The first Commonwealth psychosocial conviction turned on missing training, not a missing policy

In late 2025, the NSW Local Court convicted the Department of Defence for breaching its primary duty of care under the Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (Cth), the first time a Commonwealth employer has been found guilty of failing to manage psychosocial risk. Defence pleaded guilty to a single charge under section 33 of the Act and was fined $188,000, along with an adverse publicity order under section 236, details still to be determined. The case traces back to July 2020, when a RAAF technician died on duty at Base Williamtown. Comcare's investigation found he had been placed on four separate Work Plans over a six-month performance management process, and that he showed increasing signs of distress throughout it. At no point did his supervisors refer him for support, place him on leave, or take any other step to relieve the pressure, despite knowing he wasn't coping. Defence wasn't convicted for lacking a performance management policy. It was convicted because it never trained the supervisors running that policy to recognise a Work Plan as a psychosocial hazard in its own right, to spot the risk signs it can create, or to know when to pause the process and refer someone for a medical assessment. As Comcare put it in the proceedings, policies can only mitigate risk if they're applied and followed in practice, and that requires the people using them to be trained on how. This is the gap most PCBUs actually have. A performance management policy sits in the handbook, HR runs it, and nobody treats it as a WHS control that needs its own risk assessment, named owner and review cycle. This case says otherwise. A performance management process is now squarely inside the same documentation discipline as any other psychosocial control: who's accountable for it, what training was given to the people running it, and whether anyone was checking how it was actually landing on the worker going through it, not just whether the paperwork was signed off.