By Lucio Matarazzo

Finally, the Commonwealth Fair Work Act has been amended by the Albanese Labor government to tackle the worst practice usage of rolling fixed term employment contracts including in the Northern Territory public service.

This change will hopefully have a beneficial impact on the NT’s 24,008 public servants.

The scourge of rolling fixed term employment contracts affects over 800,000 Australian employees every year, predominantly in the public services, non-government organisations, and the education, and higher education sectors in Australia.

As of December 6, employees can only be on fixed term contracts for a total of two years, and then they automatically become permanent employees. However they may be on a one year contract which gets extended by another year. But employers will only be allowed to extend or renew a contract once.

There are a number of exemptions to these changes to the Fair Work Act, and the most prominent exemption of these is where a full time employee who earns more than the high income threshold, which is currently $167,500 per annum, is excluded by these changes. That figure is indexed to grow based on annual Fair Work Commission rulings.

There are also limitations around the use of consecutive fixed term contracts for the same or substantially similar work.

As a professional industrial relations practitioner, I put on the public record my disappointment at the failures and non-empathetic attitude in relation to not fixing rolling fixed term employment contracts in the NT public service, by successive governments from the mid 1990s to 2023.

Rolling fixed term employment contracts have been a feature of the public service for around 28 years now.

It is time rolling fixed term employment contracts are stopped with immediate effect for non-executive Northern Territory public servants.

At my private industrial relations consultancy in Darwin, I have dealt with countless of these cases in the public service, and seen first-hand their detrimental impact on employees.

In 2016, a former AO 4 level NT public servant attended my industrial relations consultancy office and advised me that she had been on eight rolling fixed term employment contracts during a period of 60 consecutive weeks of continuous employment.

In other words, this employee’s average fixed term employment contract rolled-over every 7.5 weeks, and the chief executive officer of the relevant public service agency confirmed this in writing to me.

The same chief executive also confirmed to me the public servant’s appointment came to an end via an “effluxion of time” after eight rolling fixed term employment contracts and 60 weeks continuous employment.

It will not be a surprise the public servant left the Northern Territory, never to return.

How many thousands of other people and their families have moved interstate from the Northern Territory because of the use of fixed term contracts?

In the 2022-23 NT public service State of Service report it was noted that in the 12-months months from July 1, 2022 to June 30, 2023, 6,410 Northern Territory public servants, or 26.7 per cent, ended their employment with the public service.

I note the deafening silence by senior executives of the NT public service as to the recruitment and turnover costs of this extraordinary churn within the NT public service for taxpayers.

Lucio Matarazzo is a Darwin born-and-bred industrial relations practitioner with an Economics Degree who has been advocating, defending and representing Territorians for 30 years. Lucio Matarazzo Pty Ltd (LMPL) is an industrial relations consultancy firm based in Darwin that provides industrial relations services for employers and employees over the last 10 years.