Commissioner's Speech at the Kingsley Laffer Memorial Lecture
On 8 October 2026, Australian Anti-Slavery Commissioner Chris Evans delivered the 33rd Kingsley Laffer Memorial Lecture at the University of Sydney Business School.
Read the full speech below.
Check against delivery.
Thank you Binowee for the Welcome to Country.
We know that for too long First Nations people have been subject to conditions that we would today call modern slavery, and I recognise the ongoing impact the legacies of those practices, some of which are in living memory, have on First Nations peoples today.
Thank you also to Professor Steven Maguire, Professor Anya Johnson and the Business School for the invitation to deliver this 33rd Kingsley Laffer Memorial Lecture. I extend that thanks also to Associate Professor Martijn Boersma for his support to bring this lecture to life.
I was both honoured and rather intimidated to receive the invitation to deliver the Kingsley Laffer Memorial Lecture.
Like Kingsley Laffer I am a West Australian and a graduate of the University of Western Australia. We both enrolled in economics, he went on to gain first class honours and I fled the subject having been completely bamboozled by the compulsory unit of economic statistics.
He would have been pleased, no doubt, that I only fled as far as the industrial relations department and eventually completed my degree while working full time and serving as the union delegate at my workplace.
Looking back at the list of previous speakers, I see I am in illustrious company including two great West Australians, both Rhodes scholars of much political achievement, in Bob Hawke and Kim Beazley.
Other lecture luminaries Anna Booth, the Fair Work Ombudsman, and Emeritus Professor of Industrial Relations at the University of Sydney, Russell Lansbury, are also here tonight. Thank you for joining, Anna and Russell.
My early career in industrial relations began by working as an organiser for the Miscellaneous Workers Union, representing mainly migrant domestic staff and cleaners. Some years on, I feel like I’m back where I started, advocating for fairer treatment for these workers.
One thing I learned over these years is that exploitation is rarely an isolated incident. It begins when normal protections stop working, when workers become less visible and responsibility becomes fragmented.
Professor Laffer devoted much of his career to understanding the changing nature of work, the institutions that shape it, and the relationship between economic policy and social outcomes.
Those themes remain deeply relevant today because the challenge of addressing modern slavery ultimately sits at the intersection of all three.
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Over the past five years, Australia has undergone a significant period of workplace relations reform, including measures specifically designed to address migrant worker exploitation. Yet the evidence reveals serious exploitation remains widespread.
This apparent contradiction sits at the heart of my argument tonight.
Australia has built many of the right tools, but they are not working in concert. Workplace regulation, migration policy, corporate accountability and criminal enforcement have largely been designed and implemented separately. And exploitation grows in the cracks between them.
Part of the reason is how we think about forced labour. We still tend to regard it as an isolated crime, best managed by the criminal justice system. But forced labour sits at the extreme end of a continuum of exploitation that often begins with something far more ordinary: underpayment, unsafe conditions, or a worker too afraid to speak up. Each of those is a point where exploitation can be stopped before it escalates.
That is why labour exploitation and modern slavery policy should not be treated as separate problems. They are both responses to the same broad problem, each addressing a different point along that continuum. And they will only be effective if they work together.
Preventing forced labour therefore requires more than stronger criminal laws or supply chain regulation alone. It requires us to understand and address the vulnerabilities that allow exploitation to take hold in the first place.
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Tonight, I want to do three things.
Firstly, discuss that continuum of exploitation, and the structures that drive it.
Secondly, analyse how our current responses, however well intended, are not reaching workers who need them.
And third, outline the role that the Modern Slavery Act can play in responding to the problem.
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Forced labour was defined in international law almost a century ago, in the ILO’s Forced Labour Convention of 1930. The term ‘modern slavery’, by contrast, has come into common use only recently. It has no universal definition, and it has been criticised for its ambiguity. I’ll admit I’m not fully convinced of its usefulness myself.
Modern slavery is an umbrella term that refers to situations of exploitation that a person cannot refuse or leave because of threats, violence, coercion, deception, and/or abuse of power.
The Australian Modern Slavery Act was the first law in the world to define the term, linking it to several offences in our Criminal Code. These include slavery, servitude, forced labour, debt bondage, forced marriage, deceptive recruitment and human trafficking. It also covers the worst forms of child labour.
The scale is difficult to comprehend, with most recent global figures estimating around 50 million people living in modern slavery. Of those, approximately 28 million are in situations of forced labour, including 3.9 million people in state-imposed forced labour.
Under Australian law, forced labour is work that a person is not free to stop or walk away from, because of threats, coercion or deception. The test isn’t whether the door is locked. It’s whether a reasonable person in that worker’s position would feel free to leave.
