- The cast: who does what
- Where the scheme applies: the constitutionally covered business test
- Making an application
- What the Commission does next
- What the Commission cannot do
- If an order is ignored
- Where the scheme frays: edge cases and common missteps
- When a lawyer helps
- The order is a systems fix, and the systems are yours
Since 1 January 2014, most Australian workers have had a direct, statutory route to stop workplace bullying: an application to the Fair Work Commission for an order that the behaviour cease. The scheme, in Part 6-4B of the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth), is deliberately preventive. It does not punish past behaviour, compensate for harm done, or fine anyone. It is engineered around a single idea: while a worker is still at work and still at risk, the Commission can step in and make the bullying stop.
That design shapes everything that follows. This guide walks through the scheme's moving parts: who is covered and who is not, what behaviour counts as bullying, how an application moves through the Commission, what an order can actually require, and where the scheme ends and court claims for compensation begin. For a small to medium business, the mechanics matter in both directions. You may one day be defending an application, and you may one day need to know whether an employee's complaint has real traction.
The cast: who does what
Six groups of players make up the scheme, each with a distinct role:
- The worker: any individual who performs work, including employees, contractors and subcontractors, labour-hire workers, outworkers, apprentices, trainees, students on work experience and volunteers. A worker who reasonably believes they are being bullied can apply.
- The employer or principal: receives the application, must respond to it, and can be ordered to change its systems, policies and training.
- The alleged bully: an individual or a group, from a manager or co-worker to a union official, can be named in the application and bound by any order.
- The Fair Work Commission: the tribunal that conciliates, holds conferences and hearings, and makes the orders. It cannot award compensation or impose fines.
- The courts: the Federal Court and the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia impose penalties for contravening orders, while state and territory courts hear common law damages claims for psychiatric injury caused by bullying.
- Work health and safety regulators: such as WorkSafe Victoria, can act in parallel, because the FWC scheme runs alongside WHS laws rather than replacing them.
The interests are easy to see. The worker wants the behaviour to stop without losing their job or standing. The employer wants to manage performance and conduct without generating claims. The Commission wants a prompt, practical resolution. Most of the friction in the scheme comes from these three pulling in different directions, which is why the statutory tests matter so much.
The trigger: what counts as bullying
Under s 789FD of the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth), a worker is bullied at work if, while at work in a constitutionally covered business, an individual or a group repeatedly behaves unreasonably towards the worker or a group of workers of which the worker is a member, and that behaviour creates a risk to health and safety. Three elements do all the work.
Repeated and unreasonable
A single incident is not bullying, however unpleasant it was. The behaviour must be repeated, which is why the Commission's application form asks for at least two examples of the conduct. The repetition can take many forms: yelling and verbal abuse, ostracism and exclusion, humiliation in front of colleagues, unreasonable work demands, or constant nit-picking and undermining. Whether behaviour is unreasonable is assessed objectively, not by reference to how the worker experienced it.
Reasonable management action is not bullying
Section 789FD(2) makes clear that reasonable management action carried out in a reasonable manner is not bullying. Performance management, discipline, allocating work and giving feedback are all part of running a business. This is the most misunderstood part of the scheme. It is also the employer's principal defence, and it rewards businesses that can show their managers acted sensibly, documented their reasons and followed their own policies.
Risk, not injury
The worker does not need to prove an actual injury. The behaviour only needs to create a risk to health and safety, and that includes psychological health and safety. But the risk must be live. The Commission will only make an order if it is satisfied there is a risk the worker will continue to be bullied at the time it decides the matter.
Where the scheme applies: the constitutionally covered business test
Because it is a Commonwealth law, the anti-bullying jurisdiction only reaches businesses within Commonwealth constitutional power. The worker must be at work in a constitutionally covered business, which the Act defines as a constitutional corporation (including proprietary limited companies and trading or financial corporations), the Commonwealth, a Commonwealth authority, a body corporate incorporated in a territory, or a business conducted principally in a territory or Commonwealth place.
The practical exclusions follow from this. According to the Fair Work Commission, the national anti-bullying laws may not cover workers of sole traders or partnerships, state government departments, some non-corporate state public sector agencies, some local governments, and corporations without significant trading or financial activities. Members of the Defence Force are excluded by the Act itself. A worker outside the scheme is not without protection: state and territory WHS, anti-discrimination and workers compensation laws may still apply, and a lawyer can map which ones.
Making an application
Any worker who reasonably believes they have been bullied at work can apply under s 789FC. Eligibility has a few hard edges. You must still be working in, or connected to, the workplace where the bullying happened, and you must be experiencing, or at risk of experiencing, further behaviour that creates a risk to your health and safety. If you have left the job, the scheme cannot help you.
The application is made on Form F72. It asks for the details of the person you believe is bullying you, at least two examples of the behaviour, how the behaviour creates a risk to your health and safety, what you have already done about it, and whether performance management or disciplinary action is underway. The filing fee for 2026-27 is $92.70 and changes each 1 July, and it can be waived if paying would cause serious financial hardship.
Two features of the process surprise people. First, the application and any documents lodged with it are given to the employer or principal and to every person named as a bully, so they can respond. Second, the Commission must start dealing with the application within 14 days of it being made under s 789FE. That statutory promptness is one of the scheme's genuine strengths, although as the example below shows, a contested matter can still run for a long time.
What the Commission does next
The Commission will usually begin by trying to resolve the matter by conciliation: a voluntary, private discussion to see whether the parties can agree on practical steps. If that fails, the matter proceeds to a conference before a Commission member, or to a hearing.
