Compliance Management Requirements

Compliance management requirements are the obligations an Australian organisation has to meet to run compliance properly, and they are not the same for every business. What applies to you depends on your industry, your entity type, your size and the states you operate in. Working out which requirements actually bite is the first job, not the last.

Most Australian employers carry a common baseline. Work health and safety duties, Fair Work record keeping, privacy obligations under the Australian Privacy Principles and anti-discrimination law apply broadly, whatever the sector. Layered on top are requirements tied to what you are. Public companies and large proprietary companies have had to maintain a whistleblower policy since 1 January 2020 under section 1317AI of the Corporations Act, and that policy must cover set matters including how disclosures can be made, how the company investigates them and how it protects a discloser from detriment. APRA regulated banks, insurers and superannuation trustees came under CPS 230 on 1 July 2025, with the service provider requirements reaching pre-existing contracts by 1 July 2026 at the latest.

Meeting requirements in practice usually means being able to show:

• a current register of the obligations that apply to your organisation, revisited when the law moves
• written policies and procedures that your people have read and acknowledged
• training matched to your real risks, such as work health and safety, privacy and whistleblowing
• records showing who did what and when, and a review cycle with a named owner

ASIC’s Regulatory Guide 270 on whistleblower policies shows how specific a single requirement can get once you look at it closely. Obligations differ across states and territories and change over time, so treat this as general information rather than legal advice and take proper advice on anything that turns on your circumstances. Posts tagged here work through how Australian organisations identify and meet these requirements, and the GRC system shows how the evidence is kept in one place.