For most of her career, Sandra Parker was in the room.
As a Commonwealth Deputy Secretary she shaped the Fair Work Act, led the harmonisation of national work health and safety law across Australian jurisdictions, and sat at the table where ministers were briefed and legislation was negotiated. Her job was to advise, to frame, to push. When she wanted guidance on what to do next, she asked her secretary. She called colleagues. She walked down the corridor.
In 2018, she was appointed Australia’s Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO), head of the national regulator overseeing workplace relations for two million employers and fifteen million workers. She crossed the corridor, figuratively speaking, and the room went quiet.
“When you move into the regulatory space, you suddenly become independent,” she said, speaking on the TMR podcast. “That sounds great. And you have to be independent. But that independence comes with an isolation. That was a bit of a shock to me.”
“That independence comes with an isolation. That was a bit of a shock to me.”
It shouldn’t have been, except that nothing in the system told her it was coming.
What the crossing costs
The standard story about moving from policy to regulation focuses on the mandate. You stop advising and start enforcing. You stop shaping the system and start running a part of it. But Parker’s account of the transition focuses on something less visible: the loss of informal infrastructure.
As Deputy Secretary, she had a secretary, peer networks, ready access to senior colleagues, and the institutional permission to ask for help. None of that transfers when you become a regulator. Independence – the thing the system tells you is a feature – arrives without scaffolding. The department that until recently consulted her on everything now treats arm’s length as a reason to step back.
“The department was no longer consulting me on what should we put in this legislation, what should we say to the government,” she said. “I’d been in the room. I was no longer in the room in that sense. And that took a bit of getting used to.”
What surprised her was the silence. Not hostility – absence. Regulators are granted independence and then, in practice, left to discover what it means. The department sees the arm’s-length principle as a reason to disengage. The regulator interprets independence as meaning they shouldn’t ask for help. Both are wrong about what the other is thinking, and no one is required to correct the misunderstanding.
Parker is direct about where that leads. “There’s nothing more lonely than when you get something wrong as a regulator and the department goes radio silent. You’re sitting out there on your own thinking, the media’s after me, I’m in trouble, and no one’s helping me.”
“There’s nothing more lonely than when you get something wrong as a regulator and the department goes radio silent.”
She now sees this pattern consistently in the leaders she coaches – particularly those who arrive from outside the public service entirely and find themselves running complex agencies without a map of how government actually works. What’s striking is that the isolation didn’t lift once she found her footing. It shaped every significant decision she made at the FWO. The story of how she rebuilt the agency’s enforcement posture is, in a way, also a story about how a regulator navigates without the usual supports.
The agency she walked into
The FWO in 2018 was a case study in what happens when a regulator loses its read on the community it serves – and when the system around it doesn’t notice, or doesn’t intervene, until the damage is visible. The agency was taking 18 matters to court per year – historically low. It had been treating underpayments as disputes to be mediated at precisely the moment when the community had stopped accepting that framing.
The context matters. In 2015, journalist Adele Ferguson and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) Four Corners investigated 7-Eleven, finding workers on visas being paid as little as A$10 an hour, with franchisees running cashback schemes that required employees to withdraw their legally paid wages and hand a portion back. Around A$173 million was eventually repaid to workers. The FWO was accused of being missing in action.
Allan Fels, the prominent former competition regulator, had been brought in by 7-Eleven itself – and then sacked for being too public – before being appointed chair of a government-appointed Migrant Worker Task Force. His headline was unambiguous: wage theft should be criminalised. His report said the ombudsman wasn’t tough enough, wasn’t using all its enforcement tools, and needed bottom-up change.
Parker had watched all of this from the department. She had been Deputy Secretary responsible for supporting the Fels task force. She understood the policy terrain in granular detail. What she underestimated, she says, was the extent of the public pressure and what she’d actually need to do once she was inside. “I thought I might be able to make a difference. I was pretty naive, actually.”
Her first act was to commission a capability review – deliberately reporting to her, not the minister, so she could manage it. She chose David Butler, a former Deputy Commissioner of the Australian Taxation Office and former head of the New Zealand Inland Revenue Department, considered the best in the business for this kind of work. His finding: the agency wasn’t broken, but its enforcement approach was outdated, fragmented, and not fit for purpose. The executive team wasn’t working well together. Key decisions weren’t being made centrally. There was no coherent strategy.
Her second act was quieter but arguably more consequential. She brought in a secondee from the department – a politically astute chief counsel who knew the legislation inside out – and asked him a simple question: are we actually using all the tools we have?
The answer, it turned out, was sitting in the legislation all along. But because the agency had drifted inward – self-referential in its legal caution, disconnected from the Attorney-General’s Department that could have clarified the position years earlier – no one had gone to check.
220 compliance notices
The tool the agency had been avoiding was the compliance notice. Under the Fair Work Act, an inspector with a reasonable belief that an underpayment has occurred can issue an employer a notice requiring them to calculate what they owe, come back with the methodology, and pay the worker. If they comply in the agreed timeframe, nothing is recorded and nothing is made public. If they don’t, the matter goes to court.
It is, as Parker describes it, like a speeding ticket for workplace relations. Quick to issue. Transfers the burden of calculation to the employer. Builds deterrence without the resource cost of full litigation.
