s the five LGA is restricted. And essentially, what we have here is a scenario where the employees can’t, can’t get to work. And the work can’t be done from home. That’s actually the default position on that one is unpaid pandemic leave. So think about in these situations, you’ve got to think about who has the problem is that the employee has the problem that they can’t get to work, or the employer has the problem, that they can’t provide work. So that’s the first question you ask yourself, in respect to these situations, does the employee have the problem? Or does the employer have the problem? So that’s an important distinction to make. So in that scenario, PT is described as unpaid pandemic lead, if an employee wants to apply for leave, and that’s fine, but they should not be given personal leave in those situations if they are not sick. So generally speaking, they’ll be applying for annual leave in that scenario. So thank you for that question. paid out a very common one. We’ve found we’ve found from clients. Adrian, thank you for your comment about that. The minister, I missed that in the last few weeks. So thank you for correcting me on that. And does this include working directors?

Oh, this is a good, good point. Andrew, I might have you look into that question from Diane, about working directors whether they are eligible for such payments. We now have another LG three LGA is restricted. That’s thank you very much needed for that. We will obviously pick that up. I anticipate those three ltas will also be similar restrictions to the others. And then we’ve got a question here from Judy, regarding jobs safer for employing businesses maintain your employee headcount on the 13th of July, please clarify our headcount. So yes, stand down, employees do counts, they do count duty. And I’ll actually cover the rest of this in the next slide. So we will get to that very shortly. Okay. So another key Workplace Relations challenge that we are finding is that there’s been a few scenarios where hours conduct has actually arisen or problems without avails conduct ever has arisen, which impacts on work. I’ve got two recent examples of this one where an employee went from Maggi to Sydney and got Oh sorry, to Wollongong got fined in Wollongong for breaching COVID orders. And then obviously went back to Margie. And then the question was, because Margie was out in the regional areas, what was the person what sort of action to the employer take in the situation so the two recommendations we made was, well, first and foremost, the employee going back from that Greater Sydney Area, which includes Wollongong back to regional New South Wales, first and foremost, they have to hear that the stay at home water so even though everyone in that muddy area can go and do things as normal, and the the employee who went into Greater Sydney cannot they have to hear the state home or sort of stay at home was means obviously, they can only leave for, you know, central shopping, exercise, those sorts of things, but not just to go and fraternize in general public. We had another situation where employee went to Sydney from the hunter and went back to the hunter but then couldn’t come to work, because they have to redo the state headquarters. And the work had to be done more work could be done from home. So in that situation, kind of the employer was sort of forced to force to kind of allow an employee to work from home in this situation, because of the stay at home orders that come in effect because they came to Sydney. The other twist in that situation was the employee also, then during the during the stay at home orders back in the hunter breach the stay at home orders. So the employer actually said well, you know, you’ve clearly you’ve clearly breached the stay at home orders and there’s a tough one because sometimes it Even if they breach the stay at home orders, those are not necessarily matters that are connected to the employment, they can be matters connected to the employment there might not be. So you probably saw, I think it was yesterday there was an employee who was suspended for attending the, the, the match on the weekends. And, again, I’m not sure why the lawyer would suspend in that situation, because it’s not a matter that’s connected. And yeah, it’d be very long, though, to suggest that it was. So even if the employees doing effectively breach that home orders or do things that are outside of the stay at home order, that doesn’t necessarily mean the employer can take action. So that’s been a really interesting thing. In terms of employees refusing regional management action. So another issue we’ve seen is that employees are concerned about QR code qR coding in workplaces, they don’t want to have their every move recorded. And to be quite honest, on. I mean, I don’t keep you like QR codes myself. But I would say that it’s the one place, it doesn’t really matter where your QR code, it’s your employer, because the tax office knows where you work anyway. So I’m not sure why there’s any concern of logging in at your employers premises. So we have that situation, though, with a couple of employees or clients. And that is a reasonable directive that employers can enforce. So obviously, Employers are required to have qR coding on their workplaces at the moment, whether you like it or not. But ultimately, that is the rule. And it is a reasonable directly for employers to expect that to be that to be followed. And I would agree with you to test this absolute COVID mountains that we are seeing, let’s continue to move through.

