A University of Melbourne professor who won reinstatement after being unfairly sacked over misconduct allegations tried to also claim lost pay for her months out of work. A Full Bench found the original decision did contain a factual error, but refused to let her appeal further.
What the Commission decided
Angela Paladino was dismissed by the University of Melbourne after it found she had committed serious misconduct. A single Commission member later found only six of the 33 allegations against her were substantiated, that these did not amount to a valid reason for dismissal, and that the process used to sack her was deeply flawed. He ordered her reinstated as a tenured professor and to her former role as director of a university centre, though not to a board position she had also held.
That same decision refused to order the University pay her for income lost between her dismissal and reinstatement. The original decision maker reasoned that Dr Paladino had shown no effort to find other work, and noted she had already received a termination payment described as reflecting around six months of pay.
Dr Paladino appealed that refusal. She argued the Commission had got the facts wrong: she had given evidence of several job applications that nobody at the hearing had challenged. The Full Bench agreed this was an error. The original decision had wrongly treated her mitigation efforts as nonexistent, when in fact she had done something, even if not much.
The Full Bench went further and found this was a
What this means
This case is a reminder that even where an unfair dismissal claim succeeds, securing compensation for lost pay is a separate and often harder battle, with outcomes shaped heavily by factual findings about an employee's efforts to find other work.