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The other thing that they’re going to look at is making some changes to the modern awards. And look, I’m only going to go through this briefly because I dont see these changes as being significant.

And I would say that if you if you read the newspaper articles, and this just gives you the idea of, you know, what sort of a media world we live in these days, you know, the media will say that these IR reforms as being really, really significant and, you know, major, major changes to the system. And and that just just couldn’t be further from the truth. I mean, it’s just, we’re talking about things here that are tweaks to the system, small changes, do I think they’ll make any significant impact in how Workplace Relations works? Probably not. So.

And this and this, this part of it is actually no different. I mean, what they’re proposing here is that these, I think it’s 12 Awards. So the list that’s on here, so these are the businesses or these are the awards. For those who don’t know, there’s 122 modern awards. And I think it’s 122 last time I checked.

These 12 Awards, they’re saying are the most hardest hit by by COVID. So what they’re proposing is to introduce provisions in these modern awards, which say that part time employees can agree to work additional hours without incurring overtime, penalties unless the new hours, and less than new ordinary hours would habe attracted penalty rates. So all that really is is that, theoretically, under the Modern Award, at the moment, a part timer is supposed to have agreed hours, and that working beyond those agreed hours, can trigger an overtime situation. So I think in practice, most organizations probably already operate like that. And they might even have contractual provisions around that. So does this particular reform make any difference? Probably not.

The second thing is that flexible work, directives can be issued similar to job keeper, but only to vary the location of work and duties performed, not the pay rate or amount of hours. Again, I see this as very, very low level stuff. Yes, okay. The business can direct you to work in a different location, which is likely to be from home or something like that, maybe at another office, and can vary the duties if if there is a need to do that. But, you know, that, again, is something that businesses are probably already doing, and that this particular reform is sort of almost unnecessary in these situations.

Then the other thing that has been proposed is a loaded rate. We don’t know exactly what this means, but a loaded rate to allow employers to pay an all purpose hourly rate for certain things. So again, we don’t know exactly how that’s going to work. Some of these awards have provisions for obviously, penalties, allowances, and things like that. So we’re looking that that there’s a possibility that these loaded rates might be introduced in some of these awards to try and bring some simplicity about whether that’ll actually bring any cost savings remains to be seen. I mean, most of the time, when you’re talking loaded rates, all that means is loading up allowances and penalties into a rate and really all that does is simply does nothing more than simplify payroll unless there’s going to be a cost saving associated with that. Well, again, this is pretty low level kind of reform. So a little bit around modern awards, I guess in summation on that slide, a little bit around modern awards, there might be some tweaks in some of these awards, but again, nothing of any great amount of substance that will change anything significantly. I might move