How an employer's investigation records held up against a worker's long list of complaints
When does an employee's complaint become a shield against discipline? An Australian court has drawn that line, and the reasoning is instructive for any HR team managing a difficult staff member.
On June 24, 2026, the Federal Circuit and Family Court dismissed a general protections claim brought by a former plan management supervisor against his former employer, the disability charity Action on Disability within Ethnic Communities, known as ADEC.
The supervisor had worked there since May 2021, running a team that helped clients manage their National Disability Insurance Scheme funding. The team included an employee with a disability. According to the judgment, the supervisor was dismissed on January 11, 2023, for serious misconduct, after an investigation found he had bullied that employee.
He challenged the dismissal in court. His case: the first and final warning and the termination were "adverse action" taken because he had exercised workplace rights. He pointed to thirteen complaints, four inquiries and three periods of personal leave taken before he was disciplined.
Here is why HR should pay attention. A general protections claim shifts the burden onto the employer. Once a worker shows adverse action and a workplace right, the employer must prove the right was not a substantial and operative reason for what it did. That is the reverse onus under section 361 of the Fair Work Act, and it is where many employers come undone.
The employer discharged that onus. The court accepted the executive director's direct evidence that she issued the warning and terminated the supervisor because of his policy breaches and the bullying finding - not because he had complained.
Two factors carried the decision.
The first was documentation. Judge O'Sullivan found the decision-maker's evidence was "supported by contemporaneous documents, notably the investigation reports in each case." The records carried the case.
The second was the applicant's credibility. The judge described him as "an unreliable historian" and found him "prone to a subjective (and selective) reconstruction of events." Shown email chains in cross-examination, he repeatedly had to accept that replies he said had never arrived had in fact been sent.
The court also found that most of the matters he raised were not workplace rights in the first place. They "were not circumstances that threatened to interfere with anything to which he was entitled," the judgment said. Expressing dislike about how an organisation runs, the judge noted, does not automatically create a protected right.
The court separately found that the investigations and allegations themselves were not adverse action, as they were conducted in good faith and did not prejudicially alter the applicant's position. The application was dismissed.
The takeaway for HR leaders is direct. A general protections claim is difficult to defend on memory and far easier to defend on records. Run a genuine investigation. Document it. Make sure the actual decision-maker can explain, with the paperwork in hand, exactly why they acted. Do that, and a history of employee complaints does not become an automatic barrier to legitimate discipline.
