Sparke Helmore's MAD (Motor Accidents Division) - July special edition

Welcome to this special edition of Sparke Helmore’s Motor Accident Division publication!

The District Court of New South Wales has handed down its decision in Job v Jones; State of NSW (Fire and Rescue NSW) v Jones 2025/00319836; 2021/00041204 (1 July 2026), the first judgment to squarely consider the scope of s 3A(2) of the Motor Accident Compensation Act 1999 (NSW) (MAC Act) – the provision that excludes the MAC Act from applying ’in respect of an injury that arises gradually from a series of incidents’. Importantly for the current scheme, the Court confirmed that s 3A(2) is materially identical to s 1.9(2) of the Motor Accident Injuries Act 2017 (NSW) (MAI Act), so the reasoning is directly relevant to CTP claims today.

Our CTP insurance team has prepared this special edition summarising the decision and its implications on the current motor accident injuries scheme.

The matter was heard on 24 June 2026 before Abadee DCJ.

Background

On or around 2.45 am on 5 October 2011, Mr Edward Jones was driving a passenger coach, owned by Meakins & Sons Pty Ltd, north along the Olympic Highway at Young. The coach crossed onto the wrong side of the road and collided head-on with a truck travelling in the opposite direction. Mr Russell Job – then an employee of Fire and Rescue NSW (FRNSW) – attended the scene as an emergency rescuer. He was required to extract a teenage boy who had been thrown to the front of the coach as a result of the force of the collision.  The boy subsequently died.

Mr Job was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder in 2019, ceased operational work, and was medically discharged in 2022. FRNSW made substantial workers compensation payments to him for lost wages and treatment.

Two proceedings came before the court together (evidence in one treated as evidence in the other):

1. The State’s recovery proceedings (commencing 12 February 2021), in which the State of NSW (FRNSW) claimed indemnity against the driver and coach owner under s 151Z(1)(d) of the Workers Compensation Act 1987 (NSW), and
2. Mr. Job’s damages proceedings (commencing 20 August 2025) against the same Defendants.

Breach of duty was admitted. However, the Transport Accident Commission (TAC), effectively acting for the Defendants, denied that Mr. Job's psychiatric condition was caused by the accident and raised the special defence on s 3A(2), contending that his condition ’arose gradually and from a series of incidents’. The pleadings included a 1992 bus accident (in which Mr. Job was a passenger and witnessed multiple deaths), a series of confronting incidents attended over his FRNSW career, and the nature and conditions of his employment. TAC did not dispute the factual matrix for the purpose of the application but stressed that the medical evidence was ’untested’.

The Court was told that at least five other sets of proceedings had raised the same construction issue, with one earmarked for final hearing in May 2027.

The questions for separate determination

On 5 March 2026, over the Defendants’ objection, Abadee DCJ formulated two questions:

1. What is the scope of s 3A(2) of the MAC Act?
2. In circumstances where there has been an injury arising from a motor vehicle accident, does s 3A(2) apply to exclude the MAC Act where, relevantly, the accident is one of a series of immeasurable ’micro traumas’ or ’wear and tear’ injuries; one of a series of distinct measurable traumas; distinct measurable trauma against a background of other traumas; or one of a series of incidents not involving the named tortfeasor?

His Honour determined that Question 2 was ’inappropriate to answer’ as it invited the Court to give judicial advice on hypothetical fact scenarios not proven to apply to the claimant, which would be an exercise antithetical to the judicial method and add ’an unnecessary degree of embellishment and complication to what should be a relatively straightforward question’.

Decision

Applying the modern principles of statutory interpretation, drawing heavily on Sydney Seaplanes Pty Ltd v Page (2021) 106 NSWLR 1, his Honour rejected TAC's submission that s 3A(2) simply ’means what it says’. His Honour held:

Section 3A(2) represents a dichotomy with section 3A(1). Section 3A(1) contemplates an injury caused by a singular motor accident occurring at a fixed point in time. Section 3A(2) is engaged only where it cannot be proven that a single motor accident caused the injury; where, instead, the injury is the result only of the gradual accumulation of multiple incidents over a period of time, with no singular event.

The word ’gradual’ signifies a temporal sequence – an injury that did not occur all at once and whose nature and extent cannot be connected to a single event. Such an injury is not ’measurable’ (a concept familiar from the law of limitations: Warley Australia Ltd v Western Australia (1992) 175  CLR 514). A ’series of incidents’ denotes more than one incident happening one after another; it's opposite is a singular incident – a motor vehicle accident.

The authorities on the predecessor provisions of the MAC Act pointed the same way, confirming that the legislative objective of the 1995 amendments to the Motor Accidents Act 1998 (NSW) was to remove the overlap between motor accident and workers compensation claims.

Critically, his Honour treated the 2006 amendments that enacted section 3A as ’declaratory of the existing law, unaltered on application to the current scheme.

Outcome

His Honour held that scope of s 3A(2) of the MAC Act is such that the Act does not apply in respect of injuries that gradually occur through the course of multiple instances relating to the nature and conditions of a person at work and which cannot measurably be identified with a single motor accident occurring at a fixed point in time.

Although decided under the MAC Act, the decision applies equally to claims under the MAI Act, as his Honour expressly acquainted s 3A(2) with s 1.9(2) of the current scheme.

The decision confirms a protective and narrow reading of the ’series of incidents’ exclusion. The exclusion is not a general answer to any claimant with a history of prior trauma or a pre-existing psychiatric vulnerability. Where a discreet, measurable motor accident can be identified as a cause of the injury, s 1.9(2) will not exclude the application of the scheme, even where the accident sits within a broader history of traumatic exposure. The provision is aimed to exclude injuries that accrue gradually through the nature and conditions of work.

For emergency service and other first responder psychiatric claims in particular – where claimants are frequently subject to accumulative occupation exposure – an exclusion by way of s 1.9(2) is difficult to sustain wherever the medical evidence supports a discrete, identifiable motor accident as a material cause. The ’measurability’ of the injury against a single accident is likely to be the key footing for dispute.