In my last sentence of the prior post I wasn’t speaking strictly from a legal or regulatory viewpoint (although they could susped your license here in the States for that sort of thing if the local FAA authorities decided it was warranted). I was speaking from a safety viewpoint. Handpropping without someone at the controls and/or the airplane tied down is stupid. There is nearly a century’s worth of accident reports reflecting this.
The fellows I know who hand-prop solo always tie down or securely chock the plane while doing so. (They usually have things rigged up so once in the cockpit they yank on a rope to free the plane)
Handpropping can be done safely. It’s no great mystery and the information is readily available from many sources. This guy was lucky it was only hardware damage and not any people.
We have to bear in mind the differences between civil and criminal liability. Normally, a reference to “charges” being dismissed by a magistrate, as mentioned in the e-mail posted by Q.E.D., is a reference to a criminal case. Criminal law normally requires a higher standard of proof than do civil cases: proof beyond a reasonable doubt in criminal cases, compared to proof on the balance of probabilities in a civil cases.
As well, the standard of care required to ground a criminal charge in cases of accidents is normally higher - simple negligence is usually sufficient to attract civil liability, but to trigger criminal liability it may have to be gross negligence, a much higher standard.
So it may be that the magistrate in this case decided that the conduct did not reach the necessary levels to trigger criminal liability under the laws of South Australia - but the reference to insurance in the information posted by Q.E.D. suggests that the pilot was civilly liable, thereby triggering his insurance policy.