Unlike chattel slavery, it rarely involves shackles and isn’t about ownership. Nor is it simply bad working conditions.
Forced labour, like other forms of modern slavery, is about control. It is abuse of vulnerability, intimidation, violence, withholding of wages, and holding identity documents.
These are just some of the ILO’s 11 indicators of forced labour. Withheld wages, excessive hours, abusive working conditions: these are workplace rights violations. At the extreme end of the continuum, they become tools of control.
We tend to think of forced labour as something exceptional. Something that happens at a single moment in time. But forced labour rarely just occurs. It exists at the end of a continuum of exploitation that often begins with practices that can appear mundane or even normalised: wages paid late and then underpaid; international students asked to work extra hours for cash; or workplace discrimination.
Over time, those violations can escalate: pressure to work unpaid overtime, threats of deportation for working more than one’s visa permits or bullying that turns into abuse.
At one end of this continuum sits decent work. At the other sits forced labour. In between are escalating forms of harm, discrimination and coercion that progressively strip workers of their rights, agency and freedom. What separates a bad job from forced labour is the person’s ability to leave or stop working without facing some kind of penalty.
Understanding that continuum is important because it establishes that forced labour is not an isolated phenomenon. It emerges from conditions and vulnerabilities that often develop long before exploitation reaches its most extreme form.
It also means that solutions to forced labour should not just focus on the pointy end of the continuum when forced labour has already occurred. We need interventions at each point along the way, including effective enforcement of labour laws.
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While forced labour can affect anyone experiencing vulnerability, migrant workers are more than three times as likely as other workers to be in forced labour.
We are living through a period of increasing geopolitical and economic uncertainty. Armed conflict is displacing populations on a scale not seen for decades. Climate-related disasters are disrupting livelihoods and forcing communities to flee. At the same time, shifting trade patterns, tariffs, supply chain fragmentation and economic volatility are reshaping where and how goods are produced.
These factors do not cause forced labour directly. Rather, they create the conditions in which exploitation can thrive.
When businesses are required to change suppliers quickly, visibility and oversight can suffer. When communities lose homes, crops or livelihoods, people become more susceptible to deceptive recruitment practices.
When labour shortages emerge, economies become increasingly reliant on temporary and migrant workers who may have limited bargaining power.
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Australians are increasingly concerned about forced and child labour in supply chains but largely understand it as something that happens somewhere else.
What we are less comfortable doing is acknowledging that extreme forms of labour exploitation can and do occur here in Australia.
We take pride in our democratic institutions, our labour protections and a tradition of workplace regulation that has historically sought to balance economic prosperity with social justice.
There is much in that tradition to be proud of. Over generations unions led the fight to build and maintain institutions designed to protect workers from exploitation. This includes workplace regulators, minimum employment standards, industrial tribunals, and a range of legal safeguards.
More recently, Australia's labour market has undergone significant transformation. Today, there are close to 3 million people in Australia on a temporary visa with work rights, most of whom are in the workforce.
At the same time, labour hire arrangements, subcontracting, outsourcing and complex supply chains have become embedded across large parts of the economy, both in the private sector and in the delivery of public services.
Union membership has fallen to around one in eight employees and is lower still among migrant workers.
For many migrant workers, these risks are compounded by the terms of their visas. Some depend on a single employer or sponsor to stay in the country. Others have limits on the hours they can work, but financial needs that compel them to work more to survive.
Many, including international students, arrive carrying recruitment debts, have limited English, or work in isolated regional areas. And many fear that complaining about their treatment could put their visa at risk. These are exactly the conditions that allow exploitation to escalate along the continuum, and the vulnerabilities that unscrupulous employers prey on.
Consequently, some of the workers most vulnerable to exploitation now find themselves operating at the margins of systems that were designed to protect them. Our protections have not kept pace with the workers who now need them most, and the parts of our system are not yet working in concert to reach them.
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These dynamics are not abstract. They have real consequences for real people. One tragic example is the story of Jerwin Royupa, which I share with the permission of his sister, Jessya Joy.
Jerwin was a 21-year-old agriculture graduate from the Philippines. He arrived in Australia in February 2019 on a 407-training visa, curious and hopeful about the opportunities that lay ahead. Five weeks later, he was dead. He suffered fatal injuries after leaving a moving vehicle driven by his employer, the man who was also his visa sponsor and who held his passport. We don’t know how or why he left the vehicle, but we know from his sister that Jerwin was scared.
