I run a café with 8 staff. In the last 18 months I've had to navigate: the Closing Loopholes Act changes to casual conversion, the new right-to-disconnect provisions, payday super (from July 2026), updated Fair Work information statement requirements, and two rounds of award rate changes.

Each of these individually is manageable. Together, they've added roughly 6–8 hours of admin per week that I'm doing myself because I can't afford an HR consultant. That's time I'm not spending on the business.

Is anyone else finding this? And what are you doing about it?

Plumber with 4 employees. The payday super change is the one that's going to hurt us most. We invoice on 30-day terms. Our clients pay late half the time. But from July I have to pay super on every payday — before the invoice is settled.

The ATO has said there's no grace period. The penalty for late super is 10% interest plus the Superannuation Guarantee Charge, which is non-deductible. One bad month and I'm looking at a serious cash flow problem.

Accountant here, mostly small business clients. The compliance burden has increased significantly since 2022. My clients are spending more on professional fees just to stay compliant — fees that come directly out of their margins.

The payroll tax threshold issue is particularly acute in Victoria and NSW, where the thresholds haven't kept pace with wage growth. Businesses that were comfortably below the threshold three years ago are now caught by it simply because wages have risen.

I had to let one part-time staff member go last year — not because the business couldn't support the wages, but because the admin overhead of managing a casual under the new conversion rules was too high for the hours they were working.

That's a real person who lost work because of regulatory complexity. I don't think that's what the legislation intended, but it's the outcome.

The COSBOA submission to the Senate inquiry on the Closing Loopholes Act estimated the compliance cost for small businesses at $1.2 billion annually across the sector. The government's own regulatory impact statement put it at $340 million. The gap between those figures tells you something about how seriously the compliance burden was assessed.

Small businesses don't have compliance departments. Every hour spent on admin is an hour not spent on customers, product, or growth.