Legal experts say a bullying case where a young man was set on fire by a co-worker points to serious deficiencies in the workplace health and safety system.

Nick Clements has told 7.30 of how he was squirted with highly flammable cleansing solvents and then set alight by a co-worker at Haeusler's farm machinery dealership in the Victorian town of Shepparton.

Mr Clements, who had been diagnosed with high functioning autism as a young child, was nine days into a two-week trial at the dealership when the assault happened.

"He grabbed a pump-action spray bottle from the side of his tool chest and sprayed me in the crotch with solvent," he told 7.30.

"And then he said, 'It looks like you've wet yourself.' And then he pulled out a lighter from his toolbox, from the drawers and he held it towards me and said, 'I'll light you.'

"And I said, 'Oh, no, you wouldn't,' because you wouldn't think that someone would actually do that. And next thing I looked down, I was all up in flames."

Nathan Frizzle, the apprentice who set him alight, still has his job at Haeusler's after pleading guilty to assault in Shepparton Magistrates Court last month.

He was given a 12-month good behaviour bond and a $500 fine. When contacted by 7.30, he refused to make any comment.

Just before the court ruling, the Government watchdog WorkSafe, which investigated the incident at length, decided it would not take any action because of the police charges.

As a last resort, the Clements family plans to lodge a victims-of-crime complaint with the Director of Public Prosecutions.

But WorkSafe's decision has left Mr Clements and his family feeling badly let down.

"I find it a disgusting outcome. It feels like a real spit in the face to see what he got," Mr Clements told 7.30.

Prominent anti-bullying lawyer Moira Rayner is leading a push for the establishment of a national tribunal to allow civil claims.

She thinks the treatment of Nick Clements is not isolated and that WorkSafe could and should have done much more.

"I have always regarded bullying as a failure by management and all our bullying law is unsatisfactory because they don't give the individual a personal right of redress," she said.

"If they make a WorkCover claim or a WorkSafe claim and it doesn't end up because of technicalities in addressing their problems, then the person who's been bullied, victimised and psychologically if not physically harmed may well have on top of that a sense of grave injustice.

"When someone could have been killed in a classic apprentice-playing-with-fire incident, there should have been an immediate and effective intervention in the workplace so the employer, the employees and the apprentices got the message very loud and clear that this could have ended up in a manslaughter charge."