The statutory test for an order is in s 789FF. The Commission must be satisfied that the worker has been bullied at work and that there is a risk they will continue to be bullied, and it may then make any order it considers appropriate to prevent the worker from being bullied, other than an order requiring payment of money. In deciding what to order, the Commission must take into account any investigation that has been done and any grievance procedures available to the worker. That gives employers a real incentive to investigate complaints properly and promptly, because a good investigation shapes what the Commission thinks is still needed.
The orders themselves are structural and forward-looking. The leading example remains Bowker v DP World Melbourne. Three stevedores at DP World's West Swanson Terminal applied in May 2014, claiming they had been bullied by managers and union officials. In November 2015, after a long and contested proceeding, Deputy President Gostencnik made orders requiring DP World to finalise risk assessments and return-to-work plans for each applicant with a WorkSafe Victoria inspector, to monitor the control measures, to train its management in forensic investigation techniques, to develop a workplace investigation manual, and to rewrite its employee handbook and workplace behaviour policy so that bullying is treated as an occupational health and safety issue. Consideration of orders against the Maritime Union of Australia was adjourned.
Two lessons for a business owner. First, an order can bind the alleged bully directly, but it usually bites hardest on the employer's systems: policy, training, investigation and risk assessment. Second, timing cuts both ways. The Commission must start dealing with an application within 14 days, but the Bowker matter took around 18 months from application to orders because the facts were contested. The longer a matter runs, the more it costs everyone, which is another reason to resolve complaints early.
What the Commission cannot do
The scheme's limits are as important as its powers. The Commission cannot award compensation for past harm, and it cannot impose fines. The order is purely preventive. That is why the anti-bullying scheme is only one layer of the legal picture.
Compensation comes from elsewhere. A worker injured by bullying may claim statutory workers compensation for the psychological injury, or sue the employer at common law for negligence or breach of contract. The leading Australian authority on employer liability is Nationwide News Pty Ltd v Naidu [2007] NSWCA 377. Mr Naidu, an employee of a contractor working at a Nationwide News site, was subjected to prolonged bullying and racial taunts by the site supervisor. The New South Wales Court of Appeal upheld a judgment against Nationwide News of $1,946,189.40 for the psychiatric injury he suffered: nearly two million dollars flowing from a supervisor's conduct that the employer did not stop.
That figure is the sharpest illustration of why this area matters commercially. A successful FWC application costs nothing in compensation, but it is often the precursor to a damages claim, and it puts the employer's conduct on the record. WHS regulators can also act in parallel: s 789FH of the Fair Work Act confirms that a stop-bullying application does not stop proceedings under WHS laws.
If an order is ignored
An order is not a request. Section 789FG makes contravening an order to stop bullying a civil remedy provision, meaning a court can impose a pecuniary penalty. The Commission itself does not enforce its orders; enforcement is a matter for the courts. A person affected by the contravention, an industrial association, or an inspector can apply to the Federal Court, the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia, or an eligible state or territory court.
The maximum penalty for a contravention is 60 penalty units for an individual and 300 penalty units for a body corporate, because bodies corporate face five times the individual maximum under s 546. With the penalty unit at $364 for 2026-27, that is $21,840 for an individual and $109,200 for a body corporate per contravention, and the dollar figure is indexed each 1 July. Courts can also make other orders alongside a penalty, including compensation orders for loss caused by the contravention.
Where the scheme frays: edge cases and common missteps
A few situations regularly catch people out. A worker who resigns or is dismissed before the application is decided will usually find the risk of continued bullying has evaporated, and the application will be dismissed. There is no strict time limit for lodging an application, but because the risk must exist at the time of the decision, delay is corrosive: the scheme is not a vehicle for past grievances. The Commission can also dismiss applications with no reasonable prospects of success.
For employers, the classic error is the opposite one: freezing legitimate performance management for fear of a bullying claim. The law expressly protects reasonable management action carried out in a reasonable manner, and a manager who has documented their concerns and followed process has nothing to fear from this scheme. The employer who quietly tolerates poor behaviour to avoid conflict, by contrast, is the one who ends up with a pattern of repeated unreasonable conduct and no defence.
Finally, bullying is not the same thing as sexual harassment or discrimination. Sexual harassment has its own stop-orders regime in Part 6-4C of the Fair Work Act, introduced by the Respect at Work reforms, and discrimination claims run through anti-discrimination law. The tests differ, and a complaint is often assessed under more than one regime at once.
When a lawyer helps
For a worker, the decisions come early. Is the workplace within the scheme? Is the conduct repeated and unreasonable rather than legitimate management? Is the better route a stop-bullying application, a workers compensation claim, or a common law damages claim, which has its own limitation period and evidentiary burden? A lawyer can map those options before you commit to a course of action, and can represent you in conciliation, where most matters resolve.
For an employer, the clock starts when the application arrives, because the response is due quickly and the Commission must start dealing with the matter within 14 days. A lawyer will help you work out whether the conduct falls within reasonable management action, prepare the response, and, more usefully, fix the systems the application has exposed: the policy, the training, the investigation process. If an order is made, legal help ensures the business actually complies, because the penalties for ignoring an order are the sharpest part of the scheme.
The order is a systems fix, and the systems are yours
If there is a single signal from how this scheme operates, it is that the anti-bullying jurisdiction's teeth are not in the Commission's orders themselves, which are preventive and structural, but in what those orders reveal and what follows them. An order tells the business, in public, to fix its policy, training and investigation practices. A damages claim like Naidu shows where a failure to act ends up: nearly two million dollars for a supervisor's conduct the employer tolerated. Both are avoidable by getting in early: a proper anti-bullying policy, genuine investigation of complaints, and defensible, documented management action. Understanding the scheme is the first step, and a free consultation can establish where your business sits: covered, exposed or protected.