Hiring a Freelance Copywriter in Australia: The Control Problem

Hiring a freelance copywriter in Australia means passing two control tests that pull in opposite directions. Section 15AA of the Fair Work Act has applied since 26 August 2024. It decides whether your writer is a contractor or an employee by looking at the real substance, practical reality and true nature of the relationship, not only at the contract. AHPRA says the person who authorises the content, or directs someone to draft it, is the advertiser. The advertiser carries the liability. So you have to control the words without controlling the worker. Most hiring briefs get that backwards.

What does a freelance copywriter in Australia actually cost?

Between about $50 and $500 a page. The spread says more about the writer than about the market, and I have broken the real rates down in a separate post on what a freelance copywriter costs in 2026.

This post is about the part that never appears on the invoice.

Hire a freelance copywriter in Australia and you take on two legal questions at once. The first is whether that person is really a contractor. The second is who answers for the words once they are published.

Both questions turn on the same idea. Both are settled by law, not by what your contract calls the arrangement. And the honest answer to one can damage your answer to the other.

Almost no hiring guide covers either. So here they are, from the two documents that decide them.

Is your freelance copywriter a contractor or an employee?

Whatever your contract says, the law decides. And the way it decides changed on 26 August 2024.

That is the day section 15AA of the Fair Work Act 2009 commenced. It was inserted by the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes No. 2) Act 2024. The section reads:

"whether an individual is an employee of a person within the ordinary meaning of that expression ... is to be determined by ascertaining the real substance, practical reality and true nature of the relationship between the individual and the person."

Subsection (2) is where the work happens. It says regard must be had:

"not only to the terms of the contract governing the relationship, but also to other factors relating to the totality of the relationship including, but not limited to, how the contract is performed in practice."

The Act is unusually open about why it exists. A note under the section says it "was enacted as a response to the decisions of the High Court of Australia in CFMMEU v Personnel Contracting Pty Ltd [2022] HCA 1 and ZG Operations Australia Pty Ltd v Jamsek [2022] HCA 2".

Those two 2022 decisions had made the written contract close to decisive. Section 15AA takes that back. Your contract still counts. So does everything you actually do.

For a copywriting engagement, that means the day to day is evidence. The Fair Work Ombudsman calls this the whole of relationship test. Run through it honestly:

• Do you set their working hours?
• Do you tell them which task to do in which order?
• Do they have to attend your team standup?
• Do they work on your laptop, your logins, your software?
• Do you pay by the hour with no defined deliverable?
• Are you their only client?

No single answer is fatal. Stack up enough of them and the arrangement stops looking like a contract for services.

What happens if you get the classification wrong?

You lose the argument, and you carry the burden of showing you were reasonable.

Section 357 of the Fair Work Act says an employer must not represent to an individual that their contract of employment is a contract for services. It is a civil remedy provision. Section 358 stops you dismissing an employee in order to re-engage them as a contractor for the same work. Section 359 stops you making a statement you know is false to push someone into a contractor arrangement.

The defence is where this got harder. Section 357(2) says the prohibition does not apply:

"if the employer proves that, when the representation was made, the employer reasonably believed that the contract was a contract for services."

Read the verbs. The employer proves. The employer reasonably believed.

Before 27 February 2024 the test asked whether the employer did not know and was not reckless. That is a question about your state of mind. The test now asks whether your belief holds up when someone else looks at it, a shift from a subjective standard to an objective one, as Kingston Reid put it at the time.

Section 357(3) adds that in deciding whether your belief was reasonable, "regard must be had to the size and nature of the employer's enterprise". A national group with an HR function gets less benefit of the doubt than a two person practice.

One thing to keep straight. All of the above is the Fair Work Act. Tax, superannuation, payroll tax and workers compensation each run their own tests. Getting one right does not settle the others.

Can a freelance copywriter opt out of the test?

Sometimes, and only above an income threshold.

Section 15AB lets an individual give an opt out notice electing that section 15AA does not apply to the relationship. Section 15AC sets out the effect. Section 15AD lets them revoke it later.

The conditions are tight:

• You may only tell a contractor the option exists if you consider their earnings for that work "exceed the contractor high income threshold".
• The opt out notice itself must state that the individual considers the same thing.
• The individual may give only one opt out notice for that relationship.
• If you gave them the notice first, they have 21 days to respond.

The threshold amount is not written into the Act. Section 15C says it is "the amount prescribed by, or worked out in the manner prescribed by, the regulations". Check the current figure with the Fair Work Ombudsman before you rely on it.

