Melton management are wasting money on irrelevant legal opinions

17 July 2026

Earlier this week, you may have seen Council’s EA update including advice about the ASU’s multi-employer bargaining campaign from a law firm called “HR Legal”.

Let’s get something straight: Melton City Council are wasting money by seeking opinions and commentary from a law firm that has had zero involvement in our campaign and bargaining. Their opinion is clearly based off publicly available information taken from the ASU website, and their associated commentary is staggering in its lack of any real insight into what is actually happening.

Take it from the people that are actually involved in negotiations: we are making historic progress and achieving significant wins, and we’re not done yet!

Negotiations only commenced in March, and already we have made significant progress on consultation, reproductive health leave, gender affirmation leave, improvements to parental leave, and dispute resolution, and we are working through other claims constructively.

HR Legal made derisive comments about negotiation for a consultation term. They were correct in only one respect – it is a mandatory term in enterprise agreements – but negotiating for real improvements that ensure workers have a genuine say in changes that impact them will have a significant impact on the lives of ASU members. Poor change management processes are a recognised psychosocial hazard, and we are negotiating for a clause that will deliver significant improvements.

They have also sought to reflect on the regional MEB negotiated between Ararat and Central Goldfields in an effort to undermine confidence in our wages claim for the metropolitan MEB (10%, 4%, 4%, 4%).

ASU members involved in the regional MEB pursued an entirely different bargaining strategy – they were focused on combining the best conditions from each of the two agreements rather than pursuing historic pay increases – they did not even claim for wage increases similar to what is being pursued in the metropolitan MEB – and most importantly, ASU members involved in that Agreement successfully achieved their goals, and now have some of the best conditions of employment in the industry (and they still won better pay increases than what Melton recently offered employees!).

And finally, regarding our claim for a “catch up” payment of 10% to address the real wage decline that ASU members have suffered under the broken single EA system: the ASU will continue to fight and negotiate to ensure that councils that join the multi-employer agreement after the first year do not miss out.

HR Legal have missed some other important things. The ASU has in fact made an application last week to vary the metropolitan MEB authorisation to include Wyndham City Council. Two weeks prior to that, the ASU made applied to include Frankston City Council. If those applications are approved by FWC, those Councils will join in the bargaining for the metropolitan multi agreement along with the other 8 Councils. The ASU is asking for your support to add Melton City Council as well. We are stronger together, and management knows it. That’s why they paid a law firm to try and convince you it’s a bad idea.

If you have not already signed the petition to join into the MEA please sign here.

Learn more by reading our FAQs and the MEA log of claims currently being negotiated.