Modern Slavery in Australia: What It Is, the Act, and How to Prevent It

Most Australian businesses will never find modern slavery in their own workforce. That is not the same as having no exposure to it.

The risk almost always sits further down the supply chain, in the cleaning contract, the security roster, the uniforms, the electronics and the produce. It is bought rather than employed, which is exactly why Australian law focuses on what organisations purchase rather than only on who they hire.

This guide covers what modern slavery is, the eight forms it takes under Australian law, who is at risk, what the Modern Slavery Act requires, what the government has announced for the future, and what a proportionate prevention programme looks like whether or not you are a reporting entity.

What is Modern Slavery?

Modern slavery is serious exploitation where an offender uses coercion, threats or deception to take away a person’s freedom. The defining feature is not how badly someone is paid or how long they work. It is whether they can leave.

That distinction matters, because it is where most people get it wrong. Underpayment and excessive hours are serious problems and often illegal, but on their own they are not modern slavery. A worker who stays because the pay is worse elsewhere is in a poor job. A worker who stays because their passport is held, because a debt keeps growing faster than they can repay it, or because their family has been threatened, is in a very different situation.

Modern slavery can be present directly or indirectly in businesses of any size and in any industry. Laws in Australia and overseas now require larger organisations to look for it and report on what they found.

The eight types of modern slavery under Australian law

The Modern Slavery Act 2018 covers eight specific practices. Knowing all eight matters, because organisations that only look for the dramatic ones tend to miss the common ones.

1. Trafficking in persons

Moving or harbouring a person through coercion, threat, deception, abduction or fraud, and treating them as property rather than as a person. Trafficking often crosses borders, but it does not have to.

2. Slavery

The most severe form, where a person is treated as property and another person exercises rights of ownership over them. It is rare in Australia, and it is the reference point the other practices are measured against.

3. Servitude

A person is not owned outright but cannot leave, and does not believe leaving is possible, because of coercion, threats or deception. Servitude often looks like an ordinary job from the outside, which is what makes it difficult to detect.

4. Forced labour

Work extracted under threat. The threat does not have to be violent. Threats to a person’s visa status, to their housing, or to their family are common and effective. People in forced labour frequently believe they are bound to keep working.

5. Forced marriage

A marriage entered into without full and free consent, because of coercion, threat or deception. It is a form of modern slavery under the Act, and it sometimes surfaces through a worker’s circumstances rather than through the workplace itself.

6. Debt bondage

A person pledges their labour as security for a debt, but the work never clears it. The length and nature of the service are undefined, and the debt is often engineered to grow. Recruitment fees are the most common entry point, which is why a worker who paid to get a job is already at higher risk.

7. Deceptive recruiting for labour or services

A person is recruited on false information and does not learn the real nature of the work, the pay or the location until after they have committed. By then, leaving usually carries a cost they cannot absorb.

8. The worst forms of child labour

Employing people under 18 in work that harms their health, safety or morals, or that prevents schooling. It is most common in unregulated sectors and in the lower tiers of supply chains, where visibility is weakest.

Who is at risk of modern slavery?

Risk concentrates wherever a person has the least power to walk away. Offenders are usually in a position of relative power over their victims, and the people most exposed are those least able to protect themselves.

• Temporary visa holders, whose right to remain is tied to an employer
• Migrant workers recruited through intermediaries, particularly where fees were charged
• Refugees and people seeking asylum
• Children, especially in unregulated sectors
• Women, who make up a large majority of victims worldwide
• Workers in isolated locations, where oversight is thin and leaving is physically difficult
• Workers with limited English, who cannot easily access help or understand their rights
• Occupations with weak legal protection or heavy subcontracting

Sector matters as much as circumstance. Cleaning, security, horticulture, food processing, construction, textiles and electronics manufacturing carry higher risk than most professional services, and they are also the categories most often bought on price.

Modern slavery in Australia: the numbers

The scale is larger than most people assume, and the part that reaches Australian businesses sits in what they buy.

• Close to 50 million people are living in modern slavery worldwide, according to the 2023 Global Slavery Index.
• An estimated 41,000 people are in modern slavery in Australia, a prevalence of about 1.6 per thousand.
• Australia imports an estimated $17.4 billion a year in products at risk of being produced with forced labour. Electronics account for about $8.9 billion of that and garments about $6.4 billion.
• Australia’s government response scores 67 out of 100, the highest in the Asia-Pacific and second globally behind the United Kingdom.
• Detection is the weak point. Only a small fraction of victims in Australia are ever identified, which is why supply chain due diligence matters more than waiting for someone to report.

