Paid family and domestic violence leave (Australia)

Introduction

Family and domestic violence means violent, threatening or other abusive behaviour by an employee’s close relative that:

• seeks to coerce or control the employee

• causes them harm or fear.

A close relative is:

• an employee’s current or former spouse or de facto partner’s child, parent, grandparent, grandchild or sibling, or

• a person related to the employee according to Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander kinship rules.

Fair Work Australia is changing family and domestic violence Leave (FDVL) within Australia. This will take effect for employers with

• 15 or more employees on 1 February 2023 and
• less than 15 employees on 1 August 2023.

Please refer to the Fair Work page for more details on the changes and below are the key call outs for customers using PayGlobal.

Key changes

• Entitlement changes from 5 days unpaid to 10 days paid.

• New employees that commences on/after the effective legislation date get 10 days from 1st day of employment – they do not have wait 12 months anymore.

• Existing employees as at the the effective legislation date, have existing balances reset to 10 days and when their next employment anniversary falls, the balances are required to be reset again to 10 days. 

  • This does mean some employees could legitimately access to more than 10 days paid within the first 12 months of the effective legislation date.

• Leave can be taken in any quantity as either continuous block or non-continuous, for example 1 hour here and there or 10 days in one occasion or any combo in between.

• FDVL supersedes other leave.

  • If employee is on Annual or Sick leave and they need to take FDVL, then the FDVL would replace the other leave.

  • There will be no difference to an employee getting sick whilst on annual leave. i.e. existing leave requests would need to be replaced/modified. “Other leave payments” may need to be reversed so that the other leave balances and liabilities get credited back what was replaced by FDVL.

• Casual employees can take FDVL outside their rostered hours of work but the employer is only required to pay FDVL for the days/hours they were rostered. This does not stop the employer from paying generously although they are not required to.

Key issues

The following issues have been raised with ATO and/or Fair Work by Digital Services Providers Australia New Zealand (DSPANZ) are:

• Clarification on how an employer can validate an employee received their full rate of pay.

  • For example, should it just be the planned work hours that get replaced in payroll or should all pay items be replaced with FDVP using a consolidated rate.

    Until we receive guidance from Fair Work/DSPANZ, employers should seek independent legal/financial advice on how FDVL should be represented within the payroll system.

• How the leave is to be reported in single touch payroll (STP)

  • Safety concerns have been raised in respect to the employee’s MyGov account/annual income statements being accessed with additional value now showing up.

    Until we receive guidance from the ATO, employers should seek independent legal/financial advice FDVL should be reported within STP.

• What to display on Payslips for the FDVP payment(s) and/or leave balances

  • Legislation says it must included but the same safety concerns apply as for STP.

• How 'part-day' leave is to be calculated.

  • Especially if the employee is also entitled to incentive-based payments and bonuses, loadings, monetary allowances, overtime or penalty rates and any other separately identifiable amounts.

How to implement this change into PayGlobal

For those customers who have implemented unpaid FDVP using the Leave Credits functionality, then if you will need to create a new Allowance record for paid FDVP and you will need to place the instances the old allowance is used. This may involve edits to ESS workflow, Leave Credit Table Leave Credits record and or Payroll rules.

If nothing is recorded in your payroll system as yet, you will need to consider doing so especially if the ATO requires the earnings to be reported via STP.