Strengthening the Modern Slavery Act
17 September 2025
On 8 September 2025, the Law Council made a submission to the Attorney-General’s Department in response to its consultation paper entitled Strengthening the Modern Slavery Act.
The Law Council noted its longstanding support for the Modern Slavery Act and the recommendations made by Professor John McMillan in his 2023 review of the Act, some of which the Government now seeks to implement.
The submission welcomed the Government’s commitment in the Consultation Paper to strengthening the Act to ensure that operations and supply chains/networks of goods and services provided to Australians are not tainted by modern slavery and like practices. Drawing on the expertise of the Business and Human Rights Committee, as well as input from Constituent Bodies across the country, it set out answers to the Government’s 37 consultation questions on how this can best be achieved. Some of the principal proposals, intended to better align the Act with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the McMillan Review, were to:
- clarify and extend reporting requirements under the Act, including to address remediation processes and/or grievance mechanisms;
- prescribe concrete consequences for failing to meet the reporting requirements in the Act; and
- better facilitate reporting by corporate groups, which can have complex (sometimes multinational) structures not adequately addressed by the current joint reporting model.
The submission also noted that there is significant and growing interest in broad-based human rights due diligence requirements for business, going beyond modern slavery risks to other risks of exploitation and abuse in global business value networks. Other possible reforms include establishing a compensation scheme for victim-survivors and lowering the current $100 million revenue threshold for the application of the Modern Slavery Act. We look forward to continued engagement with Government on these important issues.
Last Updated on 17/09/2025
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