We’ve now got so this is the criteria that I want everyone to think about when they’re considering whether their employee can work or not. Okay, so let’s work through this. And when I say come to work, come to work at the premises, okay, so anyone can work from home, anyone can do that. Obviously, this is really a criteria, we’ve prepared for people thinking about whether they can come to work at apprentices. So the first question you ask yourself, is, is the business able to be open? Okay, that’s the easiest question. It’s not on the closed businesses list. So if the business is not on the closed businesses list, then the second question you got to ask yourself, is, can the work be reasonably carried out at home? Now, this is an interesting one. The government initially kind of came out with language of Can that be reasonably done at home? Then they went on employers must allow employees to work at home. And now it seems like they changed it back again. So reasonably. So. I mean, you know, and this is just my absolute criticism of the government in this regard, is that the it? We’ve had hoped now for the best part of 15 months. And the fact that the government can’t work out when an employee can and can’t work from home, they keep changing language. What’s an essential worker? What’s the restricted LGA, when they’re testing is, you know, what sort of businesses to be closed down into stage 123? lockdown, it’s absolutely preposterous that they still haven’t worked this stuff out. And it seems like they’re just doing this on the run. And it’s almost you’d almost have to argue that. I mean, I don’t want to be cynical, but you’d almost have to argue that this is just that almost deliberately trying to be confusing. It’s very disappointing leadership. And hopefully, we can see better in the months ahead, because up to date has been very, very confusing. And even we’ve had situations where on set on Saturday, we’ll be looking at the rules for clients. And then on Sunday, we’re reading back the same clients telling them, the rules have changed. And two weeks ago, for example, we had a situation where the New South Wales government said you can’t leave your LGA unless you are a health worker, or an emergency or emergency workout. So we’re hanging around on Saturday saying, sorry, guys, all these employees in these areas can’t leave. Then the very next day, there’s another 10 different categories of authorized workers, which just got added to the New South Wales Service website. So that just gives you you know, I don’t want to rant about this too much. But that just gives you the context of some of the madness we’ve seen in the decision making on this and the incompetence of government in getting this right. Let’s keep going back to though the carbon restriction so can the work be reasonably carried out from home in my view, is that you’ve got to have a connection to the site. So work, but work is a situation has to be connected to the side it has to be a scenario where, you know, they either work in manufacturing, a little work in warehousing or they’re working something that’s physically connected to the site. I don’t think it’s a strong enough reason that you simply haven’t got the computer systems at home, or the telephone line is at home. I don’t think that’s a good enough reason to deal with I often say that the word can’t be reasonably carried out at home. So anyway, that’s my thoughts on point two, then we get to point three, is the employee, an essential worker, what even is an essential worker? And the truth of the matter is that the term essential worker actually kind of has no real well, it doesn’t actually have any bearing in the situation, the more correct term is authorized worker, authorized worker, we’ll get to in point six essential workers just kind of in this term, that’s been again, bandied around by government, but it’s not actually defined. Because we actually revert back to authorized worker in this situation, we’ll get to what exactly that means. Going forward. So the third question, so is the business able to be open? Let’s say it Yes. Can the work be reasonably carried out at home? Let’s say it’s no, they have to come to the office? So then does the employee leaving an impacted lgi? And then if the answer to that is yes, that unpaid pandemic leave? If the answer that is no, they can come to work? Is the work? Well, the other question is, is the work carried outside of an impacted LGA? So an employee who is working in lives in an affected LGA and works within the sign lgi. They don’t actually necessarily need to be an authorized worker to go work. Because the business is open. And as long as the work can’t be done from home, but can still go to work. So it’s only if you have to leave the impacted area to to get to work,

