Guesswork and the Illegal Gag Clause: Indonesia vs. Australia

🇮🇩 Indonesia · 🇦🇺 Australia

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In Indonesia, finding out what a colleague earns usually requires a mix of social instinct and polite indirection, because the number simply isn't volunteered. In Australia, finding out what a colleague earns technically requires nothing at all now — since December 2023, a clause in your contract forbidding you from discussing pay is not just unenforceable, it's illegal. One country never built the plumbing for salary talk. The other just had the government tear out the pipes that were blocking it.

Do's & Don'ts

🇮🇩 Indonesia

🇦🇺 Australia

Indonesia: No Pipes for the Information to Travel Through

Hofstede Insights scores Indonesia at 78 on power distance and a striking 14 on individualism, among the most collectivist readings globally — a profile where information generally flows along hierarchy rather than horizontally between peers, and salary is treated as exactly that kind of hierarchy-gated information. The Jakarta Post's reporting on fresh graduates entering the job market captured the resulting uncertainty directly: one 21-year-old student, Rian Antony, described Rp 4 million a month as "already very adequate for a fresh graduate" and said he'd bargain during an interview but never push for more than he felt he genuinely deserved — a calibration made almost entirely from instinct and secondhand impression, because no public salary band existed for him to anchor against.

The information genuinely isn't volunteered by employers either. WageIndicator's launch of an Indonesian salary-check tool drew heavy early traffic specifically because, as the organization's own reporting noted, workers had so little else to compare against. For expats and multinational hires, the picture shifts somewhat — one long-term Jakarta-based commenter on an expat forum noted that base salary is "just salary is negotiable," while an entire tier of standard package items (housing, medical insurance, return flights) is typically fixed and non-negotiable, which at least gives arriving foreign hires one clear lever even as local employees often negotiate with no comparable data at all.

The gap this creates between local and foreign hiring tracks is substantial enough that it shapes career advice on both sides. Indonesian-language career guidance aimed at domestic professionals consistently frames salary negotiation as a skill to be learned carefully and defensively — researching a believable range, building a case for it, avoiding the appearance of greed — while packages aimed at expatriate hires are written and negotiated as an entirely separate conversation, often denominated in a different currency from the start. A local employee and a foreign colleague doing functionally the same job can, as a result, be negotiating from two completely different playbooks without either one being told so directly.

Australia: The Government Pried the Taboo Open by Force

Australia's Hofstede profile sits almost exactly opposite Indonesia's — 90 on individualism, 36 on power distance — yet the salary taboo there was, until recently, nearly as strong, just for different reasons. A 2024 analysis described it bluntly: "in Australia, it's not the done thing to know — let alone ask — what our colleagues are paid," a norm strong enough that a 2022 Workplace Gender Equality Agency survey found roughly half of employers maintained some form of pay confidentiality requirement, often formalized directly into contracts as a gag clause.

The Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Secure Jobs, Better Pay) Act changed the legal terrain decisively: pay secrecy terms in existing contracts stopped having effect from 7 June 2023, and including such a term in a new contract became outright unlawful from 7 December 2023, with penalties running as high as roughly $546,000 for larger employers per contravention. The stated policy logic was explicitly about the gender pay gap, which the ABS put at 21.8% nationally as of February 2026 — a 2023 WGEA study the same reporting cited found organizations with higher pay transparency running gender gaps 5 to 8 percentage points lower than average, which is the kind of number that turns an awkward social taboo into an actual legislative target. What the law hasn't yet fully overridden is habit: a Payscale survey of over 380,000 employees found the majority who believed they were underpaid were wrong about their own market position in either direction, suggesting the information gap, now illegal to enforce contractually, persists anyway simply because old reflexes don't update as fast as statute books do.

The law's architects were explicit that enforcement would lean on individual workers exercising a right rather than any automatic disclosure mechanism — nothing requires an employer to proactively publish salaries, and accessing a colleague's payroll record without their consent remains off-limits even now. That design choice means the practical gap between "legally entitled to ask" and "actually knows what the person next to them earns" is still substantially a matter of individual nerve, which is precisely the socially awkward step the 2024 analysis of Australian pay culture identified as the real, un-legislated barrier all along.

The Reckoning

The genuinely interesting symmetry is that both countries' salary opacity is now officially unsupported by the state, just via entirely different routes. Indonesia never built a legal taboo to tear down — the silence is cultural, running through hierarchy and modesty norms that no single piece of legislation addresses, so there's nothing for a reformer to simply ban. Australia's silence was substantially contractual, which meant a single act of parliament could, and did, void it directly — yet the WGEA's own data suggests the culture is still catching up to the law years later. An Indonesian employee moving to Australia will find a system that legally invites exactly the conversation their home culture trained them to avoid; an Australian employee moving to Indonesia will find no law to invoke at all, and will have to rebuild their negotiating leverage from instinct and research, the way Indonesians already do by default.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

teamblind.com — In a 2019 Blind compensation survey of 5,149 tech workers, 60.59% said their employer had discouraged them from discussing salary, with PayPal, Intel, and Cisco employees reporting the highest rates of discouragement and Facebook, Indeed, and Google employees the lowest — a reminder that even within one industry and one broadly transparent-leaning country, the norm varies enormously by employer.

expat.com — One long-term Jakarta-based expat, describing a full package negotiation, said they would expect housing, a car with driver, domestic help, children's schooling, an annual flight home, and family medical cover bundled in — and specifically expected to be "paid in US Dollars" — illustrating how differently a foreign-hire negotiation can look from a local one in the same office.

compiler.substack.com — One engineer, asked directly whether they discuss pay openly with colleagues, said they treat their own finances as a private matter that only official authorities should know — but added they'd be willing to share their income anonymously "for the sake of salary equality," capturing the gap between personal discomfort and support for the broader transparency principle.

Advice worth having before you land: in Indonesia, do your own market research before any negotiation — nobody is going to hand you a number, and the fresh-grad instinct to lowball yourself out of politeness costs real money over a career. In Australia, remember the gag clause in your contract is void whether or not anyone's told you so; ask a trusted colleague what they make if you want to know where you actually stand.

Conclusion

If you're choosing between these two for how much you'll actually know about your own market value, the honest answer is that Australia will tell you more, eventually, once the law finishes catching the culture up — and Indonesia will tell you almost nothing, which means the research has to come from you. The thing I'd tell a friend over a drink: in Jakarta, treat WageIndicator like it's your second employer — check it before every negotiation; in Sydney, just ask the colleague at the next desk what they make, because as of a few years ago, that's now entirely, boringly, legally your right.