Commonwealth Modern Slavery Act 2018

The Commonwealth Modern Slavery Act 2018 is Australia’s national modern slavery reporting law. It came into force on 1 January 2019 and requires entities in the Australian market with annual consolidated revenue of at least $100 million to publish an annual modern slavery statement describing how they identify and address risks in their operations and supply chains.

The word Commonwealth is doing real work in that sentence, because this is not the only modern slavery Act in Australia. New South Wales has its own Modern Slavery Act 2018, which created the NSW Anti-slavery Commissioner and places separate obligations on state agencies, state owned corporations, councils and universities. A regional council and an ASX-listed retailer are both subject to modern slavery law, and not to the same one.

Who each Act reaches:

• Commonwealth Act, entities in the Australian market with at least $100 million consolidated revenue, reporting to the national register
• NSW Act, state agencies, state owned corporations, councils and universities, overseen by the NSW Anti-slavery Commissioner
• Below either threshold, voluntary reporting is open to you and larger customers increasingly ask for it

The Commonwealth Act is a transparency law, not a prohibition. It creates no new offence for reporting entities and does not ask you to certify that your supply chain is clean. It asks you to describe honestly what you looked for, what you found and what you did about it. Statements sit on a public register, so a thin one is visible to investors, customers and journalists.

For an entity in scope the work is governance, not paperwork. The statement is approved by the principal governing body, which puts it on the board agenda beside your other governance, risk and compliance reporting. Supplier risk has to be assessed and revisited each period through risk management, and the evidence behind each claim retained through records management. The Attorney-General’s Department notes that modern slavery is often linked to corruption, so anti-bribery and fraud training belongs in the same programme.

Thresholds and requirements change, and a statutory review has recommended adjusting them, so treat this as general information rather than legal advice and confirm the current position with the Attorney-General’s Department. Sentrient’s compliance training courses cover the awareness side.