If you don’t have any thoughts don’t reply. This thread is about Brown being stood down using nfsd so I believe the hypothetical question is relevant, not everyone is a rep star on 4 year contracts, some are year to year and a 2 year ban while court continues to get adjourned and ruins a career and then gets acquitted could have massive financial liability to the NRL
Hypothetically I'm not sure the player would have a leg to stand on tbh
Employers in Australia have the right to stand down employees for a lot of reasons, including for their conduct (or misconduct) and for the duration of any internal or external investigation into that conduct. They
must pay them for the period of the stand down except in certain circumstances, none of which would apply to the NRL. So the stand down is lawful, even if it's apparently arbitrary in its' application.
NRL players are on fixed term contracts with their club, so there is no expectation of ongoing employment beyond the end of a contract. Effluxion of time isn't a termination, so there's no leg to stand on there.
As a prospective employee, I doubt the player could argue any breach of the general protections or discrimination acts in terms of clubs not hiring them with a court case hanging over their heads, because being the subject of criminal proceedings is not a protected attribute.
You could maybe argue that either the stand down was illegitimate or incorrectly handed down, using other similar cases, if the NRL had arbitrarily applied it to one player but not another in similar circumstances, but in terms of damages you would then need to prove that another contract would have been forthcoming at all. That's going to be hard for a fringe first grader with only 1 and 2 year deals in their back catalogue.
You could also theoretically do the same as the NRL would and argue reputational damage I suppose, and although that's not at all my area I imagine it would be difficult to make a case for it when the player has had criminal proceedings on foot. Even if the allegations are found to be totally false and made up, it's not the NRL who has damaged the player's reputation, it's the person making false allegations.