The ABC said nothing had changed. Its own contract system told a different story
A long-serving ABC casual returned from a family trip to deleted accounts and no shifts. The Fair Work Commission called that a dismissal.
In a decision issued on August 7, 2026, the Commission found that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation dismissed a casual employee on February 5, 2026, and rejected the broadcaster's two objections to his unfair dismissal application. The Commission has not yet decided whether the dismissal was unfair. That question now goes to conciliation.
The worker had been engaged by the ABC on a casual basis since July 15, 2019, working as a presenter, reporter and producer on ABC NewsRadio until December 14, 2025. He was a casual on paper, but the pattern told a different story. The Commission found he completed 154 shifts between November 25, 2024 and December 14, 2025, was rostered weeks or months in advance, and earned over $80,000 gross through his casual employment in the 2020/21, 2021/22, 2022/23, 2023/24 and 2024/25 financial years. His former NewsRadio manager gave uncontested evidence that he had worked on an ongoing, regular and highly systematic basis for around six years.
He was unavailable from December 15, 2025 to mid-January 2026, travelling to the United Kingdom with his family to visit his elderly parents. He gave the ABC notice of the trip. The Commission recorded that the ABC raised no concerns about the period of unavailability.
While he was away, the paperwork moved. The ABC's internal system required casual contracts to be renewed every six months, and his had been renewed each cycle since early 2020. This time it wasn't. The ABC decided not to renew the contract when it nominally expired on December 28, 2025. Around December 29, his ABC email address, network account and ID pass were deleted or deactivated - which the Commission found happened as an automatic consequence of the non-renewal. From mid-January 2026, the ABC stopped including him in the emails carrying the NewsRadio rosters.
When he returned in late January, he found the accounts gone. On February 5, 2026, he spoke by phone with the managing editor of the ABC's Audio News and Current Affairs Department and raised concerns about his NewsRadio shifts being removed. The two gave different recollections of that call, and the Commission found both presented as credible witnesses. On the balance of probabilities, it accepted his account: that he was told he would not be receiving any more NewsRadio shifts. The Commission noted the editor did not recall making the statement, but preferred his evidence in light of the surrounding circumstances. He filed his unfair dismissal application the next day.
An editor of NewsRadio confirmed at the hearing that a decision had been made inside the ABC in late 2025 not to keep providing him with NewsRadio shifts, and that this was why the contract was not renewed. He has not been offered a NewsRadio shift in 2026, despite the ABC being aware he had returned to Australia and had been available to work since late January.
To work at the ABC at all, he had to sign a new casual contract with ABC Sport, at a lower rate of pay, before his network account and ID pass were reactivated. He continues to work under that contract. The Commission noted that his legal employer throughout was the ABC - NewsRadio and ABC Sport are internal operational parts of the same entity, not separate companies.
The ABC's first objection was that he had not completed the minimum employment period of six months. Under the Fair Work Act, casual service only counts toward that period where the employee was a regular casual with a reasonable expectation of continuing work on a regular and systematic basis. The Commission found he met that test comfortably, with over six years of regular and systematic casual employment and a reasonable expectation of continuing work from July 2019 until late January 2026. Both ABC witnesses accepted under cross-examination that he had worked regularly for the broadcaster.
The second objection was that he had never been dismissed. Here the Commission applied the established test: whether a reasonable person in the position of the parties would have understood that the employer ended the employment. It found they would have. The contract was not renewed, the rosters stopped, the accounts were deleted, and when he raised the issue on February 5, nothing changed.
The Commission described the ABC's argument that what happened in 2026 was simply a continuation of his earlier casual employment as "somewhat disingenuous." It said the broadcaster's suggestion that this was essentially just "business-as-usual" with his casual engagement could not be accepted. It was, the Commission said, "a considerable stretch" for the ABC to argue his previous casual employment had not ended when it expressly required him to sign a new contract at a lower rate of pay before allocating him work. Standard contract language about separate engagements and no guarantee of ongoing engagements, the Commission added, was not how the relationship operated in practice.
Because a dismissal does not take effect until it is communicated to the employee, the Commission fixed the date at February 5, 2026 - the phone call - rather than around December 28, 2025, when the internal decision was made. It dismissed both jurisdictional objections and said a conciliation conference would be listed on a date to be advised.
For HR teams, the mechanics are the story. No termination letter was sent. A contract lapsed on schedule, an access system switched off automatically, and a name quietly disappeared from a roster - and the Commission treated that chain as an employer-initiated dismissal with a fixed effective date. Rolling six-month casual contracts with automatic expiry build a decision point into every cycle, and declining to renew for a long-term regular casual can be characterised as a dismissal rather than a neutral lapse. The boilerplate did not carry the day, because the Commission looked at how the engagement ran in practice. Worth noting too: the finding rested partly on the ABC's own internal records and the evidence of its own witnesses, and the effective date was set by a phone call rather than by the decision made months earlier.
