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Employee Travel
Travel arrangements for MOP(S) Act employees are set out in Determination 2020/15: Staff travel and relief staff arrangements (the travel determination) and the Enterprise Agreement Guidelines.
- Determination 2020/15: Staff travel and relief staff arrangements
- Enterprise Agreement Guideline: Domestic Travel
- Enterprise Agreement Guideline: Travelling Allowance
- Enterprise Agreement Guideline: Motor Vehicle Allowance
- Enterprise Agreement Guideline: Overseas Travel
The travel of employees is administered by the Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority (IPEA). Queries about employee travel should be directed to IPEA. More about IPEA and its functions can be found at http://www.ipea.gov.au/.
Short-term Employment, Work Base and Travel
Senators and Members should take care with short-term employment arrangements where the employee may be required to travel. For casual employees, each day or part-day worked constitutes a separate engagement. The work base for a casual employee is the location where he or she spends the most time on duty during an engagement, or a period of consecutive engagements. Any break in service, i.e. a working day on which the casual employee does not work, ends a period of consecutive engagements.
An employment agreement records where the employee and employer intend the work base to be. However, the work base is established by the facts of where the employee spends their time at work, and may differ from the place of work recorded in the employment agreement.
If a non-ongoing or casual employee has a work base other than where the employee lives, the travel to and from the employee’s home is the employee’s responsibility.
To avoid non-ongoing or casual employees engaged for short periods being required to bear the costs of travel, Senators and Members who require support staff in Canberra may wish to send an ongoing employee from their electorate office, or employ a non-ongoing or casual staff member who resides in the Canberra area.
For example: a non ongoing MOP(S) Act employee is engaged for a period of three weeks. Their employment agreement states their work base is the employing Senator or Member’s electorate office, but they spend two weeks of their employment period working in Canberra. This employee would not be entitled to receive TA while working in Canberra. The employee’s work base is Canberra, because that is where the employee spends most of their time on duty.