What causes modern slavery in supply chains?

Modern slavery is rarely the work of one bad actor. It persists because the conditions around it make it possible, and some of those conditions are created by ordinary commercial decisions made a long way from where the harm occurs.

The underlying conditions

• Poverty and the need to work for survival
• Social discrimination that pushes certain groups into unprotected work
• Civil disruption and armed conflict
• Weak law enforcement in source countries
• Natural disasters that displace communities

What buying organisations contribute

• Price pressure passed down. A contract won on the lowest bid leaves the supplier to find the saving somewhere, and labour is usually the softest cost.
• Recruitment fees. A worker who pays to get a job starts in debt, and debt is what removes the option to leave.
• Layers of subcontracting. Visibility drops with each tier, and most exploitation sits below tier one.
• Short notice and volume swings. Sudden order changes push suppliers into excessive overtime and informal labour.

The second list is the useful one, because it is the only list an Australian organisation can act on directly.

How modern slavery affects organisations and society

The direct consequence is harm to people, and that is the reason the law exists. Modern slavery deprives people of fundamental human rights and forces them to work in hostile conditions without adequate provision for their health and safety.

There are organisational consequences as well, and boards tend to weigh these.

• Contracts lost, because large customers now ask supply chain questions as a condition of doing business
• Public exposure, because modern slavery statements sit on a public register and can be compared year to year
• Investor and lender scrutiny, particularly where sustainability reporting is already required
• Staff trust, which is harder to measure and slower to rebuild than any of the above

There is a wider cost too. The longer exploitation goes unchallenged, the more it becomes a normal way to compete, and the harder it becomes for businesses that do the right thing to win work on price.

The Modern Slavery Act 2018 and who has to report

Australia has had a reporting regime since 2019. The Modern Slavery Act 2018 requires entities based or operating in Australia with annual consolidated revenue of at least $100 million to publish an annual modern slavery statement. Entities below the threshold can report voluntarily, and many do because their customers ask them to.

The statement is not a declaration that an entity is free of modern slavery. No organisation can credibly claim that about a global supply chain. It describes what the entity did to find and address the risk.

A statement is due within six months after the end of the entity’s reporting period, which for most is the financial year. It must be approved by the principal governing body, usually the board, and signed by a responsible member. Statements are published on the public Modern Slavery Statements Register, which means customers, competitors and prospective employees can read them.

The seven mandatory criteria

A statement must address all seven of the following. The Attorney-General’s Department publishes detailed guidance on each.

Criterion	What it asks for	Where statements go wrong
1. Identify the entity	Name the reporting entity and its ABN	Rarely a problem
2. Structure, operations, supply chains	Describe what you do and what you buy	Structure described well, supply chains barely at all
3. Risks	Describe the risks in those operations and supply chains	Listing risk categories without saying where yours actually sit
4. Actions	Describe due diligence and remediation	Naming a policy and a training module, then stopping
5. Effectiveness	Describe how you assess whether the actions worked	The weakest criterion in most statements by a wide margin
6. Consultation	Describe consultation with entities you own or control	Omitted entirely by groups that should address it
7. Other information	Anything else relevant	Used well by mature reporters, left blank by most

Sentrient recommends confirming your reporting obligation and your statement content with your own legal advisers. Thresholds are calculated on consolidated revenue, and the corporate group structure affects who reports.

What the government announced in July 2026

On 16 July 2026 the Australian Government announced its intention to significantly strengthen the modern slavery regime.

Change	Status	What it would mean
Failure to prevent offence	Announced, consultation to come	Criminal liability for entities above the threshold that fail to prevent modern slavery, with a reasonable steps defence
Civil penalties for reporting breaches	Announced	The reporting obligation has carried no penalty since it began. Enforcement powers would follow
Threshold cut to $50 million	Recommended in 2023, agreed in principle, not legislated	Roughly doubles the number of reporting entities if it proceeds

These are announcements rather than law. The government has said it will consult, no bill has been introduced, and the detail of what reasonable steps would mean has not been settled. Nothing about your current obligations has changed, and the threshold remains at $100 million.

What has changed is the direction of travel. A reasonable steps defence rewards organisations that can produce evidence of a real programme. It does not reward organisations that can produce a statement. Businesses that start building the evidence now will be in a better position than those that wait for the bill.