Earlier this year, the findings of the New South Wales Deputy State Coroner laid bare a series of failures that extended well beyond any single employer or individual. Jerwin's visa had been approved on the basis of training arrangements that the Department of Home Affairs later acknowledged should not have been accepted and which are now being changed.
After arriving in Australia, he worked long hours undertaking manual labour in extreme heat. He received no training, was not paid for his work (which was permitted under his visa conditions), and did not have access to his passport. In examining the circumstances of his employment, the Coroner pointed to several indicators associated with forced labour.
What is perhaps most troubling, however, is what happened when Jerwin sought help.
The Coroner described the protections available to him as "inaccessible, inadequate and insufficient". In his final days, he messaged his sister that he was afraid, and he spent a night locked in his cabin. Jerwin was frightened, concerned for his safety, and, despite his best efforts, he struggled to identify where he could turn.
On paper, Jerwin was protected by a comprehensive framework of laws, regulators and support services. In practice, none of them reached him when he needed them most.
This was a completely preventable and tragic death. His case shows that vulnerability is not just the result of personal circumstances. It is also the product of policy failure.
While much of Jerwin’s circumstances related to his visa, the truth is this could happen to workers on any number of visas and it is. We’re just not finding it yet.
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The most compelling contemporary evidence of these vulnerabilities comes from the Migrant Justice Institute's recent landmark report, Off the Books: Inside Australia's Hidden System of Migrant Worker Exploitation.
Based on the largest survey of temporary migrant workers ever conducted in Australia - with some 10,000 participants - the report found that two-thirds of migrant workers were paid less than they were lawfully owed.
One-third worked on ABNs, with most likely experiencing sham contracting.
Forms of insecure work, including labour hire arrangements, casual employment and subcontracting, were among the strongest predictors of underpayment and non-compliance.
More significantly, the research demonstrated the relationship between ordinary workplace exploitation and modern slavery. The more severe the underpayment, the more likely workers were to experience indicators of forced labour.
For the first time, more than one-third of respondents reported experiencing at least one indicator of forced labour, including excessive hours, deception about working conditions and being unable to leave work they wished to leave.
Let that sink in for a moment – one third of temporary migrant workers in 2026 in Australia reported experiencing at least one indicator of forced labour.
So much for just a few bad apples. This is vulnerability at scale, produced by the interaction of insecure work, labour market structures and migration settings.
When a worker’s ability to remain in Australia, repay debts, and support their family depends on keeping their job, the balance of power shifts dramatically. If a worker is told that $15 an hour is simply "the way things are done" and that complaining may jeopardise their visa, many will remain silent.
This is what the MJI report also found - workers regularly tolerate conditions they know are unlawful because the perceived consequences of speaking up are too great. We know this. The issue is not a lack of legal rights. It is whether people feel able to exercise them.
Understanding the power imbalance migrant workers such as Jerwin face, and the fear it creates, is central to understanding why serious exploitation continues despite extensive legal protections.
We also need to accept that this is not an anomaly. The problem is systemic and a systemic problem requires a systemic response – one where policy responses work together, not in silos.
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In the three years since Tony Burke delivered this lecture on Closing the Loopholes, a substantial reform agenda has taken shape.
Wage theft is now a criminal offence. Protections for labour hire workers have been strengthened, minimum standards have been introduced for on-demand delivery workers, and enforcement has increased significantly.
Last year alone, the Fair Work Ombudsman nearly doubled its proactive investigations, recovering more than $450 million in unpaid wages and entitlements for over 181,000 workers. That is a remarkable achievement, and one worthy of recognition.
In migration policy, there has been a growing focus on how visa settings shape worker vulnerability. Following the Coroner’s findings into Jerwin’s death, and engagement with the Royupa family and my Office, the Department of Home Affairs strengthened the genuine training requirement for 407 visas. And the Strengthening Reporting Protections Pilot and Workplace Justice Visa Pilot have been extended.
We have seen progress on labour hire. In Victoria, a raft of measures were introduced in June, making it harder to register as a labour hire provider, and setting new standards for providers operating in higher-risk sectors.
And just a few weeks ago the Minns Government in New South Wales committed to releasing a bill to establish a labour hire licensing scheme within its first 100 days if re-elected.
This is real progress and I welcome it. But the evidence tells us it is not yet enough to change the system.
So how do we do that? I’d like to share three suggestions for how I think we can begin to turn the ship.
First, we need to close some final gaps and make reform work better.
The opportunity before us is to address the gaps that remain and make better use of the reforms we already have. More importantly, we have an opportunity, if not an obligation, to ensure the next tranche of reform strikes at the root causes of exploitation and supports earlier intervention.
Right now, it is still too easy to exploit people.
