Sandgate and Brighton run on genuinely small businesses — the café with six staff, the salon with four, the allied health practice with a practitioner and a receptionist. Owner-operators, mostly, doing payroll themselves on a Sunday evening between everything else.
That shape produces a specific kind of exposure. There is rarely anyone whose job it is to notice a rule change, so arrangements set up at the start tend to persist unchanged for years. The casual who has worked the same four shifts a week since 2022 is the classic example: genuinely casual on day one, and by now looking very much like a permanent part-timer regardless of what the contract says.
The good news is that businesses this size are quick to fix. There is no committee and no legacy system — usually one conversation, a corrected classification and an updated contract, and it is done. The work is almost always smaller than the owner fears, and a great deal smaller than leaving it another two years.