There is a certain irony at the heart of Queensland’s changes to the way they hire workers. There were a few bad business owners who were breaking the law, like farm contractors who charged workers more for a mattress than a night’s pay and labor hire companies that stole money from Pacific Island workers who didn’t know what they were owed. Abuse really did happen. Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk stood at the 2017 Labor Day rally in Brisbane in front of about 30,000 people and asked, “If you need a license to run a real estate agency or a car dealership, why shouldn’t you need a license to run a labor hire business?” Not much could be said against it.
But somewhere between the rally and the making of the law, a much wider net was cast. Companies that were not involved in shady subcontracting started reading the bill and quietly wondering if it applied to them in some way. These included companies that were running internal secondments, managing specialized skills transfers between divisions, or just providing staff on a temporary basis to fill legitimate gaps. A lot of them were.
During the consultation process, BHP Billiton brought it up and said that the draft law might include arrangements within the company and staff rotations that had nothing to do with the exploitation cases that were the reason for the reform. That’s a big statement from a big mining company, not a small operator on the edge. The Ai Group also had concerns, saying that the bill’s definitions were too broad, including normal work practices along with the bad ones it was trying to catch. These companies weren’t defending taking advantage of people. They were making a fair process point about drafting that had become less clear about what it was supposed to do.
The Chamber of Commerce and Industry Queensland named twelve different pieces of legislation that already govern how people should behave at work in the industry. Their point wasn’t that rules aren’t needed; it was that adding a new licensing system to a system that is already very strict about following the rules makes things more difficult and expensive for businesses that are already doing the right thing. As you walk through their submission, you get the sense that their anger wasn’t so much ideological opposition as it was weariness. Most well-known businesses weren’t trying to avoid responsibility. They just didn’t want to use a system that was made to fail other people.
But the failures were real, and you should pay attention to them. The story told by the prosecution is very sad. In just three years, 650 labor hire companies across Queensland had been punished for not following the rules. They lost their licenses, had to follow strict rules, or were fined. The Fair Work Ombudsman was able to get a fine against a labor hire company in 2023 for not paying 87 visa holders from Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, and the Solomon Islands enough. The company had taken more money out of their pay for housing than it actually paid for it. It wasn’t a mistake in rounding. A lot of workers were owed hundreds of dollars. One wasn’t paid enough—more than two thousand. The plan wasn’t meant to cause harm in theory.
Both of these things are true at the same time, which makes the situation really complicated—more complicated than the 2017 debate showed. The abuse was real enough that it was okay to step in and stop it. And the way the law was written made it go further than anyone had intended. Some of that reach may have been done on purpose, as a way to make sure there were no holes. It’s also possible that there was a mistake in the writing that wasn’t fixed before the bill passed. In either case, companies that did business legally for years now have to deal with licensing requirements, reporting requirements, and “fit-and-property” tests that were first described as ways to deal with criminal behavior.
The Queensland Labor Hire Licensing Compliance Unit is still going after people who break the law. As late as March 2026, a provider who wasn’t licensed was successfully prosecuted for breaking the scheme. The system is working the way it was meant to. There is still no clear answer to the question of whether it was designed correctly and for the right people.