How is it that a large security company can engage hundreds of guards through ABN arrangements?
How is it that, in some jurisdictions, a labour hire operator can obtain a licence without a robust fit-and-proper-person test?
And given what we know about the risks associated with labour hire, why do we still lack a national regulatory framework?
These are gaps that should be closed. We need a national, or at the very least nationally harmonised, labour hire licensing scheme and stronger action on sham contracting.
The burden should rest with employers to demonstrate that workers are genuinely independent contractors, rather than on migrant workers to prove they are not.
But closing gaps is only part of the answer. We also need to make better use of the powers we already have. Wage theft offences are still relatively new, and the first cases remain under investigation, but there are a range of existing offences and penalties that are rarely utilised.
Likewise, the Workplace Justice Visa pilot remains too narrow to reach many of the workers it was intended to assist.
We also need better coordination. Too many laws, regulators and programs continue to operate independently of one another. As a result, exploitation too often flourishes in the gaps between systems.
It has been reported that while the Victorian Labour Hire Authority and the Tax Office were separately investigating M.A. Services, guards supplied by the company continued to be deployed nationally, including by major corporations and government agencies.
More recently, analysis by the McKell Institute and Unions NSW identified 171 labour hire providers banned elsewhere but operating in New South Wales. Labour hire operators do not respect state borders. Our regulatory response should not stop at them either.
Information, referrals, intelligence and protections should move with the worker rather than requiring the worker to navigate a fragmented system alone.
Preventing forced labour is not solely the responsibility of the AFP. Workplace regulators, migration authorities, taxation agencies and other bodies all possess tools capable of identifying and disrupting exploitation before it reaches the criminal threshold.
One of the reasons this does not happen consistently is that we still lack a standing framework that joins up the national response to modern slavery.
I have long argued for a more coordinated, whole-of-government approach to addressing the conditions that leave migrant workers vulnerable to systemic exploitation.
Too often our system intervenes only after serious harm has occurred.
If forced labour sits at the far end of a continuum of exploitation, then we must use every opportunity to intervene further upstream. That means closing obvious gaps, making better use of existing powers, and ensuring our institutions work together rather than in parallel.
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Turning to my second point: labour rights enforcement and anti-slavery policy should be understood as parts of the same system, playing complementary roles at different points along the continuum.
Labour rights enforcement is one of our strongest safeguards against severe exploitation because it operates at the earlier end of the continuum, where problems are often easier to identify and address.
Unions and migrant worker centres, and other worker representatives are a vital part of that architecture. They are often the first to hear about underpayment, coercion or unsafe conditions, and in some cases the first people a worker trusts enough to confide in.
Yet their role has traditionally been understood as separate from anti-slavery efforts, which tend to focus on the most severe manifestations of exploitation.
There is an opportunity to think about that relationship differently.
If forced labour sits at the extreme end of a spectrum of labour exploitation, then worker voice and representation have an important preventative function. They can help identify problems before they escalate, support workers to seek help, and provide insights into workplace practices that may otherwise remain hidden.
Anti-slavery work should be core union business. Unions can be more involved in detecting and resolving forced labour, and in supporting business due diligence.
Equally, if businesses want to understand what is really happening in their operations and supply chains, they need access to perspectives that sit close to workers themselves.
Unions and worker representatives, both in Australia and overseas, can often provide that insight in ways that audits and reporting processes cannot. Workers need to be brought into the system not as passive actors but as active participants in driving change.
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Third, I return to my patch and the role of the Modern Slavery Act in contributing to tackling severe exploitation both in Australia and internationally.
Fifteen years ago, the United Nations Human Rights Council unanimously endorsed the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, with Australia as a co-sponsor. The Guiding Principles established a simple framework: governments have a duty to protect human rights, businesses have a responsibility to respect them, and people who suffer harm should have access to remedy. Each pillar depends on the others.
Businesses meet their responsibility to respect by undertaking risk-based human rights due diligence to identify and address harms they might be involved with in their activities and value chains.
Governments have since that time considered how to give force to those commitments.
The UK in 2015 and Australia in 2018 took a narrower approach and legislated a specific modern slavery transparency and reporting regime. Neither has moved to legislate broader human rights due diligence.
Both acts have helped raise awareness, strengthened board-level understanding of modern slavery risks, and brought many businesses into conversations they might not otherwise have had.
Neither act has shifted the dial enough to make widespread improvement for impacted workers in the reporting companies supply chains.
There has been increased transparency but not much action or impact.
The European Union has taken stronger action by legislating human rights due diligence of very large companies. That will have considerable impacts down their supply chains as they seek to manage the risk of human rights abuse within far reaching supply chains.
