His three-year deal ended on schedule. He called it a dismissal. The Commission disagreed
When a fixed-term contract runs out, has the worker been dismissed - or has the clock simply run out?
That was the question before the Fair Work Commission in a decision handed down on June 9, 2026. The answer matters for any HR team that relies on fixed-term or "maximum term" contracts.
Iain Walker worked as business manager for Australian Composites Manufacturing CRC Ltd. He signed a three-year contract on December 23, 2022, running from February 1, 2023 to January 31, 2026. When that date arrived, his employment ended.
Walker saw it differently. He filed a general protections application under section 365 of the Fair Work Act, arguing the company had dismissed him at its own initiative. A general protections claim lets an employee challenge certain adverse actions by an employer. But there is a catch: under section 365, the claim only works if a "dismissal" actually happened.
The company objected on exactly that point. Walker was on a contract for a specified period, it argued, and the job ended when the period ended. Under section 386(2)(a), that is not a dismissal.
Commissioner Crawford agreed, leaning on a 2024 Full Federal Court ruling, Alouani-Roby v National Rugby League Ltd. That case reset the rules. Before it, a contract that allowed either side to terminate early was often treated as falling outside the "specified period" exception. After it, an early-termination clause no longer pushes a contract out of that exception.
Walker's main argument was about the "practical reality" of his role and his expectation that the work would carry on past the end date - reasoning drawn from an earlier decision, Khayam v Navitas English Pty Ltd. But the Commissioner found Alouani-Roby had largely knocked that argument out. As the decision put it, there "can be no expectation of an ongoing employment relationship without an ongoing employment contract."
One route remained: the anti-avoidance provision in section 386(3), which can switch off the fixed-term exception if a "substantial purpose" of the contract was to avoid an employer's obligations. Here, the Commissioner found no evidence of that. The company was in a start-up phase when it hired Walker in 2022, and using a fixed term to test its resourcing needs was a plausible, legitimate explanation. The decision notes Walker has not been replaced - his duties were taken on by existing staff.
Walker also argued he had become an ongoing employee around December 17, 2025, when the company offered a six-month extension. Offering another fixed-term deal, he said, breached the newer limits in section 333E. The Commissioner found two problems. Walker's earnings sat above the high-income threshold of $183,100 - his 2023 salary was $200,000 plus superannuation - so the section 333E limits would not have applied. And no new contract was ever formed: there was no evidence Walker accepted any offer, and the company never put a salary figure on the table.
The result: Walker's employment ended when his contract expired, the fixed-term exception applied, and he was not dismissed. His application was dismissed.
For HR, the signal is clear. After Alouani-Roby, a maximum term contract that simply runs its course will generally not count as a dismissal - even with an early-exit clause, and even where the employee expected the work to continue. But that protection is not automatic. The anti-avoidance provision still applies if a tribunal finds a contract was built to sidestep obligations, so the business reason for choosing a fixed term matters. And the newer section 333E limits sit alongside all of this, with their own thresholds and exceptions.
The Commissioner closed on a human note, acknowledging Walker came across as genuine and had faced hard circumstances since his job ended. But the law allowed only one question: was there a dismissal? On these facts, there was not.