How to prevent modern slavery in your organisation

Prevention rests on two things working together. Your people need to be able to recognise modern slavery and know how to report it, and your buying decisions need to stop creating the conditions that produce it. Training on its own will not do the second part.

Start with a risk map, not a supplier list

A list of every supplier is not useful on its own. Sort your spend by risk instead, using country, sector and workforce type. A small contract for cleaning services carries more risk than a large contract for professional services, and the spend figure will tell you the opposite.

Train the people who make purchasing decisions

Modern slavery training is often rolled out to everyone and absorbed by nobody. The people who choose suppliers, negotiate contracts and approve invoices are the ones whose decisions change the risk. Train them properly, and give everyone else the awareness version so they can recognise and report what they see.

Write it into your policies and contracts

A modern slavery policy and a supplier code of conduct turn expectations into something you can point to. Clear procedures also give your people a defined route to report a concern, which is the difference between a suspicion being raised and a suspicion being kept quiet.

Give people a way to report

Workers in a supply chain rarely have a channel into the buying organisation. Where you can, make one available and make it usable in the languages your suppliers actually work in.

Keep the evidence in one place

Policies, training records, supplier assessments, incidents and remediation should be retrievable together. If a failure to prevent offence becomes law, the reasonable steps defence will be an evidence exercise, and evidence scattered across email and spreadsheets is difficult to assemble under pressure.

If you are below the threshold

Plenty of Australian businesses that never lodge a statement still get asked about modern slavery, because their customers are reporting entities and the question travels down the chain. If you supply to a large corporate, a university, a hospital network or a government department, expect the questionnaire. A policy, a supplier code of conduct, training for the people who buy things and a documented way to raise concerns is enough to answer it honestly, and it is the foundation of a full programme if you later cross the threshold.

Sentrient’s modern slavery training

Sentrient’s modern slavery and human rights online training course explains what modern slavery is and how to identify and report it. It was built around the compliance factors Australian organisations actually have to address, and it is designed to be completed and recorded without anyone chasing a spreadsheet.

Because the course sits in the same workplace compliance system as your policies, acknowledgements and incident reports, completion records and policy sign-offs are retrievable together. That is what makes criterion five answerable.

Where to start

If you are building this from nothing, start with your top twenty suppliers by risk rather than by spend. You will learn more in an afternoon than a full supplier list will tell you in a month.

From there, train the people who buy, write the expectation into your contracts, and keep the records together. Modern slavery is not eliminated by any single organisation, but it is made harder every time a buyer stops treating the lowest price as the only question worth asking.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is the definition of modern slavery?

Modern slavery covers situations where a person cannot refuse or leave work or a relationship because of coercion, threats or deception. Under the Modern Slavery Act 2018 it includes trafficking in persons, slavery, servitude, forced labour, forced marriage, debt bondage, deceptive recruiting and the worst forms of child labour.

2. What is the difference between modern slavery and exploitation?

The absence of a real choice to leave. A worker who stays because the pay is bad elsewhere is in a poor job. A worker who stays because their passport is held, because a debt keeps growing, or because their family has been threatened, is in a very different situation.

3. Who has to lodge a modern slavery statement in Australia?

Entities based or operating in Australia with annual consolidated revenue of at least $100 million. Smaller entities may report voluntarily.

4. When is a modern slavery statement due?

Within six months after the end of the reporting period, which for most entities is the financial year. It must be approved by the board and signed by a responsible member.

5. Are there penalties for not reporting?

Not at present. The government announced in July 2026 that it intends to introduce civil penalties for breaches of the reporting obligation, but that has not been legislated.

6. Is the reporting threshold changing to $50 million?

It has been recommended and agreed in principle, but it has not been legislated. The threshold today is $100 million.

7. What should a business below the threshold do?

Expect the questionnaire. A modern slavery policy, a supplier code of conduct, training for the people who buy things and a documented way to raise concerns is a proportionate response, and it answers most customer due diligence requests honestly.

8. Does modern slavery training satisfy the Act?

No single measure satisfies the Act. Training is one action an entity can describe under the fourth criterion, and it is a common one, but a statement also has to describe risk assessment, due diligence, remediation and how effectiveness is measured.

Read More About Modern Slavery:

• Why is modern slavery training a must for your organisation
• What are the various types of modern slavery your employees need to be safeguarded against
• The benefits of modern slavery training
• How can you create a culture of promoting human rights and preventing modern slavery
• Top 5 drivers of modern slavery
• Can modern slavery training help fight the worst forms of child labour