Podcast - Recent caselaw involving sexual harassment and psychosocial risks in the workplace

Welcome to the second instalment of The Proactive Workplace podcast series, which is a series exploring effective management of sexual harassment, discrimination and psychosocial risk issues, incidents and litigation.

This is an area of the law where we are seeing considerable change, with the new Work Health and Safety (Sexual and Gender-based Harassment) Coder of Practice 2025 approved under s 274 of the Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (Cth) as recently as 5 March 2025. The Code of Practice offers practical guidance on what can be done to identify, manage and prevent the risk of sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace.

Another source of practical guidance is caselaw, which provides real examples of what to do and what not do—in the eyes of the courts, commissions, and regulators. So, in this instalment, Rossana Parmegiani (Special Counsel), John Nairn (Senior Associate ) and Rupert Gillies (Associate) from our Workplace team consider five recent cases—three involving employment law related issues and two involving work health and safety issues—and highlight what can be learned from these cases about managing sexual harassment and psychosocial risks in the workplace.

To listen to the podcast, you can click on this link to redirect to Sparke Helmore's podcast page on our website, or listen on Podbean through The Sparke Cast host page.

We also have a dedicated Proactive Workplace blog featuring a series of short topical articles to provide you with insights, guidance and support. 

If there are issues you’d like us to explore in The Proactive Workplace podcast series or in an upcoming article, please contact Julie Kneebone.