The line between a discussion and a drill just became legally significant
When safety training went undocumented and a cash side job came to light, a Perth skipper's dismissal held up in court.
On February 19, 2026, Fair Work Commissioner Lim dismissed an unfair dismissal application by Adam Garnaut, a vessel master employed by Boundary Lane Pty Ltd, a small Perth marine tourism company. The Commission found the company had lawfully terminated Garnaut on January 10, 2025, for serious misconduct.
Garnaut had been employed since May 15, 2023, responsible for crew training, passenger safety, and regulatory compliance across two charter vessels. The cracks appeared at a skipper meeting on November 29, 2024, when management discovered that none of the skippers had participated in any onboard emergency drills across 29 completed charters. No fire evacuation, no man overboard, no abandon ship.
An independent survey of one vessel, the Serendipitous, delivered December 12, 2024, found no compliant lifejackets on board, no approved fire control plan, no general alarm system, and an incomplete set of emergency plans. The Australian Marine Safety Authority issued a formal Detention Notice on December 19, 2024. A survey of the second vessel, the Quintessential, on December 31, 2024, found largely the same.
Garnaut maintained he had run training sessions: seated discussions around a dining table about hypothetical emergency scenarios. The Commission was unimpressed. "A drill is not sitting around a table and discussing what to do in the case of a fire or emergency," Commissioner Lim wrote. The safety management system logs also contained no records of training sessions conducted during crew inductions or on October 11, 2024.
Then came the moment that compounded the dismissal. On December 21, 2024, Garnaut texted a colleague asking her to work a cash, off-the-books charter on another vessel, a booking originally scheduled on the Serendipitous before AMSA grounded it. That colleague was Ms Micah Jenner, the Interior Manager and Relief Captain, who shortly advised management of the messages. A Show Cause Letter followed on January 8, 2025, then a formal meeting on January 10, 2025, at which Garnaut was dismissed.
By his own evidence and his acknowledgment at the dismissal meeting, Garnaut had not known what regulatory code applied to the vessels until an independent surveyor was brought in during December 2024. Under cross-examination, he also acknowledged the crew faced a real risk of not knowing how to respond to an emergency because they had never practised. The Commissioner was not sympathetic: "I do not agree with Mr Garnaut's characterisation of this as 'an oversight'. This is an extremely serious safety issue."
The case carries clear lessons for anyone managing a workforce. Training records are legal evidence, not administrative box-ticking. An undocumented session is, from a legal standpoint, indistinguishable from one that never happened. For small business employers pursuing summary dismissal, the key legal question is whether the employer genuinely held a belief — based on reasonable grounds — that the employee's conduct was sufficiently serious to justify immediate dismissal.
In this case, the Commission was satisfied that belief existed and was reasonable, supported by Garnaut's own evidence regarding his ignorance of the applicable maritime code and the failure to conduct and document proper crew safety training. And where an employee redirects company business to a personal side arrangement, the damage to trust may prove irreparable.
