Guide to future act decisions made under the Commonwealth right to negotiate scheme

How to use this guide

The online version of the Guide to future act decisions is updated every six or twelve months to include significant decisions.

If you subscribe to this electronic publication through the Tribunal’s subscription centre, you will be notified by email whenever the guide is updated.

Structure of the guide

The guide is structured into four parts: overview, general case notes, case notes by subject matter and additional material. The main content is included in parts two and three — case notes.

General case notes are listings of cases with explanations of the significance of the decision/s made. The section on ‘case notes by subject matter’ gives explanations and examples of cases (some of which may also be included in general case notes) by the broad subject area.

Navigation tips :
  • Click on main headings to see the full chapter.
  • Click on subheadings to access sections only.
  • Within chapters, below case names, you will find links to determination summaries on the Tribunal website and to court decisions listed on the austlii web site.
  • Use the search facility to help find what you’re looking for.
  • You have the option of sorting cases in chapters 3, 4 and 5 by date (view by numeric order) with the most recent last, or by alphabetical order (view by title).
  • To view the latest updates, go to 'Recent updates' located on the right menu.

How to effectively search the guide

At its simplest, a query can be just a word or a phrase. But with the tips on this page, you can expand the focus of your query to give you more complete results. These tips will get you started with basic query language — Search the guide.

  • Look for words with the same prefix. For example, in your query form type key* to find key, keying, keyhole, keyboard, and so on.

  • Search for all forms of a word. For example, in the form type sink** to find sink, sinking, sank, and sunk.

  • Search with the keyword NEAR, rather than AND, for words close to each other. For example, both of these queries, system and manager and system near manager, look for the words system and manager on the same page. But with NEAR, the returned pages are ranked in order of proximity: The closer together the words are, the higher the rank of that page.

  • Refine your queries with the AND NOT keywords to exclude certain text from your search. For example, if you want to find all instances of surfing but not surfing the Net, write the following query:

    surfing AND NOT the Net

  • Add the OR keyword to find all instances of either one word or another, for example:

    Abbott OR Costello

    This query finds all pages that mention Abbott or Costello or both.

  • Put quotation marks around keywords if you want Index Server to take them literally. For instance, if you type the following query:

    "system near manager"

    Index Server will literally look for the complete phrase system near manager. But if you type the same query without the quotation marks:

    system near manager

    Index Server searches all documents for the words system and manager.