The EU like the US and other jurisdictions has also introduced a forced labour import ban.
Promised reform in Australia of the Act has advanced frustratingly slowly.
The EU changes will come online in the next couple of years and will have an impact on Australian business directly and indirectly, as they will need to meet these standards to be able to sell into those markets.
The tariff increases announced by the USA have punished many countries’ producers, including Australia’s.
The justification used has been the failure, from the USA’s perspective, of countries, including Australia, to take strong enough action to prevent goods made by forced labour entering their markets.
The Australian Government has rightly pushed back against the US action and defended its record on modern slavery.
Many countries have responded and undertaken to implement import bans on goods identified as suspected of being made by forced labour.
Modern slavery is now front and centre of the foreign affairs and trade interests of Australia.
In July, the Australian Government announced its intention to introduce a criminal "failure to prevent" modern slavery offence for large corporations, accompanied by a "reasonable steps" defence.
I welcomed the Government’s announcement as a clear signal that modern slavery must be treated with the seriousness it deserves. However, getting these reforms right is critical.
A criminal offence is a potentially useful addition to the armoury, but it is not, however, a silver bullet. In fact, the Australian Law Reform Commission described it as a ‘blunt instrument’ to drive changes in corporate behaviour in the human rights context.
The foundation of meaningful reform must be mandatory modern slavery due diligence for all reporting entities including the Government, overseen by a responsive regulator and supported by pathways to remedy.
Of all the tools available, due diligence has the greatest potential to drive lasting behavioural change and deliver outcomes for workers.
This is not a new idea for business. Similar due diligence laws exist in Australia for other responsible business topics like illegal logging, money laundering, sexual harassment and environmental protections.
The Parliament will consider the matter next year and hopefully legislate a much stronger mandatory due diligence regime.
While the current MSA has not delivered significant impact, there has been some. A number of major Australian companies have exercised a high standard of diligence while others have done nothing.
There are instances of success, of finding and remediating forced labour.
In 2024, Rio Tinto reported an instance of the worst forms of child labour connected to one of their suppliers in sub-Saharan Africa. The case was remediated and they continued a program of monitoring in 2025.
Significantly, however, other companies have, by virtue of their MSA responses, uncovered many examples of labour exploitation that would otherwise not meet the threshold of forced labour.
This year, Woolworths reported that approximately $100,000 was repaid to 196 workers in the horticulture sector, following findings from audits. In the meat sector, they reported an increase in instances where 119 migrant workers paid up to $5,000 each, in recruitment fees in their home countries. Remediation is ongoing.
BHP suspended a fleet of vessels until an identified underpayment issue was resolved.
Telstra has also made a forward-looking commitment to identify potential areas of concern around labour rights for migrant workers in their Australian supply chain.
These companies, among others, in meeting their obligations under the MSA, uncovered and remediated instances of labour exploitation. These include underpayments, excessive overtime, recruitment fees and worker health and safety concerns.
Having found lesser labour offences, they were able to impact and achieve improved labour standards for workers in their supply chains.
An MSA that requires mandatory due diligence by all companies with a consolidated revenue of $100m or more, can make a positive impact both to the victims of forced labour and other forms of labour exploitation.
The Modern Slavery Act can be an effective tool in the armoury of responses to labour exploitation.
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There is a structural issue that the Migrant Justice Institute's research makes clear: temporary workers do not automatically get the same protections as Australian workers. There are, in effect, two systems. Two experiences.
We can't just keep plugging holes. There is something structural going on in our economy that exposes temporary workers to a unique set of circumstances. Circumstances we have tolerated long enough.
Australia has made progress, but the job is not done. We need to close the critical gaps that remain, and we need to make more of the reforms we have already achieved.
Reform of the Modern Slavery Act is an important opportunity. As far as I'm concerned, it is a reform that is overdue.
But like every other reform, it will only reach its potential if business takes its role seriously and does the due diligence required.
If there is one lesson from Jerwin's story, it is that protection on paper is not protection in reality. We must not leave workers to navigate the system alone. Right now, it is too easy to exploit people and too hard for them to get help.
Our task is to reverse that.
None of this is beyond us. Others around the world are already showing what is possible.
Australia prides itself on being the country of the fair go. But the fair go cannot be a national slogan. It has to be the lived experience of every worker.
If one in three temporary migrant workers reports an indicator of forced labour, if workers feel compelled to accept exploitation as the price of opportunity, and if people keep falling through the gaps between the systems meant to protect them, then we have work to do.
If it's not a fair go for all, it's simply a story we tell ourselves.