$89.70 to claim. $18,200 to defend.

At last, the Albanese Government has found a growth industry.

Unfortunately, it is not productivity, business investment, manufacturing, mining, real wages, or the small business sector.

It is unfair dismissal claims.

Today, HR Nicholls publishes The Go Away Money Economy: How Australia Turned Unfair Dismissal into a Settlement Industry - the research the Albanese Government does not want employers to read.

The findings are extraordinary.

Since the first financial year of the Albanese Government, unfair dismissal applications are projected to rise by 76 per cent at the end of this financial year, and on current trends, applications will exceed 30,000 per year by 2029–30.

In other words, Labor has not delivered a productivity boom.

It has delivered a litigation boom.

If unfair dismissal claims counted as productivity, Jim Chalmers would be holding a press conference.

Instead, Australian employers are left to pay the bill.

HR Nicholls is the first Australian think tank to comprehensively model unfair dismissal claim costs, project future claim volumes, and identify the policy decisions driving the explosion. We have detailed that the average cost to an employer for every unfair dismissal claim is now $18,200 for employer time, representation and settlement payout.

Employers are already carrying hundreds of millions of dollars in annual costs, and the five-year burden is projected to reach $2.3 billion.

The conclusion from this is unavoidable: Australia’s unfair dismissal system is out of balance because the Albanese Government has made it that way.

It has become too easy to claim, too costly to defend, and too rational to settle.

That is not a fair work system, it is a settlement industry and whereas the Albanese Government promised secure jobs, in effect it has delivered secure litigation.

Through three deliberate tranches of industrial relations legislation - the Secure Jobs, Better Pay Act, the Closing Loopholes Act, and Closing Loopholes No. 2 - Labor has taken Australia’s unfair dismissal system from strained to unsustainable.

Not by accident but by design.

Labor’s workplace laws have created new grounds for claims, blurred the boundaries of employment, multiplied litigation pathways, empowered unions, and buried employers under another layer of legal uncertainty.

All while the filing fee remains just $89.70.

For less than $90, an applicant can now buy a ticket to a process that may cost an employer $20,000.

That is not fairness. That is leverage.

Even the Fair Work Commission’s own President appears to understand the scale of the problem.

Justice Adam Hatcher, confronting the Commission’s exploding workload, said he “reached for the brown paper bag” and warned that, on the Commission’s current operational performance and funding structure, the trajectory was “simply unsustainable.”

When the President of the Fair Work Commission is reaching for the brown paper bag, Australian employers should be reaching for the alarm bell.

The numbers explain why:

Unfair dismissal applications are projected to hit approximately 19,900 this financial year - up 76 per cent from the 2022–23 trough.

Australian employers are bearing an estimated $300 million in direct costs each year.

The projected five-year burden reaches $2.3 billion - and climbing.

On current trends, applications exceed 30,000 per year by 2029–30.

Only around 1.9 per cent of applications reach a final decision on the merits.

Yet every claim still costs employers an estimated $17,000 to $20,000 to resolve.

Each quarter of 2025–26 is now adding roughly $88 million to the cumulative employer cost burden - almost $1 million per day.

The most damning finding is not merely that claims are rising, rather, that almost none of them ever reach a formal merits decision.

Across the dataset examined in this report, 133,228 unfair dismissal applications were lodged. Only 2,572 proceeded to a Member’s decision on the merits.

That is just 1.9 per cent.

The other 98 per cent were resolved through conciliation, withdrawal, jurisdictional dismissal or other pathways before a proper determination of whether the dismissal was actually unfair.

Yet every claim still imposes a cost, and in far too many cases, the rational commercial answer is to pay because it is cheaper to make the problem disappear than to prove the employer was right.

That is the go away money economy.

Australia’s fastest-growing workplace industry is no longer employment, it is suing over employment.

It is a system that rewards the filing of claims, not the merit of claims. It punishes employers through process, even where there is no finding they acted unfairly. It encourages settlement over justice and caution over enterprise.

The report also highlights the growing problem of speculative and unmeritorious claims.

The Fair Work Commission itself has warned that weak claims are clogging the system, delaying genuine applicants and forcing employers with no case to answer to spend time and resources defending claims that should never have been filed.

The Albanese Government has not merely failed to fix this problem.

It has poured fuel on it.

Every major workplace law it has passed has moved in the same direction: more complexity, more rights to litigate, more uncertainty, more union power, more tribunal involvement, and more risk for employers.

That is why it is increasingly impossible to avoid the conclusion that this is the most anti-business government Australia has seen in decades.

A government serious about productivity would make it easier to hire, invest, manage and grow.

This Government has done the opposite.

It will no doubt insist this is all part of a fairer workplace system.

But if a 76 per cent increase in unfair dismissal applications is the definition of fairness, one shudders to think what success looks like and lends itself to the obvious question - have Australian Businesses become 76 per cent more unfair in sacking employees since Labor came to power in 2022?

Perhaps the next Budget will include unfair dismissal claims as a new productivity measure.

On current trends, it may be the only line item growing fast enough for Jim Chalmers to put in a glossy chart.

But there is nothing fair about a system where an employer can spend $20,000 defeating a claim that should never have been lodged.

There is nothing fair about a small business owner paying go away money to avoid losing a week of their life to a hopeless case.

There is nothing fair about genuine claimants being delayed because speculative claims are clogging the queue.

For small businesses, the problem is especially acute.

A large corporation can absorb unfair dismissal claims into HR and legal budgets. A small business owner cannot.

For them, one weak claim can mean days away from the business, thousands of dollars in advice, stress, disruption and the commercial pressure to pay a settlement simply to get their life back.

This is not a marginal workplace issue:

It is a productivity problem.

It is an investment problem.

It is a small business problem.

It is a national economic problem.

Because economies do not grow stronger when employers become frightened of employing people.