No policy, no training: Perth employer ordered to pay $125,238 for harassment on shift five

On 21 May 2026 the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia ordered a Perth heating and cooling business and its sole director to pay $125,238.43 to a young worker who was sexually harassed on the fifth shift of a two week work trial. The decision, Wood v Kendall [2026] FedCFamC2G 889, was delivered by Judge Liveris and reported by Human Resources Director Australia on 26 May 2026.

The award splits three ways: general damages of $100,000, aggravated damages of $15,000, and $10,238.43 for economic loss, on a finding that but for the harassment the worker would probably have been kept on. Two law firm analyses published since, by Elit Lawyers on 24 May 2026 and by Workplace Law on 13 July 2026, report the same total and the same components, Workplace Law describing it as $115,000 in damages plus economic loss above $10,000.

The facts, as reported, are short. The applicant was 20, had been referred to the business through a disability employment service in May 2023, and told the director on her first day that she lived with obsessive compulsive disorder and severe anxiety. On her fifth shift the director asked her about her sexual fantasies, touched her hair, and asked whether she would let him kiss her if they were dating. She left the workplace and did not return. The company, Heating and Cooling Australia Pty Ltd, was found vicariously liable for its director's conduct.

What makes the judgment matter beyond its own facts is the reason the company lost. The Sex Discrimination Act 1984 gives an employer a defence if it took all reasonable steps to prevent the conduct. HRD reported the court's treatment of that phrase: the word "all" in the defence "does a lot of heavy lifting", and taking some steps is not enough. On the evidence there were no sexual harassment policies, no complaint procedure and no training. There was nothing for the defence to attach to.

The court also found the business had fallen short of the positive duty in section 47C, the obligation introduced by the Respect at Work amendments requiring employers to take reasonable and proportionate measures to eliminate harassment before anything happens. Workplace Law treats this as the significant part: courts are beginning to read the preventive duty into private litigation, and compliance with it may help an employer resist vicarious liability, although what counts as reasonable and proportionate still varies with the workplace.

That is a live question rather than a settled one. The positive duty commenced on 12 December 2022. The Australian Human Rights Commission did not receive powers to enforce it until 12 December 2023, and those powers, as Clayton Utz set out on 25 October 2023, belong to the Commission alone: inquiries where it reasonably suspects non compliance, compliance notices, enforceable undertakings, and applications to the federal courts for compliance orders. An individual cannot sue for breach of section 47C. The Commission's own compliance and enforcement page, carrying a date of 8 July 2026, describes its role in the same terms and points to a Statement of Intent and a compliance and enforcement policy. The duty entered this case sideways, through a failed defence, not as a cause of action.

The reports disagree about why the aggravated damages were awarded. HRD ties the $15,000 to how the respondents behaved after the complaint: missed deadlines at the Commission, a no show at court referred mediation, and no response filed despite consent orders. Elit Lawyers and Workplace Law record the amount without that explanation. The distinction is not academic. If aggravated damages here were substantially a sanction for non participation, a respondent who turns up and contests the claim may face a materially smaller bill on the same conduct.

The wider numbers are old but official. The Commission's fifth national survey, Time for respect, published in November 2022 and based on more than 10,000 respondents, found that one in three Australian workers had been sexually harassed at work in the previous five years, that only 18 per cent of incidents were reported, and that only about a third of workers thought their organisation was doing enough. There has been no sixth national survey since the positive duty took effect, so there is no measured before and after.

Several things remain unknown. The full text of the judgment could not be opened for this article, because AustLII refuses automated access, so every figure here rests on secondary reports that agree with one another rather than on the reasons themselves. Whether the money has been paid, by a small company and an individual director, is not public. Whether the Commission has opened any inquiry into this business is not public either, since it publishes no register of inquiries or compliance notices. And there is no published national count of how often the all reasonable steps defence now fails, which is the number that would show whether cases like this one are an outlier or a pattern.