The FWO had been issuing roughly 220 a year. The reason was a legal interpretation that had calcified inside the agency: lawyers had convinced themselves that in order to issue a compliance notice, the ombudsman had to first calculate the exact underpayment to the dollar. Given the complexity involved – a single worker paid across ten years, through multiple award rates, rosters, promotions, and part-time arrangements – the exercise was prohibitive. So inspectors were avoiding using these notices.
Parker sought advice from the Attorney-General’s Department. The answer was clear: the agency was being too conservative. It could require the employer to do the calculation. All it needed to do was assure itself the methodology was sound.
That single shift changed the agency’s posture. By the time Parker left five years later, the FWO was issuing around 2,500 compliance notices a year. Her target had been 10,000 – and she was under no illusion about the distance still to travel. “It’s a very long road to change the approach in any agency,” she said. The 2,500 figure was not the destination, but rather proof the direction was right.
“Every time an employer didn’t pay back the money owed to a worker, even if it was a small amount, I took them to court,” she said. “Which did get some criticism, but not from courts, which were very supportive. But my view was we needed to shift to providing a strong deterrent through taking this tough stance. Employers needed to know we meant business. And if we didn’t shift to doing that, they could just call our bluff every single time and say, oh, well, they won’t do anything.”
The culture change that accompanied this was neither quick nor clean. Parker shuffled her deputies across roles, set up an enforcement board that she personally chaired, and travelled to the 22 offices around the country to explain why the shift was necessary and how it would be supported. Many inspectors resisted. They had built their professional identity around visiting workplaces, educating employers, and helping people work things out. The new posture felt more prescriptive and adversarial to them. “But most senior executives have to do it at some stage.”
What she sees now
Parker left the ombudsman role and now works with senior executives and regulators through the JWLG Executive Learning Groups, facilitating peer learning groups and coaching leaders through leadership challenges and major transitions. The problems she encounters in the coaching rooms are consistent enough that they’ve started to feel like a list.
Take the question of legislation. Many new regulatory leaders don’t know their own Act with the depth the role requires. Parker’s version of “knowing your legislation” means reading the second reading speeches when it was first introduced, and any subsequent amendments, understanding the debates in parliament at the time, and being clear about what harm the legislation was designed to address – because that harm is the anchor. Regulators drift when they lose sight of it. They add on things that interest them, wander outside their legislative mandate, and create problems that compound quickly.
The social licence question is adjacent. The FWO in 2015 had not clocked the change in community sentiment – from underpayments being seen as just “how it is” for young workers in agriculture and hospitality, to outrage. The community had moved. The agency had been too slow in responding. The banking royal commission is Parker’s other vivid example: an industry that lost its social licence rapidly and publicly, leaving regulators scrambling to catch up with community expectations they should have been watching.
Beyond that there are practical things no handbook covers: how to appear before a Senate estimates committee, how to manage a media crisis without departmental support, how to manage a public sector agency, and how to understand the budget cycle well enough to advocate for your own resources. These are learnable skills. They’re just not being systematically taught.
The system that isn’t there
Parker’s prescription is consistent. Every new regulatory leader, on appointment, should receive a structured induction: legal and policy training on the legislation, guidance on the public sector framework, coaching and mentoring from an experienced former regulator. A list of suitable and available coaches should come from the central agency. The minister’s letter of appointment should make participation mandatory, not optional.
She’s been making this argument for years. She helped to establish the Commonwealth Regulator Leadership Cohort – a group of agency heads who gathered quarterly to share case studies and support each other, born from her own experience of isolation in the early years of her FWO tenure. She contributed to the Commonwealth heads of regulator pocket guide, an attempt to put the unwritten knowledge of the role onto paper.
Neither fills the gap she’s describing. “I’d like to see them wrapped around with a whole lot of support,” she said. “And it should be part of the minister’s letter to them saying, you must do this. Not an option.”
“I don’t think ministers realise it’s in their best interest to make sure the regulator is actually very well supported.”
The irony she returns to is this: the minister has every incentive to want a well-functioning regulator. A regulator who comes unstuck – publicly, badly, on something that ends up at a Senate committee – reflects back on the minister, the department, and the government. “I don’t think ministers realise it’s in their best interest to make sure the regulator is actually very well supported,” she said. “They have every right to assume the department and the central agencies are doing that.” Often they’re not.
Common sense
When asked what a magic wand would fix, Parker didn’t reach for a structural reform or a new legislative instrument. She described a question she wants every regulator to ask from the moment they arrive.
What’s the harm this legislation was designed to address? What resources do we have? How do we use them as well as we possibly can?
She called it common sense. It might be. But the frequency with which it goes unasked – in agencies across every sector, in every jurisdiction she has worked in or coached through – suggests it’s not as common as the name implies. The system rarely stops to ask it on behalf of the people it appoints to answer it. Sandra Parker thinks that should change.
Sandra Parker PSM served as Fair Work Ombudsman from 2018 to 2023. She now works with senior executives and regulatory leaders through JWLG Executive Learning Groups. This article draws on her conversation with TMR – available in part one and part two of the TMR podcast.
