Court rejects unfair dismissal claim by employee who obtained a medical certificate so he could attend AFL game.

[Newshound]

An employee of Crown Casino who obtained a medical certificate so he could take sick leave to attend Essendon’s last game with coach legend Kevin Sheedy has lost an unlawful dismissal case that tests the issue of whether employers are bound to accept medical certificates they believe are not genuine.

A Crown Melbourne Ltd employee purchased tickets for the match and booked a return airfare from Melbourne to Perth, before seeing a doctor on August 27, who gave him a medical certificate dated September 1.

Crown managers were alerted that the employee was planning to do this and advised him against it. However, he went ahead and attended the game, taking time off sick to do so. On his return the employee was suspended without pay and after a number of meetings was ultimately dismissed.

The Court found that the dismissal was “eminently fair”, rejecting the employee’s claim that he was unlawfully dismissed because of the prohibited reason under s659(2)(a) of a temporary absence due to illness.

Federal Magistrate Phiilip Burchardt said it would be only “in the most unusual and exceptional circumstances that an employer and/or by inference a Court would not accept the validity” of a medical certificate.

“This, however, is an exceptional case”, he said.

He said while it was “obviously wrong for a non-medically qualified person such as a judge to cavil at an opinion given by a qualified medical practitioner in an area of that practitioner’s expertise, I do not think it can be the case that either a Court, or indeed even an employer, is necessarily bound to treat a medical certificate as binding on them”.

It certainly didn’t help matters when it was taken into account that the doctor who issued the certificate had been disciplined for issuing false medical certificates in 2004 .

He concluded that the employee was in “excellent” physical health, wasn’t suffering from any depressive or “diagnosable” medical condition and wasn’t ill around the time of the game.

The Court upheld Crown’s view that the employee “had simply absented himself wilfully and in circumstances amounting to misconduct” and Crown was entitled to be suspicious about the validity of the medical certificate because they knew the employee was in fact in Perth attending an AFL game..

Read the full account of the case here;
Anderson v Crown Melbourne Ltd [2008] FMCA 152 (3 March 2008)