DSPANZ provided a submission to the Standing Committee on Employment, Workplace Relations, Skills and Training's inquiry into the operation and adequacy of the National Employment Standard (NES) under the Fair Work Act 2009 on 12 August 2026.
In this submission, we highlighted that software is a primary delivery mechanism for the NES and workplace relations entitlements and therefore that the adequacy of the NES, and the broader Fair Work system, depends on whether they can be translated into clear, consistent and reliable software rules.
We recommended that software providers be recognised as implementation stakeholders in the workplace relations system, supported by structured engagement with the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR), the Fair Work Commission (FWC) and the Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO).
Early and continuing engagement would help ensure that future workplace reforms are capable of being implemented with clarity, consistency and reasonable lead times. When obligations can be accurately translated into the payroll and HR systems employers use every day, compliance becomes easier and more consistent, employees receive their correct entitlements, and regulators can focus their resources on substantive non-compliance rather than resolving avoidable uncertainty about how obligations should be interpreted and administered.
Our submission focused on how establishing structured engagement pathways with DSPs fosters opportunities to fundamentally impove the way workplace obligations are developed, explained, comenced and maintained in software. We noted that this level of engagement with DSPs will be particularly important for introducing any changes to the NES resulting from this inquiry.
DSPANZ made the following recommendations:
- The government should establish structured engagement with DSPANZ and relevant software providers during the development of workplace legislation, FWC reviews and other reforms that affect payroll, HR and workforce management systems to identify implementation issues early and support better compliance.
- Workplace reform processes should expressly consider software implementation impacts, including affected systems, redevelopment and testing costs, dependencies, cumulative change and realistic deployment timeframes.
- Workplace reforms should be supported by clear implementation guidance, including worked examples, consistent definitions, transparent calculation methodologies and, where appropriate, machine-readable artefacts.
- Legislative and regulatory changes affecting payroll, HR and workforce management systems should provide realistic implementation lead times, staged commencment where appropriate and early publication of sufficiently settled guidance and calculation rules.
- Where employment, taxation and superannuation frameworks regulate the same underlying payroll concepts, all levels of government should seek to adopt consistent defintiions and classifications wherever practicable.
- The FWC and FWO should progressively adopt digital-first approaches to workplace regulation, including machine-readable guidance, structured and version-controlled calculation specifications, and transparent methodology for official tools and datasets.
Read more in the full
submission.