The client's employment by the Commonwealth
If liability is to be accepted for a disease, or the aggravation of a disease, the member's workplace or employment activities must have made a contribution to the contraction or onset of the condition, and not just be the setting in which the condition manifested. It clearly is not adequate for there to be just a temporal or spatial link between the disease and the employment.
In Federal Broom Company Pty Ltd v Semlich (1964), Windeyer J commented:
When the Act speaks of “the employment” as a contributing factor it refers not to the fact of being employed, but to what the worker in fact does in his employment. The contributing factor must in my opinion be either some event or occurrence in the course of the employment or some characteristic of the work performed or the conditions in which it was performed.
As suggested by Windeyer J, the relevant causative link could arise from:
- events or occurrences in the workplace (eg. poor management handling of workplace restructuring or sexual harassment problems contributing to a stress condition);
- a characteristic of the work performed (knee or shin problems arising from years of infantry training); or
- the conditions in which the work was performed (eg. hearing loss from exposure to engine room noise).
Care must be taken to identify situations where the member's own neurosis attributes the condition to the workplace conditions but there is no objective correlation; see for example Fitzpatrick v Commonwealth (1985) where the Full Federal Court said:
The fact that the applicant thought his disability arose out of his work, and therefore thought it compensable, may have been potent factors in the development of his neurosis. But these were thoughts in his mind. They did not mean that his employment actually was a contributing factor in the development of his neurosis. The contrary view would lead to absurd consequences. For example, a worker might wrongly believe that a boil was suffered as a result of dust at work and become resentful upon the proper rejection of his claim. If such a worker then developed a neurosis, it would seem to be a necessary consequence of the applicant's argument, if correct, that he would be entitled to compensation for the neurosis arising solely out of the correct refusal of the claim for compensation for the boil.
Example - no employment contribution
A member develops a depressive condition as a result of the failure of a personal relationship with a member of the same Unit. While the workplace was the point of contact of the two people, and the relationship was conducted primarily in the workplace, the depressive condition did not arise from their interaction as work colleagues but rather from their personal relationship.