Drivers worked 16+ hours on outback freight runs, but the agreement never said stop
Australia's biggest private rail freight operator has overturned penalty findings after the Federal Court ruled its enterprise agreement never actually required the company to pull train drivers off shifts within set time limits - even though the agreement was packed with provisions about maximum shift lengths.
The Full Federal Court handed down its decision on October 9, 2026, setting aside eight contravention declarations that the South Australian Employment Court had made against Pacific National earlier in 2025.
At the centre of the dispute were train crews running long-haul freight through some of the most remote stretches of rail in the country - intermodal services between Port Augusta, Kalgoorlie and Perth. The Australian Rail, Tram and Bus Industry Union had alleged Pacific National breached section 50 of the Fair Work Act on 11 separate occasions in 2023 by failing to sign off drivers within the maximum shift lengths in the Pacific National Intermodal Train Crew Enterprise Agreement 2021.
The numbers were stark. One two-person crew worked four and a half hours past a 12-hour rostered limit. A three-person crew on the Cook to Port Augusta corridor ran two hours beyond a 15-hour rostered shift. Other overruns ranged from 10 minutes to just over two hours.
The lower tribunal found Pacific National had contravened the agreement on eight of those 11 occasions. It also declared several of those breaches to be "serious contraventions" under section 557A of the Fair Work Act - a classification that attracts significantly higher maximum penalties.
Pacific National appealed.
The three judges of the Full Court agreed the appeal should be allowed, but they got there by different routes - and the split matters for anyone drafting or relying on enterprise agreements.
One member of the bench held that clauses 4.1.1 and 14.1 of Attachment 1 - the agreement's "Rostering Guidelines" - set maximum rostered shift lengths but imposed no positive obligation on Pacific National to relieve drivers or sign them off within those limits. The text, that judge found, was declaratory: it stated what maximum shift lengths should be, not that the company must enforce them as hard cutoffs. A neighbouring clause - 4.3.1, dealing with emergencies - explicitly used the language "must be relieved from duty and signed off after a maximum period of sixteen (16) hours." The shift-length clauses used nothing of the kind. If the drafters had intended to create an enforceable duty to pull crews at a set hour, the agreement showed they knew how to write one.
A second judge took a different view of the underlying text but reached the same result. That judge accepted that clauses 4.1.1 and 6.6.1, read together, could be understood as imposing hard caps on actual shift lengths - not just rostered ones. But the case turned, in that judge's analysis, on Attachment 6, the "Local Agreements" section of the enterprise agreement. Item 1 of Attachment 6 dealt specifically with the Port Augusta, Kalgoorlie and Perth depots where every disputed shift had originated. It expressly contemplated drivers working beyond the 12-hour and 15-hour rostered limits and provided for those excess hours to be paid as overtime. That local provision, the judge held, was inconsistent with any hard cap on actual shift lengths and prevailed over it under the agreement's own inconsistency clause.
The practical effect was the same either way: for the remote depots in question, no enforceable ceiling on actual working hours existed under the agreement.
The third member of the bench agreed with both colleagues on the Attachment 6 point.
The court also identified errors in how the lower tribunal had assessed "serious contraventions." Section 557A of the Fair Work Act required proof that Pacific National "knowingly contravened" the provision and that the conduct formed "part of a systematic pattern." The lower tribunal had instead found only that Pacific National had knowledge of a "likely breach" - a lower bar - and had treated the fact that more than one employee was affected as sufficient to establish a systematic pattern, without making the separate finding the legislation required.
All eight declarations were set aside. The union's penalty application was dismissed.
For HR teams managing enterprise agreements, the case is a pointed reminder that what an agreement appears to require and what it enforceably requires are not always the same thing. If a shift-length clause does not explicitly oblige the employer to act - to relieve, to sign off, to stop the clock - a court may find no enforceable term exists to contravene, no matter how far the actual hours run.