comes into play. So within the same LGA is fine, I’ll give you eight clients. And it’s in the main street. And I have a situation where they are in the Canterbury Bankstown LGA. They had employees who lived in the cannery banks and LGA, so they could come to work at the premises, the work wouldn’t be done from home. But then they’ve got a situation where the they’ve got deliveries that need to be driven outside of the bank standard LTI can’t be vaccine lgi. So basically, what they have to do, and this just gives you the, you know, the absurdity of some of the rules, that employees who live within the bank standard LGA could come into the workplace with all the other employees pack, and prepare and put into the truck the orders, but then you’ve got to get a driver who lives outside of the bank stand LGA, to come inside the bank stand LGA and work to then take deliveries back outside of the banks, then LGA. So if you’re not already confused with that, then if you following all of that, and if that made sense, then great if you confused? Well, that’s completely understandable. But again, that’s a scenario where the impact of the LGA matters. There was a real life scenario we had there with that client a couple of weeks ago, which, and then to add, to add some add something even more interesting to that then laid down some employees had an employee tested positive for COVID. Stand down, all that awful, and all the other employees then bring back all of the employees that want to pay a team to replace the employees and have been isolating. So very interesting times for that for that client in the last couple of weeks. Got a question here from jitesh. around. We want to get to a point where we can access over the next few weeks whether our staff are vaccinated so far, when we send out anonymous surveys, can we ask same online anonymous surveys? What else can we do to push forward? Can we access rapid test kits that we have know that we can have non vaccinated staff take daily? Well, I think that I think that what we’re talking about here is we’re talking about making decisions that are outside of the scope of what the government requires. And at the moment, as I understand that the government requires certain industries to be vaccinated. I’ve always issued caution to employers in going beyond that, unless it impacts upon unless it’s a knock on effect requirement from clients that they provide services to. So for example, if I’m providing services to a quarantine hotel, and the quarantine hotel requires suppliers or delivery drivers to be vaccinated, then that would be a basis for seeking vaccination on reluctant to advise any any client or or any business to at this particular point in time. demand their employees vaccinate if if they did not require it to do business now, sure employees Is the revolution that’s completely fine. But once it starts becoming an employer request, and if that’s not a mandatory requirement in that industry, you are potentially buying into things such as workers compensation. So for example, for example, if an employee was required to be vaccinated by their employer, and if if they had an adverse reaction to that vaccine, then that may very well, I wouldn’t even say neighboring, or could very well be a workers compensation claim, particularly if they weren’t otherwise intending on being vaccinated. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with an employer, encouraging people to be vaccinated in general terms and even facilitating employees to be optionally vaccinated. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. But in terms of making it an inherent requirement of the of the roll, that should only be done if it is needed. And again, I think it’s going to be very interesting to see what happens in that regard.

So So yeah, so that’s, that’s, that’s going to be a very interesting space here. And obviously, there’s strong views on both sides of this. But I I’ve said all along, and I wouldn’t be doing any more than the government requires at this particular point. I think that if you take that position, then I think that’s a safer position, then going going it alone and requiring more of your employees, because then I think you’re buying into some of the risks associated with that. So that is ultimately, yeah, that’s just some some thoughts on that. That’s at the back to the test. So essentially, we then got is the work carried out on the impacted LGA is the employing authorized worker. So obviously, there’s an authorized worker list that people within impacted LGA is which there’s now another three, according to one of the participants on this today. And then you’ll only be able to leave those impacted LGs if you’re an authorized worker. And the authorized worker is I think about 11 Industries, where there’s a whole bunch of subcategories in that as well. So again, you can leave the area if you fall into one of those categories. So I think the important thing to note, though, is that I think the worker has to be authorized not just the industry. So you can’t just you another, you can justify bringing in a whole bunch of office staff, just because you run a warehouse. So warehousing is included in the authorized worker list. But I don’t think that gives you the license to bring in all of your office workers as well, unless, of course, they have a direct connection to that warehouse. Sure if their inventory control. And yes, you could argue that that’s a connection up to the website. So connection to the to the site to the site. And let me go to a couple of other questions here. Diane, a question about employee claims. $600. For the Monday through Friday, this week, rule the payment received for three days from last week be included as income this way I might, I might get Andrew, if you could take that one for me. Right, that would be great. We have our production staff coming in, but provided off start option to work from home. That’s good. jitesh. That makes sense. That makes absolute sense. Okay, so we’ll keep going through. But the other thing is he we spoke about that meeting industry, one, the other one that I think businesses are grappling with is, again, the authorized worker list is still vague. And there is some businesses that are making commercial decisions about this. Whether or not, you know, a $10,000 fine is an acceptable risk, whether they’re just saying to their employees, look, we are authorizing you to go we’re sending you We’ll give you a letter so that you’re authorized to do this work and look, the way I see it. I don’t I don’t know the police unless it’s clear cut. I don’t know how that police are necessarily going to be able to be definitive in making these fights getting penalties, because what are they going to do going to turn up your site and say, well, you’re authorized to work and there’s certainly arguments that can be made for and against that I don’t even know that the police can make a definitive call on and I think what you’ll see a lot of is probably warnings and telling people, they can’t do it, but not necessarily fine. That would be my guess there was even in the early stages, there was some feedback I had about a travel agent in Oregon who apparently

