澳大利亚：预算削减——就业和工作场所关系

Presentation to the Victorian Bar Association byJustice Adam Hatcher, President of the Fair Work Commission18 February 2026 Introduction Thank you for the invitation to speak tonight. When I first worked in a legal office, doing a summer clerkship about 40 years ago, I was given alittle office with a desk and chair. On my desk was a writing pad and a few pens, a landline phone,and an ashtray in case any visitor wanted to smoke. If I wanted a document prepared, I had to hand-write it, and take it out to the typing pool to be typed in accordance with my instructions. If Iwanted to contact somebody by phone, you would only succeed if they happened to be in thevicinity of their landline phone at the other end. If they weren’t, you had to try again a few hourslater. Documents were usually sent to other parties by a document courier, although the recently-introduced cutting-edge technology of the fax machine was starting to change that. If you wanted tofile a document in court, someone had to walk it down to the registry counter and wait for someone In the 20 years after this, the legal office environment was revolutionised by four things: thedesktop computer, email, the internet and the mobile phone. These revolutionised documentpreparation, information retrieval, legal research and communications, and massively improved theproductivity of legal practice over that period. However, that phase of technological improvement Generative artificial intelligence (AI) began to seriously be talked about as a thing of the future onlya few years ago. As late as November 2024, when I chaired the Ron McCallum debate concerningthe impact of AI on employment, we were still primarily discussing it, at least as far as Australia But now it is here. So what I want to talk to you about tonight is the recent impact of AI on the work of the Fair WorkCommission (FWC). Impact on the Fair Work Commission If I had to describe how the FWC has experienced that impact in a few words, I couldn’t do betterthan refer to the famous Ernest Hemingway quote about how you go bankrupt: ‘Gradually, and thensuddenly’. It became clear over the course of 2025, after some signs that this was beginning to occur inprevious years, that the FWC’s operations were being significantly disrupted by the availability anduse of AI tools. Nowhere is this clearer than in the statistics about our workload. The following The ‘normal’ up until about 2023 was a bit above 30,000 matters a year. However, there was asudden increase in 2023–24 to around 40,000 matters in total. That was a record year. Then in2024–25, there was a further jump in 2024–25 to about 44,000 matters. That was another record For 2025–26, we are looking at a number between 50,000–55,000, which will be another record.There is no sign of this growth trend plateauing out, and we have no idea what the ‘new normal’will be. Now, as you know, the reforms to theFair Work Act 2009(FW Act) effected by the Secure Jobs,Better Pay legislation and the Closing Loopholes legislation have conferred upon the FWC a rangeof significant new powers and functions. However, that hasnotbeen the principal driver of theincrease in workload. The Federal Government funded a number of additional appointments to the The real growth has rather been in our traditional matter types, particularly those related todismissals and general protections disputes. The following table shows the lodgment statistics forthe financial year to date for all matters, and for: •section 365 applications — where a person has been dismissed and alleges that thedismissal was in contravention of the general protections provisions; •section 372 applications — other general protections contravention disputes notinvolving dismissal; Compared to the three-year average from 2022–23 to 2024–25: •total lodgments are up 40%;•section 365s are up 62%; It must also be noted that the previous three-year period used as a point of comparison in the tableabove had two record years in it. Assessed over the longer term, the growth in workload is much more significant. For example, thisfinancial year there will likely be between 8,000 and 9,000 section 365 applications. When I first The bottom line is that, by the end of this financial year, it is likely that the FWC’s total workloadwill have increased by over 70% in the space of three years. Increased workload caused by access to AI tools That this is principally being caused by the increasing use of AI tools by potential litigants is, in myview, the only reasonable inference which can be drawn. In the previous decade, there was a clear correlation between the number of dismissal-relatedapplications and the state of the labour market. Broadly speaking, if retrenchments were going up,dismissal related applications would go up, and they would go down if retrenchments were going down. However, that statistical relationship has broken down in the last couple of years. That hasbroadly coincided with the