He had the car for 20 years - then took voluntary redundancy
A government worker who spent more than 20 years inspecting cars could not convince a commission that his company car should have counted toward his redundancy payout.
The NSW Industrial Relations Commission dismissed proceedings brought by the Public Service Association (PSA) on November 10, 2026, finding that the phrase "weeks' pay" in the NSW Government's Workforce Mobility Placement and Employee Transition Policy means ordinary monetary pay - not broader remuneration that captures non-cash benefits like a departmental vehicle.
The worker was an automotive inspector for the Department of Customer Service. His job took him into motor vehicle repair businesses to check regulatory compliance. Throughout his employment, the department gave him a car for both work and private use - and covered registration, insurance, maintenance, petrol and NRMA membership on top.
Then came voluntary redundancy.
His employment ended on March 24, 2026. His annual salary at that point was $114,461. He received 52 weeks' severance - four weeks' notice in lieu, an extra week for being over 45, eight weeks' incentive payment and 39 weeks' severance pay. All of it calculated on salary alone.
Nothing was added for the car.
The PSA argued that "weeks' pay" in the policy was ambiguous and should be read to include total remuneration - including the estimated $33,904.59 annual value of the vehicle benefit. That figure was an inflation-adjusted version of the $27,600 the NSW Supreme Court had accepted as evidence of the entitlement's value in earlier proceedings involving the same worker. The union sought an additional $33,788.58.
The heart of the argument came down to two words: "pay" versus "remuneration." The PSA pointed out that a separate clause in the same policy - one dealing with forced redundancy - used the word "salary." If the drafters had meant salary in the voluntary redundancy clause too, the union argued, they would have said so.
The department's position was simpler. It said "weeks' pay" has had a settled meaning in Australian industrial relations for more than four decades: ordinary monetary rates of pay. Not a broader package of benefits.
The Commission agreed. It traced the history of redundancy provisions in Australia back to the landmark 1983 Crocker decision, which set the first minimum redundancy scales in NSW. Those scales used "weeks' pay" to mean ordinary pay. That convention carried through successive Employment Protection Regulations, the federal Termination, Change and Redundancy test case, and into the current Award Review Principles - where "weeks' pay" is expressly defined as the ordinary time rate of pay, excluding overtime, penalty rates, allowances and bonuses.
A 1985 decision had gone further still, holding that even monetary vehicle and hospitality allowances fell outside the Crocker scale.
The Commission accepted the word "pay" carried slight ambiguity in the dictionary sense - the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as including "remuneration," a concept that can extend to non-monetary reward. But that sliver of ambiguity did not survive the industrial context. No decision, the Commission noted, had ever interpreted "weeks' pay" to mean remuneration, and no redundancy instrument had ever included amounts referable to a motor vehicle entitlement in its calculation.
The PSA ran a fall-back argument on fairness grounds. It submitted that calculating redundancy purely on salary shortchanged workers who received substantial non-cash benefits. In this case, the vehicle perk represented nearly 30% of the worker's salary and close to 23% of his total remuneration of $148,365.59. Other employees whose packages were entirely cash-based would effectively receive more upon redundancy, the union argued.
That argument did not land either.
The Commission noted this was a voluntary redundancy - the worker chose to accept the offer and was aware of the department's position on what "weeks' pay" meant when he did. Earlier Supreme Court proceedings had also found that the worker had turned down a higher salary rather than give up private use of the car, partly because of implications for his income-tested government benefits and Medicare levy. The arrangement had trade-offs on both sides, and the Commission found it could not fairly isolate one element and call the outcome unfair.
There was a broader policy point too. Granting the relief would hand one worker a greater entitlement than others in the same position, cutting against the policy's stated aim of a streamlined, whole-of-government approach to redundancy. If the way redundancy standards apply to salary-packaged employees needs rethinking, the Commission held, the proper challenge is to the policy itself - not a one-off adjustment for a single case.
For HR teams managing redundancy processes, the decision draws a clean line: unless a policy or instrument explicitly brings non-monetary benefits into the calculation base, "weeks' pay" means what it has meant in Australian industrial law for decades - the money that hits an employee's bank account.
