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A very big Season’s Greetings to all ICA members, supporters, friends and contributors—of which there are many! 2016 has been an impressive year in terms of achieving positive outcomes for self-employed people.

• The Unfair Contract laws for small business people began on 12 November. And look at this letter.  At least one bank, the NAB, has taken moves to change its small business finance contracts.
• ATO admits fraud allegation ‘error’. We successfully defended Rod Douglass against baseless fraud/evasion allegations by the ATO. There’s more to come, but the outcome sets a big precedent for the ATO’s behaviour. The ATO admitted in court that its claims against Rod were ‘baseless’.
• Construction subbies defended. A new construction code starts soon in Western Australia, focused on protecting small subbies. We’ve been working on this for almost five years. Unfortunately, the new federal code won’t start for two years! More work needed on this!
• Truckies defended.  Self-employed truckies were almost wiped out, but were saved. We were proud to play a role in the outcome in taking the issue to the High Court. And don’t worry, we haven’t dropped the compensation attempt. But it’s a slow process gathering evidence!

Our focus at ICA is on targeting practical outcomes for self-employed people that gives them/us a better chance of being effective business people. We work on this through networks of volunteers and supporters. We’re not a huge organization but it’s amazing what people can achieve with a central focus, determination and clear strategies. In fact this is how the new ‘gig’ economy works. It’s what we support and do.

In doing this, our thanks go to many public servants (even though we sometimes seem to be ‘at war’ with them), dedicated politicians (yes, there are many believers who help!), a key band of very supportive lawyers (yes, again, there are believers!) and, of course, the stacks of self-employed people.

ICA has some major plans for 2017. We’ll keep you informed.