For almost a decade, Australia’s response to modern slavery in global supply chains has been built around a relatively simple proposition: if businesses are required to disclose modern slavery risks and what they are doing about them, transparency will drive better corporate behaviour.
The Modern Slavery Act 2018 (Cth) embodies this approach. Large entities are required to report on modern slavery risks in their operations and supply chains and the actions they take to address them. Yet the Act does not require reporting entities to actually prevent modern slavery. This distinction matters.
In July 2026, the Australian Government announced its intention to amend the Act to introduce a criminal offence for reporting entities that fail to prevent modern slavery in their supply chains, subject to a defence that they took reasonable steps to prevent the conduct. If enacted, this would represent a significant change in how Australia governs corporate responsibility for modern slavery.
The shift from transparency to criminal liability changes the central question asked of reporting entities. Rather than asking ‘what do you know about modern slavery risks?’, a failure-to-prevent offence asks ‘what did you actually do to prevent exploitation from occurring?’. But whether this represents a more fundamental shift in how Australia understands the problem of modern slavery remains unclear.
Modern slavery in global supply chains is often framed as individual instances of exploitation that businesses must become better at identifying and managing. Yet exploitation does not occur in isolation from the economic and institutional arrangements through which global supply chains operate. Purchasing practices, outsourcing and subcontracting, downward pressure on prices and wages, insecure forms of work and migration, and profound inequalities in bargaining power can all contribute to conditions in which workers become vulnerable to exploitation. Recognising these things allow modern slavery to be understood as a problem of structural injustice: one produced through systems in which multiple actors participate and from which some actors benefit, and others are harmed.
This framing complicates what it means for a reporting entity to ‘prevent’ modern slavery. Prevention cannot be reduced to having the right policies in place, conducting sporadic audits, mapping risks or responding when exploitation is discovered. It may also require entities to examine whether their purchasing decisions, contracting arrangements and business practices contribute to the conditions in which exploitation becomes possible.
The proposed failure-to-prevent offence creates an opportunity to move in this direction. But criminal liability does not automatically achieve this. A regime that defines ‘reasonable steps’ primarily through existing compliance practices could reproduce many of the limitations of the transparency model. Businesses may simply become more sophisticated at demonstrating compliance rather than changing the practices that contribute to exploitation.
There is therefore an important question about whose knowledge counts in determining whether prevention has been effective. The experiences of workers, trade unions, community organisations and survivors of modern slavery are often backgrounded in corporate auditing and risk-management processes. If a new regime is to produce meaningful change, these perspectives need to be centred in how reporting entities prevent modern slavery and how ‘reasonable steps’ are understood, implemented and evaluated.
These are some of the questions we will explore at the upcoming ANZSOC pre-conference workshop, From Transparency to Criminal Liability: Understanding Modern Slavery as Corporate Crime, at Flinders University City Campus on 30 November. The workshop brings together researchers, regulators, practitioners, business, unions, community representatives and people with lived experience to consider the proposed offence from different perspectives.
Participants will work through a supply-chain scenario involving migrant workers experiencing modern slavery and consider what a reporting entity should be expected to do and when its failure to act should become criminal. Accountability and enforcement, justice for workers and people with lived experience will also be considered and, finally, what principles should underpin an effective failure-to-prevent regime.
My hope is that the discussion moves us beyond thinking about what reporting entities may be required to do differently because of a new offence, to whether such changes will make a meaningful difference to the workers whose exploitation the law is intended to prevent.
