Global claims and total cost in Australia

A global claim (sometimes called a total-cost claim) is a pleading device, not a head of loss. It arises when a contractor's actual costs have been driven up by a tangle of delaying and disrupting events. Some caused by the principal, some by the contractor itself, some by nobody in particular, and the contractor cannot draw a clean line from each dollar of overrun to the specific event that caused it. Rather than abandon the claim, the contractor pleads the aggregate: total actual cost, less what it would have cost absent any of the alleged events, attributed globally to the compensable events taken together. Every common-law jurisdiction treats this with suspicion. Australia treats it with the least tolerance of all.

The reason the device exists at all is that construction records are almost never good enough to support the alternative. A project running years behind schedule, with hundreds of variations, weather events, access restrictions and design changes layered on top of each other, rarely leaves a paper trail clean enough to attribute every extra dollar of cost to a single named cause. A claimant faced with that reality has, in principle, two choices: abandon everything it cannot individually prove, or ask the court to accept the aggregate on the footing that individuated proof is genuinely impossible. Every jurisdiction treated in this corpus lets a claimant try the second path. What differs sharply is what happens when the attempt does not fully succeed, and that is exactly the question Mainteck answers for Australia, more harshly than anywhere else surveyed.

Mainteck and the death of apportionment

The doctrine turns on Mainteck Services Pty Ltd v Stein Heurtey SA [2014] NSWCA 184. The New South Wales Court of Appeal was asked, in substance, whether a court faced with a global claim that could not be wholly substantiated could nonetheless apportion the loss and award what the evidence did support. The Court's answer was that it could not. Apportionment of a global claim in these circumstances "is not the law" in Australia.

Two propositions follow directly, and both are strict in the same direction:

• Every component of the claimed loss must be attributable to a compensable event. A global claim that bundles in even one component attributable to the contractor's own risk. A delay of its own making, a productivity loss with no causal link to the principal. Contaminates the whole claim, not just that component.
• The impracticability of apportionment must be proved, not asserted. It is not enough to tell the court that separating the causes is too hard. The claimant carries the burden of demonstrating, on evidence, that individual causation genuinely cannot be disentangled, and that burden is where most global claims are won or lost before a single dollar is discussed.

The consequence of getting this wrong is severe, and it is worth stating without softening: a global claim that partly fails in Australia fails entirely. There is no discretion to award the part that was proved and dismiss the rest, and no doctrine that treats partial substantiation as partial success.

No safety net: the comparative position

Two other common-law jurisdictions in this corpus have built exactly the fallback Australia refuses to recognise, and the contrast is the clearest way to see how far Australia has gone.

Walter Lilly & Co Ltd v Mackay [2012] EWHC 649 (TCC) is the English position, and it is materially more forgiving: a global claim survives partial failure, and an English court may apportion the loss between what was proved and what was not. John Doyle Construction Ltd v Laing Management (Scotland) Ltd [2004] ScotCS 141 goes further still, expressly recognising apportionment as one of three available routes for a Scottish global claim that cannot link every loss to a specific event. Australia has neither route.

Layer: jurisdictional comparison. The Australian and Canadian rows rest on corroborated secondary sources. Primary Australian case-law databases returned errors throughout the research for this corpus, and every Australian proposition on this page should be independently verified before it is relied on in a pleading.

The publishable point sits underneath the table rather than in any single cell of it. Australia and the United States both make impracticability of direct proof an element the claimant must affirmatively establish. That much the two jurisdictions share. But American practice then allows a modified total cost, adjusted for the claimant's own share of responsibility and for bid error, sitting between outright success and outright failure. Australia allows nothing in that middle ground. Once a global claim is run and any part of it cannot be sustained, the result is not a reduced award. It is no award on that claim at all. That combination of a strict proof burden with no partial-success outcome makes an Australian global claim the highest-risk composite claim of any jurisdiction surveyed in this corpus.

The authority behind the rule

Mainteck did not appear from nowhere. John Holland Construction & Engineering Pty Ltd v Kvaerner R J Brown Pty Ltd (1996) 82 BLR 81, a decision of Byrne J in the Supreme Court of Victoria, is the earliest Australian global-claims decision of real substance and the case the modern line traces back to.

A citation circulates in practice for a differently styled 1997 decision with a similarly named respondent. That citation could not be verified against any primary source in the research for this corpus and is almost certainly a conflation. The matters it appears to be confused with are unrelated 2015–2018 New South Wales arbitration and insurance proceedings involving a differently constituted set of parties. It should not be used, and a pleading or submission that cites it risks being corrected in front of the tribunal on a point that has nothing to do with the merits.

What an Australian global claim has to do

The gateway Mainteck polices is unforgiving, but it is not opaque. A claim built the right way has a real prospect. A claim that skips the groundwork tends not to survive an interlocutory challenge, let alone a trial. The practical discipline this imposes on claim preparation is different in kind from what a global claim requires in England or Scotland. There, the pleading can afford to be somewhat aggregated because the court has a fallback if the aggregation does not hold up. In Australia the aggregation has to be defensible on its own terms from the outset, because there is nothing to fall back on if it is not.

