WARNING: Content may be distressing
In July 2020, a 34-year-old Royal Australian Air Force technician took his own life while on duty at RAAF Base Williamtown, near Newcastle. He had been placed on four separate Work Plans in the six months before his death. His supervisors had not been trained on the draft Work Plan procedure they were using. Nobody referred him for support. Nobody placed him on leave. Nobody paused the process.
In December 2025, the Department of Defence was convicted in NSW Local Court of a Category 3 offence under the Commonwealth Work Health and Safety Act. Magistrate Brett Thomas fined the Department $188,000 and made an adverse publicity order under section 236 of the Act. Comcare, the Commonwealth safety regulator, had filed three charges in 2022. Defence pleaded guilty to one.
It was the first time a Commonwealth employer had been penalised for causing psychological harm.
Performance management as a psychosocial hazard
The case establishes something that many HR professionals have understood informally but that hasn’t been tested in court until now: performance management processes can constitute a psychosocial hazard.
This isn’t about whether employers can manage performance. They can. They must. The WHS Act doesn’t prevent employers from setting expectations, measuring outcomes, or addressing underperformance. What it requires is that those processes don’t create or exacerbate risks to psychological health and that when they do, the employer takes reasonably practicable steps to manage that risk.
Four Work Plans in six months is not routine performance management. It’s a process that, whatever its intent, created sustained psychological pressure on a worker the Department knew was not coping.
The court found that Defence failed to take reasonably practicable measures to eliminate or minimise the risk. The supervisors running the process weren’t trained on it. The procedure itself was still in draft. No support mechanisms were built into the process. No escalation triggers existed for when a worker’s wellbeing deteriorated.
What went wrong — structurally
The Defence case isn’t just about one worker and one outcome. It exposes a structural problem that exists in organisations across Australia: performance management processes designed without any consideration of their psychological impact.
Untrained supervisors administering consequential processes. The people running the Work Plans hadn’t been trained on the procedure. They were using a draft document, one that hadn’t been finalised, tested, or reviewed for its impact on the workers subjected to it. This is the equivalent of asking someone to operate machinery they haven’t been trained on.
No monitoring of the worker’s response. Comcare found that Defence knew the worker was struggling, was aware he was dealing with personal issues, and still continued the process without pause. There was no checkpoint in the system where someone asked: is this process making things worse?
No referral for support. At no point during four Work Plans over six months did anyone refer the worker to support services, an employee assistance program, or a health professional. The process ran on rails, and nobody stepped in.
No circuit-breaker. There was no mechanism to pause or modify the process when it became clear the worker’s health was deteriorating. The system treated the outcome, improved performance or separation, as the only variable. The worker’s wellbeing wasn’t a variable at all.
The implications for every employer
This case doesn’t mean you can’t performance-manage your staff. It means you have to do it safely.
That distinction matters, because the instinct in many HR departments will be to avoid performance management altogether rather than risk a prosecution. That’s the wrong response. Poor performance that goes unaddressed creates its own psychosocial hazards, for the underperforming worker, for the colleagues picking up the slack, and for the managers caught in between.
The right response is to build safety into the process.
Train your managers. If someone is conducting a formal performance process, they need to be trained on that process, not just the administrative steps, but the human impact. They need to recognise signs of distress. They need to know when to pause. They need to know who to call.
Build in checkpoints. At each stage of a formal process, someone should be asking: how is this person responding? Are they coping? Do they need support? These questions should be documented, and the answers should inform what happens next.
Connect the process to support. A performance improvement plan should automatically trigger a conversation about support, EAP, counselling, workload adjustment, whatever is available. Not as an afterthought. As a built-in step.
Set limits. Four Work Plans in six months is excessive by any standard. If a performance process isn’t working, escalating it isn’t the answer, the process itself needs to be reviewed. There should be limits on how many formal actions can be taken within a timeframe, and those limits should be enforced.
Separate the people from the process. Were the supervisors in the Defence case too close to the process to see what was happening? Consider whether the person conducting the performance process should also be responsible for monitoring the worker’s wellbeing, or whether that function should sit with someone else.
The broader shift
The Defence case is part of a broader movement in Australian WHS law: the recognition that the way an organisation runs its internal processes, restructures, investigations, performance management, disciplinary procedures, all can create psychosocial hazards that the employer is legally required to manage.
In March 2026, the NSW Department of Education was required to comply with improvement notices from SafeWork NSW about its management of psychosocial hazards. In September 2025, SafeWork NSW issued a prohibition notice to the University of Technology Sydney, temporarily halting a restructure process because the inspector believed workers were exposed to “serious and imminent risk” from poor organisational change management.
The through-line is clear. Regulators are not limiting psychosocial hazard enforcement to bullying and harassment. They’re applying it to organisational processes, performance management, restructures, investigations, that create psychological risk.
If your performance management process was designed without considering its impact on workers’ mental health, it wasn’t designed safely. The Defence case is the proof of what that failure can cost.
If this topic affects you, Lifeline is available 24 hours on 13 11 14.