His employer cleared him and kept him on - then the regulator reached a very different verdict
A regulator declared a school principal unfit for the job over his social media posts. A court has set that decision aside.
On July 24, 2026, the Supreme Court of New South Wales quashed a determination by the NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) that a registered non-government school's principal was not a "fit and proper person" to hold the role. The court found the regulator's committee had denied him a fair process before making its call.
For anyone who runs a workplace under a licensing or accreditation regime, the case is a clean lesson in what goes wrong when a decision-maker adopts an investigator's adverse findings without letting the affected person answer them.
The sequence matters. In December 2025, after the Bondi Beach terrorist attack, NESA received media enquiries about opinions the principal had posted on Facebook and Instagram. The court noted he was "lawfully entitled to have and express his political opinions" but "did err, given the way in which he expressed those opinions."
His employer ran its own process. The school issued a show-cause notice, weighed his response, and concluded he remained a fit and proper person, with no reason to end his employment. It placed him on six months' probation instead. The employer made a considered call and stood by it.
NESA's Registration and Accreditation Committee saw it differently. On February 17, 2026, it determined the principal was not a fit and proper person. Its stated reasons included an "ongoing pattern of behaviour" in the posts, "a lack of remorse," and public commentary of a "concerning and hateful tone."
The court's concern was not the conclusion but the path to it. A senior inspector had investigated and written an adverse report the committee then relied on. But that report - and the adverse conclusions in it - was never shown to the principal or the school before the committee adopted its findings. The committee, the court held, should have given him notice of that adverse material and a genuine chance to respond to it before deciding.
The judge did not soften the point, writing that the committee "must do better than they have managed so far."
The court was careful about how far its ruling reached. It did not decide whether the posts actually made the principal unfit - it expressly declined to rule on the merits. The principal did not win on every argument, either. The court rejected his claims that the committee had exceeded its powers and that it had acted for an improper purpose. He succeeded on two grounds: that he was denied procedural fairness, and that the committee's reasoning was legally unreasonable. That combination was enough to set the determination aside.
There was one further detail the court flagged. It referred to evidence that Authority staff at the committee meeting understood the Minister wanted an outcome in which the principal "not return to the College" - an aim the court said was "not relevant to the Committee's decision under this statutory scheme."
For HR, the through-line is procedural fairness, plain and simple. The principal prevailed not because a court blessed his posts, but because the decision-maker leaned on an investigator's adverse report and adopted its conclusions without first putting that material to the person it would sink. That order of operations is not unique to schools. Any fitness or disciplinary process that borrows someone else's findings and runs with them, without letting the affected employee reply to those specific findings, carries the same risk.
The case also put the Fair Work Act in view. The principal relied on section 772, which bars terminating employment for reasons including religion and "political opinion." The court pointed to the recent Lattouf decision, which held that the protection covers not only holding a political opinion but expressing one. That protection sat behind the employer's own view that it had no fair basis to dismiss him.
The determination now goes back to the committee to reconsider - this time with the fair process it was required to follow.
