A Services Australia customer service officer who consented to the end of her employment after months of missed performance targets has lost her attempt to appeal a decision that her dismissal was not unfair, with a Full Bench finding no arguable error in the original ruling.
What the Commission decided
Kaibe Lee Leismann worked in the Youth and Students Team, helping customers with Centrelink payments such as Youth Allowance and Austudy. Her performance was tracked against metrics including quality of service, average call handling time and the number of work items she completed.
After failing to meet those targets, Ms Leismann moved through an Informal Support Plan, then a formal Support Plan, and eventually a Formal Performance Assessment under the Services Australia enterprise agreement. The agreement allowed an employee to consent to the end of their employment during that process, and Ms Leismann did so by email in October 2025, saying she had no other option.
Deputy President Saunders, hearing the original case, found that placing her on the Formal Performance Assessment amounted to an implied offer to end her employment, which she accepted, meaning the termination was at her employer's initiative. He went on to find that Services Australia had a valid reason to dismiss her and that the dismissal was not unfair, despite her complaints about how the performance process was run.
The Full Bench, made up of Deputy President Beaumont, Deputy President O'Keeffe and Commissioner Lim, refused permission to appeal that outcome.
What was actually in dispute
Ms Leismann raised five grounds of appeal, mostly arguing the Deputy President got the facts wrong. She said he ignored evidence that she had formally raised concerns about the process and had started a workers' compensation claim. The Full Bench disagreed, pointing to the original decision's finding that she could have pursued a dispute, taken leave and sought workers' compensation while remaining employed, rather than treating termination as her only option.
She also argued the Deputy President wrongly found her cultural safety had been properly considered just because support structures existed, and that this unfairly put the burden on her to seek them out. The Full Bench found this mischaracterised the original finding, which was that cultural supports existed and were available to her, not that she bore some onus to prove a safe workplace.
Other grounds concerned the mathematics behind her performance assessment, including disputes over her average handling time, call volumes and how her results compared with colleagues. The Full Bench examined these in detail, including a dispute over whether the Deputy President used an inflated monthly call figure. It found he had simply used figures Ms Leismann herself gave in evidence, including her own estimate of weekly call targets, to test whether the level of monitoring by her employer was reasonable. The Bench also rejected her claim that accepting evidence from her team leader about work quality examples amounted to a denial of procedural fairness.
Across every ground, the Full Bench found no arguable case that the original findings were wrong, let alone so wrong as to justify disturbing them on appeal. It also found nothing in the case that raised an issue of wider importance requiring guidance from a Full Bench.
What this means
This decision illustrates how hard it can be to overturn a first instance finding on unfair dismissal grounds once a Commission member has weighed the evidence and reached a view open to them on the facts. Appeals of this kind require more than disagreement with how the evidence was assessed; they need a genuine, arguable error. The case also shows how performance management processes under an enterprise agreement can lead to what the Commission treats as a dismissal at the employer's initiative, even where the employee formally consents to ending their employment, a point relevant to anyone navigating a summary dismissal or performance-related termination.