“This big case is about a small bit of wood,” begins the judgment, written by the Queensland supreme court justice Peter Applegarth.
To be more precise, the case was about a $2.6m contract dispute between an electrical contractor and the owner of a solar farm near Hervey Bay.
It hinged on a 1.4-metre-long piece of 12mm plywood, a $10 handsaw and a roll of “tough and wide Gorilla tape” bought from the local Bunnings.
The electrical company, Ingeteam, is pursuing the Susan River Solar Farm for “unpaid amounts” worth $2.38m, plus GST, under a 2020 contract to operate and maintain the 95MW solar farm.
A tiny part of the claim was for $294.24, for the repair of flooring in a shed in March 2023, which involved an electrician taping the plywood to the floor.
When the dispute came before the Queensland Building and Construction Commission last year, an adjudicator made an “unreasonable, illogical and unexplained” ruling about the plywood repair that had the effect of blocking the entirety of the $2.6m claim, Applegarth wrote.
The adjudicator’s ruling was that the repairing of the floor with plywood and duct tape amounted to unlicensed building work, in breach of the contract between Ingeteam and Susan River Solar.
On the basis of one single breach, the adjudicator found that Ingeteam had entered into the contract – more than two years earlier – with “an intention” not to abide by the terms.
The consequence of the adjudicator’s ruling was that Ingeteam was effectively “disentitled” from making its $2.6m claim for payment under the Building Industry Fairness Act.
The electrical contractor appealed to the supreme court. In his judgment on 11 March, Applegarth overturned key parts of the adjudicator’s decision on several grounds, including that the floor repair did not amount to “building work” that required a licensed builder.
“The skills of a licensed tradesperson are not required to tape the edges of a piece of plywood to a floor,” Applegarth found.
The court also found that the adjudicator had denied Ingeteam procedural fairness and that his findings of intent – that the electrical contractor had entered into its contract, years earlier, with an intention to break the terms – could not be justified.
“This finding was completely unreasonable, illogical and unexplained,” Applegarth said.
“It was a damning conclusion that no reasonable decision-maker would have reached on the basis of the performance of unlicensed building work, in one trivial respect, a few years after the contract had been entered into.”
The judgment voids key parts of the adjudicator’s decision but does not resolve the payment dispute between the parties, which will go to a new adjudicator.
