The seriousness of an allegation, inherent unlikelihood, or gravity of consequences are considerations affecting whether an issue has been proved to the reasonable satisfaction of the tribunal.

A civil penalty must be 'fixed with a view to ensuring that the penalty is not such as to be regarded by [the] offender or others as an acceptable cost of doing business'.

The maximum penalty of $2,000 prescribed by s 83(4)(a) of the IR Act applies to each individual contravention of an award, not collectively to multiple contraventions regardless of number.

The primary object of civil penalties in industrial relations legislation is protective, promoting public interest in compliance; the penalty must be fixed to ensure it is not regarded as an acceptable cost of doing business.

The totality principle involves reviewing an aggregate sentence to ensure appropriateness and is applied after the course of conduct principle to determine whether penalties should be consecutive or concurrent; it cannot be applied without first assessing penalties for individual contraventions.

Particular care must be taken in the absence of guiding authority at an intermediate appellate level as to appropriate penalties in respect of frequently-encountered contraventions so as not to skew the imposition of penalty by reference to other outcomes in the original jurisdiction in respect of quite different facts.

Compensation is a broad concept which should not be interpreted in a narrow way, and in an appropriate case the Court is able to order compensation for non-economic loss under s 298U(c).

Where a respondent commits multiple contraventions of different civil penalty provisions arising out of substantially the same facts with interrelationship between legal and factual elements, common law principles allow treatment of them as a single course of conduct or one transaction to ensure the respondent is not punished twice for essentially the same culpability.

The determination of appropriate penalty is a matter of instinctive synthesis rather than rigid catalogue of factors; ultimate purpose is to promote public interest in compliance with civil penalty provisions by way of general and specific deterrence; penalty must strike reasonable balance between deterrence and oppressive severity.

Where a respondent characterises conduct as 'accidental' but provides no proper explanation of how the breach arose, and the conduct itself is inherently difficult to explain as truly accidental given the contractual clarity, the characterisation should not be accepted for penalty purposes.

A court should not afford weight to an apology as evidence of genuine contrition where the apology is accompanied by misleading statements (such as claiming to have 'investigated' when no investigation occurred or falsely characterising a breach as purely accidental).

The maximum financial penalty of $2000 under s84A(5) is relatively low and does not necessarily allow the Full Bench to adequately penalise, deter, and denounce conduct in all cases. There is a 'chasm' between imposition of a financial penalty and directing a s73 summons.