For most freelance copywriting work, this is not your answer. A per page or per project brief usually sits nowhere near the threshold. Setting the working relationship up properly is the real protection.

Who is liable when a copywriter writes something AHPRA does not allow?

You are, if you are the one who published it.

This is the half that regulated businesses get wrong most often, so here is the source text. Section 3.2 of the AHPRA Guidelines for advertising a regulated health service, issued 14 December 2020:

"Anyone (person, business or corporate entity) who advertises a regulated health service, is considered an advertiser and must comply with the advertising requirements of the National Law."

Then it names who that is:

"The person or entity who controls part or all of the advertising (i.e. who authorises the content) is the advertiser."

And it spells out what control means. You have control of the advertising if "they publish or authorise content or direct someone to publish or draft content (including a third party, staff member or marketing agency)".

Read the middle of that clause again. Direct someone to draft content. A copywriter drafts content. Brief one, and you are the advertiser.

The guidelines then close the loop in a single sentence: "Advertisers are responsible for their advertising, so they need to check any content produced by others on their behalf."

Your copywriter may also be an advertiser in their own right. That does not move anything off your plate. It adds a second name to the list, it does not remove yours. I have written about how this plays out with an agency in does your agency understand AHPRA.

The cost of getting it wrong went up sharply in 2022.

Section 133 of the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law is the provision underneath all of it. It applies to any advertiser of a regulated health service. It has never been limited to practitioners. If you want the wider picture, start with the AHPRA advertising guidelines explained, then the specific rules on patient testimonials.

Why do the two control tests point in opposite directions?

Because both are built on the word control, and each wants the opposite thing from you.

Section 15AA looks at how much you direct the person. The more you control how, when and where the work gets done, the more the relationship looks like employment.

AHPRA section 3.2 looks at how much you direct the content. If you authorise it, or direct someone to draft it, you are the advertiser, and you have to check what comes back.

So the Fair Work Act rewards you for stepping back from the worker. The National Law penalises you for stepping back from the words.

Set out side by side, the way through is one line. Control the output, not the operator.

Approve every word before it publishes. Keep the record of who approved what, and when. Then leave the person's calendar, tools and working method entirely alone.

That sounds obvious written down. It is the opposite of how most businesses run a freelancer. The common pattern is loose sign off and tight supervision: the writer sits in your standups and uses your logins, and the copy goes live because a deadline arrived. That pattern fails both tests at once.

How do you brief a freelance copywriter without creating an employee?

Move every piece of control from the person to the deliverable. Eight things do most of the work.

1. Scope by deliverable. Ten pages, not ten days.
2. Pay per project or per page. An hourly rate against no defined output is the weakest position you can take.
3. Leave the calendar alone. No rostered hours. No standup they are required to attend.
4. Let them use their own tools. Their machine, their software, their process.
5. Do not become their only client. A contractor who works only for you is already halfway to something else.
6. Put the compliance standard in the brief. Name the framework the copy has to clear. Ask for the rule behind every claim.
7. Approve every word before it publishes. This is the AHPRA half. It is not optional and it does not count against you on the Fair Work side.
8. Keep the approval record. Who signed off, on which version, on what date.

Items six to eight are the ones people skip. They are also the only three that would help you if a notification ever landed.

One caveat, and it is a real one. This is general information about Australian law, not legal advice. Classification turns on the facts of your specific arrangement, and advertising obligations turn on what you actually published. If real money or real risk is involved, get advice from an employment lawyer. My work is the copy and the compliance review, and I say so plainly in my guide to hiring a compliance copywriter.

Does hiring a copywriter overseas change any of this?

It changes one half and leaves the other exactly where it was.

The Fair Work Act applies to constitutionally covered businesses in Australia. An overseas contractor who runs their own business, uses their own equipment, carries other clients and invoices per project is a very different fact pattern from a local worker sitting in your daily standup. That is not an automatic exemption, and the answer depends on your facts. Get advice if the amounts are material.

The AHPRA half does not move at all. If you are the Australian practice publishing the page, you are the advertiser. Section 133 attaches to the advertising, not to the writer's postcode. Where the copy was drafted is irrelevant to who answers for it.

Which puts the whole thing back on one question. Does the person writing your copy know the rules the copy has to pass?

That is the job I do. I work from Delhi, per project, on my own tools, for a number of Australian clients. Every brief names the framework the copy has to clear, whether that is AHPRA, the TGA or ASIC. Every piece ships with the evidence for its claims. If you are weighing this up against an agency, I have compared the two in freelance copywriter versus health writing agency.