HR Nicholls has today released a major new report, The Go Away Money Economy: How Australia Turned Unfair Dismissal into a Settlement Industry, exposing how Australia’s unfair dismissal system has become a low-cost, high-volume claims machine that is punishing employers regardless of whether they have done anything wrong.

The report is the first major statistical and economic analysis by an Australian think tank to model the employer cost of unfair dismissal claims over time, quantify the cumulative burden across the past decade, and project claims and costs through to 2030.

A new report from HR Nicholls has found that Australia’s industrial relations system is so complex that employers can overpay their workers and still be found to have underpaid them.

The HR Nicholls Society has appointed James Mathias as its new Executive Director. This move aims to reposition the Society as a central voice in Australia's economic, legal, and industrial relations debates, focusing on reform amid concerns over productivity decline, regulatory complexity, and activist litigation.