had to process a whole bunch of refunds I was told by the police closed down obviously wasn’t fine. But they argued we had to be the officers to you know, process all these refunds. Because now I can guarantee when I’m in that situation that probably you know, you could argue that sort of business probably isn’t work that has to be done from an office but again, only a police saying we’ll get out of here and we’re not gonna find you. So that might be the approach they take. It’s very hard to say that that’s that’s kind of what we Same so far, just looking looking at the I’ll move on to the next. Next slide now. So let’s talk about the business support introduction. So we’ve got here, the support available at 40% of the weekly payroll, I won’t cover this in too much depth, a lot of the accountants on this are really good at this stuff. So I’m just going to cover the basics of this and then maybe get into the workplace relations considerations of this, which came to one of the questions asked before by Judy. And 40% of weekly payroll is paid in arrears. Apparently, the start date for this is 18. July, the weekly minimum is 1500. For maximum is 10,000. Although we have a someone on the chat saying here another update from today’s press conference, a job saver program has been extended for a maximum of 10k to 100k. So there you go. That’s another change. That’s just coming into effect. We’ve got eligibility, the annual turnover is 75,000 to 50,000,030% turnover reduction for a two week period from the 26th of June 21 to 30 July 2021, compared to the same period in 2019. Now, we’ve used the word selected there, because presumably you can select what two week period you want to use for this. For the purposes of eligibility. Apparently GST method will be the method of calculating turnover, you’ll have to maintain your employee headcount as 13th of June, we will get onto that in the next slide, that’s going to be probably the main subject of our next slide. And the key points to make, obviously, consult with your accountant to assist with the application, many of which are on the line today. So I trust all of you guys around the detail, so I won’t spend too much on the on the money side of things on that front. Let’s get into the workplace relations part of this. So employee headcount. First of all, we must nominate an employee headcount and application. The counts includes full time, part time and casuals over 12 months. So regular and systematic casuals. And that kind of lines up with the Fair Work Act Amendments that we’ve recently had, whereby casuals with more than four months of service now have the ability to request conversion, or they must be offered conversion. So those are other obligations that can affect more recently, are different obligations for smaller and larger businesses. But all of them have that ability to request conversion, that doesn’t mean they will be converted, it doesn’t even mean that what to be converted, because conversion from casual to full time or part time employment normally comes with a 25% pay cut. But that seems to line up with that logic. So then what we can what we understand is that number changes without employer action, don’t impact on eligibility, so resignations, for example. So that could also be a way of if you are wanting to terminate certain people entering into a data release for a resignation instead, that could be a sneaky or not sneaky, but a little trick that you might be able to do to act on your eligibility. And section five to four standard employees will also be included. So employees that are simply not working, because there is no work, they will still count, but obviously that also reduce your turnover figure, all that issue. So your payrolls figure as well, in that regard. And, Andrew, we’re just gonna bring you in on this. So your understanding on the payroll is that it’s it’s based on the 40% of the payroll is based on the prospective payroll, is that right? Yes, the payroll that’s going 40% on payrolls going ahead.

38:42
Yes,

38:44
that’s my that’s That’s my understanding is based on the W, the W one in the in that they submit with the payroll.

