He had a new job at the same pay - so why did he say no, and what did it cost him
A flight trainer refused to sign a new contract over a single intellectual-property clause. The Fair Work Commission says he loses his redundancy pay anyway.
The Commission ruled on May 26, 2026 that Alliance Airlines can cut Brett Morley's redundancy payout from four weeks to zero, finding the airline had offered him an acceptable alternative job - one he turned down.
Here's how it unfolded. In November 2025, Alliance restructured its Flight Training and Standards departments. Morley, a Deputy Flight Training Manager, was told his role was at risk. The airline went looking for somewhere to redeploy him and landed on a Flight Training Manager position - same location, same pay, duties substantially aligned to his existing job.
Morley would not sign. The problem was clause 13, the contract's intellectual-property clause.
Before joining Alliance, he had developed a "command development" program. Per the decision, some of that material came from outside sources and was not his to own outright. The program had been floated to Alliance informally in 2025, looked at briefly, but never formally adopted as company property. By October 2025, a manager had said it would not continue in its current form.
Morley wanted the program carved out of the IP clause. He drafted his own wording. He traded emails with managers through December and January. The carve-out never made it in.
Alliance held firm. In a witness statement dated April 14, 2026, Head of HR Deanna King said the IP clause was standard, matched the one in Morley's original contract, and that accepting it was a condition of the role. King noted the Chief Operating Officer had been consulted while on leave, but that contract variations sat with HR.
On February 4, 2026, Morley emailed to say he had not resigned, had not accepted the new contract, and had not declined redeployment. His position: his old job was gone, he was still employed under his existing contract, and declining to sign a new one was not a refusal of redeployment.
Alliance read it as exactly that. It told him his employment would end due to redundancy and asked the Commission to reduce his redundancy pay to nil.
Section 120 of the Fair Work Act lets the Commission do that when an employer finds an employee "other acceptable employment." The entire case came down to whether the Flight Training Manager role qualified.
Morley argued acceptability had to be judged on the actual contract offered, not a tidy comparison of old role and new role. Signing, he said, would have "substantially elevated the legal risk" over his pre-employment material.
Commissioner Simpson was not persuaded. The decisive point: the IP clause in the new contract was identical to the one Morley signed when he first joined. Signing again would not have changed his position. The offer, the Commissioner wrote, "did not change the status quo on that issue prior to his existing position becoming redundant."
So the role was acceptable, Morley had declined it, and his redundancy pay drops to zero.
For HR teams, the takeaways are clean. The Commission credited Alliance with genuine consultation and several chances for Morley to reconsider - and that mattered. A clear HR witness statement explaining why the alternative role was suitable carried weight. And the case sets a useful marker: an employee's unease with a contract term does not, by itself, make an otherwise-equivalent role unacceptable - especially when the disputed term is simply carried over from a contract they already signed.
The Commission leaned on earlier decisions making the same point: refusal alone does not settle whether alternative work is acceptable. The test is objective, not personal. A separate order reducing the payment to zero will follow.
