Ex-Lambie staffers hit with $90k court bill
A TASMANIAN senator’s former chief of staff and his office manager wife have been ordered to pay more than $90,000 for costs associated with an unfair dismissal claim labelled “unorthodox” by the presiding judge.
In the Federal Court, Justice John Snaden ruled that Rob and Fern Messenger – who worked for Senator Jacqui Lambie for four years before being fired in 2017 – pay the Commonwealth of Australia’s costs.
That sum is $47,300 each. In his ruling, Justice Snaden said the general prohibition against the awarding of costs in a matter arising under the Fair Work Act was subject to
exceptions. “The court’s traditional discretion as to costs survives insofar as a matter might be said to have been instituted vexatiously or without reasonable cause,” he said.
Justice Snaden found the Messengers were at times “vengeful” in their testimony and were not unfairly dismissed.
Mr Messenger, a former
Queensland state MP for the National Party, first met Senator Lambie in 2013 when she was running for the Senate as a member of Clive Palmer’s Palmer United Party.
He and his wife Fern joined Senator Lambie’s office when she was elected to parliament, and stayed with her as she broke away from Mr Palmer’s party to become an independent.
In their unfair dismissal claim, the Messengers asserted they were subject to adverse action, were not paid in lieu of notice when terminated and that Senator Lambie had contravened the Fair Work Act. All three causes of action were dismissed.
In his ruling, Justice Snaden said while the Messengers were, at all times, courteous and conscientious, the couple were “curtailed by a poor grasp of the law, of the cases that they had pleaded and of relevant trial processes”.
“That observation should not be mistaken for criticism. On the contrary, the Messengers approached the prosecution of their matters with great energy and diligence.
“Nonetheless, their matters required substantial pre-trial case management and they embarked upon a series of procedural endeavours that more discerning litigants might have avoided.”
Justice Snaden said that because of these factors, the hearing took “substantially longer to proceed to trial than it ought to have”.
The Messengers represented themselves in the unfair dismissal hearing.
“As can sometimes occur with litigants who labour under the disadvantage of self-representation, Mr and Mrs Messenger had a tendency to fix upon matters that were irrelevant to the causes of action to which their pleadings gave voice,” Justice Snaden said.
“A balance was struck between the need to progress the trial efficiently (on the one hand) and the need to ensure that all parties were treated fairly and in a manner befitting of the occasion of a trial in this court (on the other). Nonetheless, it is fair to say that the trial did not progress in an orthodox manner.”