38:55
Thanks, Andrew. Appreciate that. In terms of unanswered questions, so things that we’re still not sure about. So performance management processes that are already underway. And what if an employee is terminated for poor performance? Obviously, yeah, that’s not something where you’re looking at actively reducing headcount. It’s just reducing, you know, or eliminating competence. So, you know, that’s when it’s not clear whether or not that person would count or not. If there’s a redundancy consultation process, it’s already underway. I mean, look that probably expired now. Because most redundancy consultation processes normally take seven to 14 days, and we’re already falling already 15 days after the cut off. So probably not that much impact of that, again, cases of serious misconduct, what if an employee is stealing in the workplace? Does that count as a production of a headcount? employee hire offset, this is the other thing that we thought was aware of not a little way around this, but we thought this is an area potentially would be permissible, where if an employee is terminated and replaced more than we would say that that’s the same headcount. That’s not a reduction. It cannot be just one employee being swapped for another essentially. The other question is our employee, all employees equal sarcasm working five hours a week updates equal to a single number? Or is there some sort of waiting on this? So we don’t, we still don’t know if that’s how that works. I mean, I’m assuming they will all just count as numbers because you’ve got to nominate headcount. And that will include regular casuals. The other thing that could work in the in the favor of some businesses here is that you might have casuals who might have 10 months or 11 months service. And by the end of this application process, we’ll have more than 12 months service, so you won’t have to count them on the way in, but you’ll be able to count them on the way out. So that could be another way of particularly for a larger workforce. That could be another way of maintaining or propping up your headcount. The other way of doing it is converting casuals with less than 12 months of employment to part time or full time employment. Even if you’ve reduced hypothetically, if you had 20 employees, you made one employee and redundant, but you had a casual employee who was you know, you’re not going to lose 20. On the application you had you lost an employee for redundancy. So you had 19. And at the 11th hour before the you know, before the headcount is reportable, again, you convert a casual part time employment, which gets you back up to 20, without actually increasing any any numbers. So that’s another way potentially, you might be able to work around it.

The other question is, is this creating an incentive to delay performance management for underperforming staff? or potentially, it is, depending upon the role, of course, obviously, sales roles and things like that going to be difficult in some industries at the moment, because obviously, it’s going to be sales going to be hard to come by and some industries in terms of delaying porn performance management more generally, I think the better strategy there, quite frankly, is to be terminating that employee and replacing that employee, that’s probably the the approach that you would take in that scenario. So I that kind of answer some of the employee base questions around the eligibility and how that might, how that might play out in practicality. So we’ll continue to move on through this. So look, I want to really open it up now for the final questions. I mean, that that’s really all we wanted to cover today in this session. So I just wanted to kind of again, put it out there that, you know, on demand HR, we’ve spent the last last few weeks guiding our members through these considerations and adapting to these circumstances as your first priority. We have essential support membership available for businesses. Typically, this would suit the business of 10 employees or more. Typically, the things we would cover would include unlimited day to day advice on all the things you see in that list there. And it’s a very, very wide scope of things. The only things we don’t include is basically employee clients in the field of commission, and things like that, and recruitment, but everything else we basically can advise you on as part of the membership, which is unlimited. The other thing that we provide unlimited access to is our online training for employees and management. So we’ve got six different online training modules. Some of those are compliance based things like bullying, harassment, discrimination training, social media training, manual, hadal, peddling, training, working from home training, some of them are management training base are things like interviewing, training, learning about leaving tolerance, and performance management, training and the like. So we’ve got that all part of our on demand, HR, membership arrangements, our membership arrangements are very different from other players in the marketplace, we cover a much wider range of things we offer training, which most or what don’t think any of the others do. And typically, our minimum terms of membership would be either three or six months. But again, that’s a lot shorter than what you would expect with other organizations. So if anyone has any further questions, I’m happy to take them, happy to take them now. Alternatively, the other option is to essentially send us a request to advice at on demand hr.com.au. And we’ll be quite happy to quite happy to respond in that regard. So I’d like to take this opportunity to really thank everyone for coming along today. Thank you for your continued support of on demand hrs webinars, we try to provide informative updates on these things for for people to use. We very much value our accounting networks in particular who have been fantastic for us in the last 11 years and hopefully you guys are getting a lot out of your associate membership with us. The other thing for any business that’s interested in obviously establishing a support a membership arrangement with us, please let us know and please please feel free to make an inquiry and we’ll be happy to assist you with this. We’ve got a team of six consultants now in we’re all based in New South Wales. We do have clients that are in there. Victoria. And in Queensland, we’ve got subcontractors on the ground there and should they ever need face to face support? So that that’s, that’s certainly something that we can help businesses with, from time to time. Always happy for you to pick up the phone and give us a call to have a chat about anything. So yeah, I might, I might leave it there. So if anyone’s got any final questions, please let us know. I do have economic question here. Are you able? Are you okay with sending out a link to EAP for all of our staff? Yes, that’s another thing that is included in our our memberships is that we have access to employee assistance programs, facilitated through a third party, which will cost you no money to access, it’s only a page go scenario. Most definitely Cassie, we can organize that for for you happy to send out that link to everyone as part of your membership with us. So feel free to go ahead. And thank you. I’ve got another question here from Judy. If clients report GST on a cash basis, am I correct that they need to use cash method, payment receipt instead of accrual invoice method to calculate turnover? Andrew, do you have any views on that particular question for Mark and Judy?

