He pointed to his "younger female" manager to explain the sacking. The court wasn’t persuaded
A coffee wholesaler has beaten a discrimination claim from a former supervisor who said he was sacked for being a man.
The worker joined Single Origin Wholesale, an Australian coffee business, as a production coordinator in October 2024 and moved up to a supervisor role in March 2025. By mid-April, his job was gone. He took the company to the Federal Circuit and Family Court, and on August 20, 2026, he lost.
He made two claims under the Fair Work Act. The first: that he was sacked because of his sex or gender identity. He is male, and pointed to the fact that his manager was, in his words, a “younger female.” The second: that he was sacked because he had taken sick leave, backed by two medical certificates. The court rejected both.
The case is a clean look at how a “general protections” claim works - the kind where a worker says they were fired for an illegal reason, such as their sex or their sick leave. These cases hinge on one question: why did the boss really make the call? And they come with a twist many employers miss. Once a worker points to an illegal reason, the law assumes that was the reason for the sacking (under section 361 of the Fair Work Act). It then falls to the employer to prove it wasn’t.
Here, the person who made the call was the company’s chief executive. He told the court he decided to let the worker go on the afternoon of April 10, 2025 - still inside a six-month probation - after a manager flagged problems with his work. The court believed him. It found he acted because the manager had raised “serious performance related issues” and because the worker “was still in his period of probation.”
The sick-leave claim came down to timing. The chief executive said he made his decision on April 10. He didn’t see the worker’s medical certificates until the next day. A decision made before the certificates even landed could not have been caused by them, the court found.
On the discrimination claim, the worker argued his manager was believed because she was a woman, and that he was frozen out of having his say because he was a man. The court didn’t accept either point. It found the chief executive didn’t take the complaints as proven - he treated them only as serious performance issues - and that the reason the worker didn’t get to respond had nothing to do with his gender.
For HR teams, the how-to is the takeaway. The company brought in an outside investigator, then split the complaints into two buckets: performance and conduct. It acted on the performance issues while the worker was still on probation. The HR manager was blunt about why that mattered - if the problems were about performance, the company could let him go simply because he hadn’t passed probation.
The court was clear it wasn’t judging whether any of this was fair. It even pointed out that the worker never got to respond before the decision was made. But under this part of the Fair Work Act, the company didn’t have to prove its process was fair - only that sex and sick leave weren’t the real reasons. The case, the judge said, “starts and ends” with what actually drove the decision.
The worker, who ran his own case, couldn’t show the court any evidence that gender drove the outcome. In his closing, he argued the company’s approach denied any male employee the chance to give their side - but the court found there was nothing to back that up.
The claim was dismissed. The question of legal costs was left open, though the Fair Work Act makes it hard to force a losing worker to cover the other side’s bill.
