Happy Valentine’s Day to our retail community – we hope it’s been successful trading.
February is always an agenda-setting month and to help with our community successfully navigate the year ahead, our marquee event the ARA Leader’s Forum is one week away on 21 and 22 February.
Taking place at Sydney’s International Convention Centre, the event features the largest lineup of retail leaders and experts to-date and includes highlights from the NRF Big Show, panels on workplace culture, customer behaviour, retail’s economic outlook, innovation, sustainability and more.
We have limited seats available. It really is a not-to-be-missed opportunity and you still have until Friday to grab a ticket before this event sells out!
This past week, the next tranche of the government’s controversial Closing Loopholes legislation passed both house of parliament, featuring some new provisions on the casual conversion process and the right to disconnect.
At the eleventh hour, crossbench Senators secured some sensible amendments to this legislation to address some of the significant concerns the ARA and other employer groups had.
We welcomed those amendments because many reflect the commonsense recommendations that the ARA had made in our outreach to the government, opposition and crossbench.
While we remain opposed to these reforms, our advocacy efforts have contributed to crossbench securing the least-worse version of this legislation. Our focus now shifts to preparing for these changes and the ARA will keep members informed of next steps.
Unfortunately, retail crime continues as a dominant theme this year and we are pleased to see continued traction around tougher penalties with the Western Australian Government announcing plans to introduce legislation to implement tougher penalties for people who assault or abuse retail workers.
The landmark reforms, being introduced to Parliament this week, will see Western Australia join the Northern Territory, South Australia and New South Wales leading the way in legislating in response to the growing prevalence of customer aggression and assaults.
The ARA has long advocated for these reforms to protect retail workers and is now urging the remaining states and the ACT to follow suit.
