Law and policy updates Queensland: PCBUs in Queensland will need a sexual harassment prevention plan From 1 March 2025, ‘persons conducting a business or undertaking’ (PCBUs) in Queensland must prepare and implement a prevention plan to manage identified risks to the health and safety of workers, or others, from sexual harassment and sex or gender-based harassment at work. The obligation to prepare a prevention plan applies where a risk of sexual harassment has been identified, and control measures are needed to eliminate or minimise the risk. For more information, see WorkSafe Queensland’s webpage Sexual harassment and sex or gender-based harassment. Victoria: new Occupational Health and Safety (Psychological Health) Regulations The Victorian Government will introduce new regulations strengthening how psychosocial hazards are managed by the end of the year. These regulations will put psychosocial hazards on the same footing as physical ones and create specific obligations for Victorian employers to identify and control psychosocial hazards in their workplaces. For more information, see WorkSafe Victoria’s webpage Occupational Health and Safety (Psychological Health) Regulations. ResourcesUpdated resourcesDisaster resources Who runs the organisation Not-for-profit Law’s NSW fundingNCOSS 2025 pre-budget submission NCOSS has submitted their Pre-Budget Submission for the 2025-26 NSW budget. The first part of the submission focuses on the needs of people living in poverty and people experiencing inequality. The second part focuses on the immense challenges facing the community sector, particularly in terms of inadequate funding in the face of overwhelming demand and increased costs. One of their recommendations is that a meaningful step would be to reinstate Justice Connect’s Not-for-profit Law services. Our program was defunded in 2022, despite offering 15,000 hours of free legal advice to NSW organisations and training 5,400 NSW board members, staff and volunteers over the previous two years. Community organisations in NSW like yours that had access to free, high-quality, and specialist legal and governance help, now have nowhere else to go. At a time when the operating environment is more complex than ever and organisations are stretched beyond capacity, access to free legal and governance support is of benefit to individual organisations, the people they support and to the NSW Government in its commissioning role. As Cara Varian, CEO of NCOSS, states “it’s that sort of investment, rather than glossy feelgood ads, that will make a real difference in building the capacity of our sector”. Update on Not-for-profit Law's funding in NSW Since the NSW Government stopped funding our work, we had no choice but to cut off our NSW advice services and remove our tailored legal resources for NSW-based community organisations from our website. Since then, tens of thousands of organisations that rely on us have had to go without critical legal and governance support. Email a letter now to the NSW Minister for Families and Communities in support of reinstating our funding. We’re grateful to have secured short-term support from another funder which means we can get our NSW-specific resources back on our website for the time being. However, this support is time limited, and it’s not enough to reopen our advice service in NSW. This month, we put the following resources back on our website: |