The modern line: one struck out, one survives

Two Western Australian and Queensland decisions bracket the practical range of outcomes. In Built Environs Pty Ltd v Tali Engineering Pty Ltd; Perth Airport Pty Ltd (No 2) [2019] WASC 76 a global claim was struck out. The clearest illustration in the corpus of the Mainteck gateway actually closing a claim before trial. In Santos Ltd v Fluor Australia Pty Ltd [2017] QSC 153, by contrast, a global claim survived. Read together, the two decisions make the point that the difference between the two outcomes is pleading discipline and evidential preparation, not the underlying merits of the events complained of. A separate, first-instance decision, DM Drainage & Constructions Pty Ltd v Karara Mining Ltd [2014] WASC 170, addresses the pleading standard a global claim must meet before it is even allowed to proceed. The same threshold that Built Environs later applied against a claimant that did not clear it.

None of these three decisions is appellate. The Australian global-claims jurisprudence below Mainteck itself is thin. A handful of first-instance decisions from two states, which is itself a caution: the detailed pleading standard is being worked out case by case at trial level, not settled by a body of appellate authority a claimant can plan around with certainty.

Cessnock: the under-pleaded answer to "your records are inadequate"

A global claim usually arises precisely because the claimant's records cannot support event-by-event proof, and the defendant's stock response is to say so. Cessnock City Council v 123 259 932 Pty Ltd [2024] HCA 17, decided unanimously by the High Court on 12 May 2024, gives claimants a genuine answer to that response, and it is the modern Australian analogue to the reasonable-approximation line American courts have developed for exactly this problem.

The High Court recognised "facilitation of proof": where a defendant's own breach caused or increased the evidential uncertainty the plaintiff faces in proving its loss, a rebuttable presumption of recoupment arises, and the onus shifts to the defendant to displace it. The Court's own description of the doctrine is worth quoting directly. It gives a plaintiff "a fair wind, not a free ride". The presumption does not relieve a claimant of the need to prove loss at all. It relieves it of the burden of proving loss with a precision the defendant's own conduct made impossible to achieve.

That is precisely the situation a global claim usually arises from. A principal's conduct has produced the disorder that then makes individual causation impossible to trace, and the contractor is left arguing impracticability under Mainteck with the defendant arguing the opposite. Cessnock offers a route to the same evidential relief that does not depend on satisfying the Mainteck gateway on apportionment at all: if the defendant caused the evidential uncertainty, the onus of proof itself moves.

This appears never to have been run to support a global or total-cost delay claim. That is a gap in the case law, not a weakness in the argument. Cessnock was not a delay case on its facts, and no reported decision in this corpus applies it to a composite construction quantum claim. For a claimant facing a Mainteck strike-out application, or defending a global claim against the objection that its records will not support individual causation, Cessnock is worth pleading in the alternative even in the absence of a delay-specific precedent. It is the strongest available answer to the objection that decides most of these cases, and it currently sits unused.

The practical shape of the claim

Put the pieces together and the shape of a defensible Australian global claim looks like this: an evidenced case for impracticability of apportionment, built from the state of the records rather than asserted from the bar table. A screen for contractor-risk contamination run before the claim is filed. An individuated fallback pleaded in the alternative so that a Mainteck failure on the global claim does not mean a failure of the whole case, and, wherever the principal's own conduct degraded the records the contractor would otherwise have kept, a Cessnock argument that the evidential onus should shift rather than sit entirely on the claimant. None of this makes an Australian global claim safe. It remains the highest-risk composite claim structure in the common-law jurisdictions this corpus covers, but it is not an automatic loser, as Santos v Fluor shows, provided the claim is built to survive the gateway rather than pleaded around it.

There is also a drafting lesson for the other side of the table. A principal defending a global claim in Australia is not in the same position as a defendant in England or Scotland, where the best available strategy may be to concede that some loss occurred and fight over apportionment. In Australia, an all-or-nothing outcome cuts both ways, and a defendant that can show even one element of the claimed loss is not properly attributed to a compensable event has a route to defeat the claim in its entirety, not merely to reduce it, which is exactly the strategy that succeeded in Built Environs. Conversely, a defendant that has itself caused the evidential mess the claimant is relying on should expect Cessnock to be pleaded against it, and should not assume that "your records are inadequate" remains a costless objection once the claimant's inability to keep clean records is the direct result of the defendant's own conduct.

The heads of loss that typically populate an Australian global claim. Extended preliminaries, unabsorbed overhead, financing cost, loss of productivity. Are the same heads examined on their own terms, outside the global-claim structure, on the prolongation and delay costs page. A claimant should always ask, before resorting to a global claim, whether any of those heads can in fact be proved individually on the available records. Only the genuinely unattributable residue belongs in the aggregated claim, because every dollar that is pulled out and proved separately is a dollar that survives even if the rest of the global claim later fails under Mainteck.

About this material Library content is general information about construction claim practice, not legal advice. Entitlement, deadlines and procedure are governed by your own contract and by the law of the place the work is performed. Reviewed September 1, 2026 · Report a correction