The Court held that an adjudicator's failure to engage in a reasoned way with a respondent's claim that construction work was defective and essentially worthless constituted both a failure to perform the statutory task and a denial of natural justice, rendering the determination void. The Court distinguished between a mistake made within jurisdiction (e.g. misconstruing a contractual term) and a complete failure to address an essential element of a party's case. The Court also found that separate quotations accepted at different times for discrete scopes of work gave rise to separate contracts rather than variations of a single contract, though on the facts this did not affect the jurisdictional outcome as all contracts were construction contracts.
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