46:10
is a not not not explicitly stated in the rules. But that would be my assumption to it’s basically how my assumption would be how they’re reporting their GST would be the same methodology for calculating eligibility. So that would be my best guess. But again, it’s a little bit challenging. We’re not accountants, but that’s how I read it.

46:33
I got a question here from Maria as well. Is it really Yes, it is very, I think it’s the question, what happens if staff need guidance and can’t work remotely, we have a mixture sub working from home because they can work independently. But I have a few 50% of the office because I need constant monitoring and help. This is one of those real gray areas, I had a very similar situation with another client the other day where they had a brand new customer service team coming into the organization. And this customer service team, theoretically, you would argue a customer service role, you know, should be able to be done from home. It’s administrative, it’s picking up the phone, they have persistence to do it. But then the question is, if it’s a brand new person, well, then is there an argument for them to come to the office because of the supervision component? I think this is a real tough one, Maria, because there’s two arguments, one argument is they need to come in because I need the supervision guidance and support the ante argument is that why can’t supervision guidance support be provided by zoom? By provided by telephone? You know, that’s, that’s the challenge is that I mean, I, I take the view that if you got a visit from New South Wales Police, and they said, Why have you got these people working in the office? You would say, well, they’re new, they need supervision, they need guidance. They would say, well, what’s the job? And, you know, you’d have to justify why they have to do the work at the office of why the guidance and, and and couldn’t be provided remotely. So I do feel for that’s a very tough scenario. And again, it might be one of those scenarios where you make a business decision, do we simply go with it, and take the view that we’ll look at the type of view that look, the situation is such that if we get a visit, we’re just going to say that they’re brand new employees, they can’t work independently as yet. And, and by the way, police officer, everyone who can work independently, we’ve said, home, I think the other thing that will be important is if you do get a visit from police, I think it’ll be important to show what you’ve done in an overall organization context. I think you’ve you’ve said most of your employees time you’ve got a capital in the office or on the site, I think that you probably got a pretty good argument that you’ve considered it carefully. And you figured out that some employees simply can’t work from home. So I think all of those factors are in play. When you when you come up with that answer. I’m sorry, I can’t be more definitive than that, Maria, but I think it’s a tough one. I think it depends what you’re doing with everyone else. And it depends whether there’s an argument that they have to be on the site or not. I’ve got a question here from for Brian, again. He gets paid two months in arrears, those being paid to live a lot of papers that says on cash basis, not being able to work most of this month, he’s saying we need to report turnovers cash registers or business packages. Again, I might default that one for you, Andrew, maybe you can pick that up on the chat box on that one, I might move on to Craig’s Nyan on Saturday don’t want to work as they can receive the government payments. Yeah, I think that’s probably one that requires people for their diet. And thanks for that question. And got a comment here down the bottom. We had a police visit. They were quite reasonable. Yeah, it’s summertime summer in office on a rotation basis. they’re okay with that. It’s okay. That’s good, Diane. That’s good feedback. Appreciate that, that you tell us that because that gives us an insight. Adding to how they are enforcing it. So Diane, you’re saying that we’ve had a police visit? They were quite reasonable as a Diane, I believe you’re running an accounting office, you’re talking about there. And we had some at home some in the office. They advisors on a rotation basis, though. Okay, is on the surgery, distancing masks and qR checking. So that’s good to know, Craig question. We have a lot of casuals and many have decided they don’t want to work as they can receive government payment. We haven’t stood them down. They’re still employed ready to return when they feel like it but not working? Are they part of the headcount? Well, interesting range? I guess. The question is, do they have you have worked for them or not? So the the first, the first question is, do we have worked for them right now or not? You’re saying they don’t want to work? So presumably, presumably, do it work for them? And they don’t want to do that work? So the first question there is whether or not they’ve lost the hours, have they really lost the hours and on their LinkedIn to not go to work? for them? The question is, have they lost the hours or not at all? And if you haven’t, because if you’re offering the hours, and they’re just not taking them? Well, that’s different from not having the hours to offer them in the first place. So I would say, yeah, you your questions more about the headcount, your question is, are they part of the headcount for the purposes of this? I think that I mean, obviously, you want to minimize your headcount on the way in and maximize it on the way out? For the purposes of the numbers, character who’s saying that they

