Employer challenged a binding panel opinion - and a court found it skipped a key step
A Victorian court has ordered a fresh medical assessment of a truck driver's back injury, asking whether his job or his farm did the damage.
In a judgment handed down on June 23, 2026, the Supreme Court of Victoria quashed a Medical Panel opinion that had tied a long-serving driver's spinal injury to his work for road builder Fulton Hogan - finding the panel overlooked records suggesting he was shearing sheep just before surgery.
The worker had driven trucks for Fulton Hogan since 2002. A few times a year, the job meant pulling a heavy sealing trolley. In September 2020, on a car park job at a Victorian prison, he used the trolley and reported sharp lower back pain. He resigned, returned briefly as a casual, then stopped work for good at the end of October 2020.
He lodged a WorkCover claim in April 2023. The insurer knocked it back, saying the injury did not come from his job. He challenged that decision, and the Magistrates' Court sent the medical questions to a Medical Panel - a group of independent doctors that gives binding opinions on disputed medical issues in Victorian compensation cases.
The panel backed the worker. It found his employment, and the September 2020 trolley work in particular, was a significant contributing factor to a spine condition that needed multiple surgeries.
Fulton Hogan challenged that opinion in court. Its argument was simple: the panel skipped a step the law requires. Under Victoria's workers' compensation legislation, a panel deciding whether work was a significant contributing factor must weigh what the worker does outside the workplace, and how the injury would likely have developed without the job.
The employer leaned on the worker's own medical files. Several treating doctors had recorded that in late November 2020 - after he had left Fulton Hogan and shortly before his first operation - he had been crutching and shearing sheep and baling hay on the family farm he ran. One GP described that farm work as the "final trigger" for surgery.
The worker pushed back. He said the heavy sheep work was contracted out, produced a letter from a shearing contractor confirming he had not sheared or crutched on the dates in question, and said one doctor had misunderstood him.
The court found the panel had erred. The judge accepted it had identified the right legal test and had considered an earlier farm incident, an April 2020 fall when a sheep landed on the worker. But on the November farm work, the panel said nothing - even though at least five medical histories recorded it and the employer had raised it directly. The panel had written that "the heavier repetitive sheep work of shearing and crutching was contracted out," but the judge found that line appeared to have been written without reference to the November records.
The court was precise about its limits. The judge did not rule that farm work caused the injury, and did not say the panel got the answer wrong. The flaw was narrower: the panel had to genuinely consider the November activity, and its reasons showed no sign it had. Because the answer could realistically have come out differently, the error mattered.
The employer's other two arguments failed. The court found the panel had adequately weighed how the injury would have developed without the job, and that its written reasons were sound.
The outcome: the opinion was quashed, and the questions go back to a freshly constituted panel to be answered again. Final orders are still being settled.
For HR and safety leaders, the case is a clear lesson in how causation is tested in Victoria - and how much a worker's life away from the job can count. The law requires a panel to actively weigh non-work activity. An employer that documents that activity, and makes sure it lands formally in front of the decision-maker, has a genuine path to challenge a finding it disputes.
It is also a reminder of how much contemporaneous records can carry. The notes that turned this case were not sworn statements - they were jottings doctors made at the time. For anyone managing claims, accurate documentation of how and where an injury happened can shape the result years down the track.
