In serious injury applications under s 134AB of the Accident Compensation Act 1985 (Vic), the capacity of an accident to cause an injury is a necessary but not sufficient condition for establishing causation; it is only the first step in the analysis. Similarly, the absence of evidence of any other causative incident, while relevant, is not of itself determinative. Where there is a significant temporal gap between the accident and the first complaint of symptoms, the applicant's histories to medical practitioners are of critical importance, and adverse credibility findings about those histories may properly undermine medical opinions that relied upon them.
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