don’t want to work? Do they go from being a regular casual to being an irregular casual? I think the answer is possibly. So I think that I think, Craig, it’s probably goes to that some of those interesting discussions we had with the last year about this around. Does, you know, at what point do we count a regular systematic casual to week? Do we say that they’ve got to work 10 hours a week or more? And when do they go from being regularly irregular? When do they go from being irregular to regular? So I think in this situation, if a signer won’t work, if you’ve got the work available for them, then yeah, you can make the argument they’re not regular, and therefore, they don’t form part of the headcount. But just quickly, Andrew, on that point, is it that the casual, is a casual, it’s more than format service regardless, or its regular and systematic casuals format service,

52:27
but they don’t, they don’t use the terminology, regular and systematic. It’s casuals that have been engaged for more than 12 months, or words to that effect is the actual terminology that they use. But I think, in Craig’s case, I think like it just similar to the discussions, Craig, that we had during the job caper period, it’s going to be down to the business to make a determination of this, I guess, with all of these type of really gray areas. And, you know, not just in Craig’s case, but but in all of these really gray areas. I think, ultimately, the spirit of all of these is going to be as we discovered on job caper, you know, to do the right thing and to do things to your best interest. So what I mean by that is, I think that in making my gut would tell me in making a determination that not to declare those employees as part of the headcount Well, I don’t think that’s an unreasonable assumption. And as we’ve discovered across the job care period, or through experience through job caper, I guess there’s no real ability to, I guess, ordered this, you know, you imagine from from a government perspective to do this on scale. I think on the balance, I personally wouldn’t be declaring that. If they’re not if they’re effectively terminating or resigning, if you like, you can you can, you can form an argument that what I do

