The new Commonwealth Government was elected only 1 month ago but there is a great deal of interest in its plans to change workplace laws.

According to a media release from the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Julia Gillard, the transition bill, which
is currently being drafted, will be introduced into the Parliament as a
matter of priority in the first sitting week of 2008.

The transition bill will, among other things:

• prevent the making of new Australian Workplace Agreements;
• create a new form of individual workplace agreement – the
  Interim Transitional Employment Agreement (ITEA) – to be available only
  for limited use during the transitional period;
• remove the previous Liberal government’s Workplace Relations Fact Sheet requirements;
• put in place a new no-disadvantage test for new agreements to provide better protection for employees; and
• enable the Australian Industrial Relations Commission (AIRC) to undertake the process of modernising industrial awards.

Further information is contained in a transcript of an interview on 18 December. The key points are:

• after the law is changed there will be no new Australian Workplace Agreements
• existing AWAs stay for the balance of their term
• under the new law, "our options could be to make a
  collective agreement with all of your staff to govern their terms and
  conditions, to make individual common law agreements but those common
  law agreements have to give people better than the safety net that is
  the significant difference with AWAs which can give you something worse
  than the safety net. Or for a two year period, there will be a
  transitional instrument called an Interim Transition Employment
  Agreement, an ITEA, that’s a statutory individual agreement but once
  again, unlike an AWA that has got to not disadvantage you compared with
  the safety net."
• "there would be two pieces of
  legislation. The first bill, the one …
  that ends Australian Workplace Agreements, the ability to make new
  ones, that’s the transitional bill. It will be followed by a
  substantial piece of legislation. That substantial piece of legislation
  will deal with the whole of our new IR system. Now the system will come
  into full operation…on the first
  of January 2010. That’s when awards will be modernised, that’s when our
  new industrial umpire, Fair Work Australia will come into operation.
  Obviously that bill will deal with a number of matters including unfair
  dismissals. … What we want to have is a streamline
  system that works for everybody, that makes sure if a worker has a
  genuine complaint about their dismissal that gets heard and fixed but
  that people aren’t dragged away from their business that the complaint
  is dealt with quickly."

UPDATE 8 January 2008: Page 136 of The Parliamentary Library Briefing Book (pdf) contains a helpful summary of the proposed changes.