Allow me to digress and forgive me for repeating an old joke.
There's martial law — and a midnight curfew. At 5 minutes to midnight two military police stop a bicyclist and ask for his ID. After a moment of inspection one of the MPs pulls out his sidearm and shoots the bicyclist dead. The other MP is shocked and reminds his colleague that it isn't midnight yet. In reply the shooter holds up the ID and says, "Look at his address, he was never going to make it."
I was reminded of this story by a recent AIRC decision where a dismissed employee hadn't been afforded procedural fairness. In that decision the Commissioner (the former secretary to the royal commission into the building industry, and before that assistant director of the Business Council) wrote:
Whilst the termination process did not include adequate opportunity for [the dismissed employee] to provide his employer with reasons why his failure to accept [the boss's] decision should not result in the termination of his employment, the evidence and submissions in these proceedings and my observations of [the employee's] conduct during the proceedings leaves me in no doubt that if the process had involved such opportunity, the outcome would have been the same.
Bang.
By the way, the employee represented himself.
When the boss rides in on a white horse,
somebody else needs to bring a shovel.
—Yllib Ybnad (b. 1948)