53:56
yeah, I think we’ve got here another comment from jitesh. About depending upon what the government’s going to do with public transport, safe in saying that France is not going to allow non vaccinated people to use public transport. I think watch that space because I know that France I think we’re considering having those you know, vaccination passports, which my personal opinions are pretty crazy idea, but in it’ll be interesting to see how far this goes. I know that France at the moment in particular, they think they’ve changed the position on that based on political pressures and, and mass protesting in that regard. So be interesting to see what happens in New South Wales or in Australia, large on that front. Another point that came up is just back on Maria’s question about the whole working from home when it’s a new start, I think it’s still it’s just a tough one. I i understand that doing zoom and telephone training might not be as good as doing face to face training. This question is, again, Maria, what I would encourage you to do in that situation probably is probably taking some Diane’s experience with this is that as long as you can show that you’re making an effort to have employees, some employees work on, I think you’re fine. But I think if you’re bringing every single employee in saying I’m sorry, I think that’s where you’re going to come and stop. So I think that if if you have new staff that you must train, and it must be done on the premises, as long as you’ve got other employees, you can show are working from home and working independently, you probably get away with I would say, at the very least the very worst, you won’t get upon it. So that’s, again, that’s sort of what we spoke about the guiding principles at the start. I think forgiveness, not permission is kind of the the approach that we would take in these situations that we really understand that, you know, businesses can’t necessarily afford to take up a head of what this does not do or not do things approach at the moment. I mean, really, if you look at it, the economic catastrophe that we’ve got right now, and I think these lockdowns costing us, you know, a billion dollars a week for, for what, seven deaths in 2021, in the whole of Australia. So, you’ve got to wonder whether the whether the, you know, the economic catastrophe is worth, whatever the so called health metaphor of disease. So that’s, that’s very interesting. Um, any, if there’s any other questions, we’re still happy to take them. We still got some time here in the in the session right now, or alternatively, happy to take them offline. Yes, been a really interesting few weeks, and obviously, they’ll be a further update. Now, as a result, today’s announcements as I understand that, the two headline announcements coming from your comments is that the increase from 10k to 100k for the business support and the increase in the three extra LGA. So we will certainly be continuing to update members. If there’s anyone who is not on our our distribution list and you want to get access to future webinars, please, just email, email us at the advice at on demand HR Comdata, you email, Andrew will add you to our list. And we will put you on for all of our future webinars that we have. So appreciate. Appreciate that. I might just do the last scan of the questions to see if there is anything else that we have missed throughout the session. Sorry, going in. I know you asked a few very technical questions on the numbers, I wasn’t able to answer all those on the fly. Andrew is probably the best one to pick that up, going forward. So the directors were the directors are included and things like that. Scrolling through again, looking at this year, obviously with the three extra lgi, that’s going to, again, going to create a scenario where obviously more employees now will be restricted from coming to work unless they are authorized workers. So again, remember the word is authorized workers, not essential workers, essential workers. This is kind of just waffle time that’s been just thrown around in the media, the real term that you need to be focused on is is the is the employee an authorized worker, as defined within the rules. So that’s that’s the key test. Because Yeah, basically, if you’re not in an effective LTA, as long as the work, if the work can’t be done from home, and you’re not in an effective LGA, then it’s it’s open slather, you can do whatever you like. If you if you live in an area that’s not affected LGA, you do not have to be an authorized worker to go to the site, so long as the work can’t be done from home. So that’s important as well, let’s not confuse every other LGA in New South Wales, with the eight LGA that are impacted, if only the impacted where you’ve got to be authorized outside of the eight, you can go to work, so long as the work can’t be done from home. Very simple. Look, thanks

so much for your time, everyone, really appreciate your continued support of on demand HR. I know Today’s been, you know, obviously a fire recession. I’ve had some strong views on the government and how they’ve handled this I just started, I cannot help myself, but really say How disappointing the planning has been in the restrictions. They’ve had a long time to work this out. You know, lock downs and cases are not surprising. But what is surprising is the day to day changes in in these LPs that we still don’t have really clarity on when does an LGA go from being you know, fine and dandy to being a stone cold hotspot? And, you know, you look at you look at Interstate and hotspots can be according to some premiers, it could be one or two cases and in other in other people’s views. I mean, these things, businesses have the right, I think to have more certainty around these things. And I’ll continue to advocate for businesses to get more clarity and better rules around these things. Because, you know, as I said earlier in the presentation and in the webinar, it’s not good enough. The government Just might be surprised as they go. Businesses need to have some expectation around what may happen next. before it happens, not not just this complete surprise after surprise after surprise. So thank you for being patient with me on that. I hope. I hope that you’ve learned a lot out of today’s session. We might leave that there. I’ll do your last check of the q&a. But if there’s no other questions, we might leave it there. Thank you so much. I’ll wish you guys all the very best for the coming weeks. I know these are going to be difficult times for a number of different industries, particularly hospitality, some retail and those sorts of things. Hopefully, these lockdowns will be entered soon enough so that people can get on with living their ordinary lives. And yeah, we’ll certainly keep you updated. Should anything significant happens