When the Systemic Harm Followed Me Home - June 2022

A workers compensation “claim” under a statutory scheme ended up becoming about survival.

By June 2022, I wasn’t simply trying to resolve a workplace injury. I was trying to stop every part of my life from collapsing under the weight of a system that had failed to do what it was legally established to do.

 

The irony still leaves me speechless.

Workers compensation legislation exists to support workers while they recover and return safely to work.

Instead, I found myself fighting to save my employment, my income, my health… and eventually, my home.

Everything became connected.

And SIRA NSW continued to do NOTHING. 

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Throughout June 2022, my emails were not really focused on ensuring rehabilitation (except for this repeated unethical coercive bullshit on the 24 June 2022 - http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/07/repeating-trauma-june-2022.html). 

They were about settlement dates.

• Contract deadlines.
• Penalty clauses.
• Mortgage security.
• Property sales.

Whether I could settle on my new home before the vendor exercised their legal rights (the only person who seemed to have no human rights, let alone legal rights under a supposed statutory scheme, was me).

Every decision was being driven by one terrifying reality:

I had been left without the income support and return-to-work assistance I should have received years earlier.

If the workers compensation system had operated as intended, none of this should have been happening.

I wrote to my real estate agents:

“If someone makes an offer like $390,000 but can settle on or before 29 June, I’ll accept this over higher offers…”

I wasn’t chasing profit anymore.

I was trying to preserve certainty.

I needed security.

I needed one thing in my life that couldn’t be taken away.

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In another email, I tried to explain what had brought me to this point.

I wrote:

“The irony is that had employer and insurer complied with workers compensation regulations, I would never have been in this horrible situation. I’d have been back at work mid-2020 healthy and well with my dignity intact.”

That sentence still hurts to read because it was written in the middle of the crisis.

I already understood exactly what had happened.

The system that was supposed to prevent financial catastrophe had become the cause of it.

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As deadlines closed in, I became increasingly desperate.

• I instructed my lawyers to negotiate.
• I asked questions about penalty notices.
• I sought extensions.
• I approved offers.
• I accepted legal advice.

Every email reflected someone desperately trying to prevent another irreversible loss.

I even began contemplating asking my brother to become a joint owner of my new home so I could complete settlement.

I wrote:

“I’d rather my brother gain from a business transaction than I lose my secure home just as everything is about to turn around for me.”

I now realise how extraordinary that sentence really was. 

An injured worker should never have to restructure their family’s financial future simply because statutory obligations were never enforced.

And little did I know then that the NSW Government regulators and other agencies were going to continue causing financial and systemic harm for several more years. How naïve of me. 

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These emails communicate someone trying to solve impossible problems.

Every message is practical.

Every decision is logical.

Every option is explored.

I kept adapting because I believed that eventually someone inside the system would do their job.

I still believed compliance mattered.

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But buried amongst the practical discussions were moments where the emotional toll finally surfaced.

I wrote to my real estate agents:

“I’m avoiding my email tonight and tomorrow morning. I’m meeting up with my mum tomorrow and I’m so freaked out by daily morning distress and frustrations in emails.”

That quote says everything.

My mornings had become associated with dread.

Every new email carried another problem.

Another threat.

Another delay.

Another reminder that I was completely on my own.

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Then I wrote something that still brings me to tears.

“It’s my mum at the foot of the cross watching her child being abused and persecuted by society when she asked for help… that hurts me the most.”

That wasn’t legal language.

That wasn’t argument.

That was grief.

Not simply for myself.

For my mum.

She had watched her daughter ask for help through the proper channels.

She watched me trust the system.

She watched that trust be repaid with years of harm.

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In another email I wrote:

“The banks must comply with regulations. But the regulator for personal injury matters makes exceptions for larger organisations who commit workers compensation fraud and turn a blind eye to the insurer’s non-compliance.”

The rules seemed to apply to everyone except those with the greatest responsibility to follow them.

Every deadline imposed on me was enforced.

The statutory obligations owed to me appeared negotiable.

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These documents capture something that’s rarely spoken about.

Financial harm caused by institutional failure doesn’t stop at bank balances.

It spreads.

• It reaches your family.
• Your relationships.
• Your sense of security.
• Your health.
• Your future.
• Your ability to make decisions.

Eventually, it reaches the place every person should feel safest.

Home.

By June 2022, I wasn’t simply trying to buy a home.

I was trying to stop an avoidable institutional failure from taking yet another piece of my life.

And all the while, I still believed that once the regulators enforced compliance, everything would finally start to turn around.

I had no idea that years later I would still be waiting…

While the institutional wage theft continued.

To be continued…

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 393-400.

Repeating the Trauma - June 2022

14–17 June 2022

By June 2022, I was preparing to explain my trauma all over again.

Because just when all was progressing for CCI to finally communicate with my NTD, Turks Legal suddenly enters the scene again, “on behalf of the insurer”. 

Another email arrived “requiring” yet another IME. 

Another “independent” practitioner. 

Another date circled on the calendar.

24 June 2022.

The words themselves had become exhausting.

“We require you to attend an independent medical examination on 24/06/2022.”

Not would you be willing?

Not how are you coping?

Simply…

“We require you.”

I was given no choice but to attend.

But this time I made one thing absolutely clear.

“I will be requiring a support person during the consultation. Please ensure CCI are aware that it’s inappropriate for a practitioner to deny a person this right for work-related psychological injuries.”

It shouldn’t have been something I had to fight for. Someone to witness the IME “transaction”. 

Also, someone suffering a psychological injury should never have to argue for the right to feel safe during an “assessment” supposedly designed to “evaluate” that very injury.

Yet here I was…

Putting it in writing.

Again.

But I do have one question for Catholic Church Insurance:

Why was CCI so adamant to do whatever it took to NOT communicate with my NTD and comply with their injury management and return to work obligations? 

These IMEs by CCI’s chosen practitioners were repeatedly used as obstruction to their injury management and return to work statutory obligations. 

WHY, CATHOLIC CHURCH INSURANCE? 

And what does ALL this reveal to us about the integrity, ethics and professional conduct of IME “practitioners” used in workplace psychological injury cases?  

WHERE ARE THE SAFEGUARDS? 

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What made this IME particularly painful was that it wasn’t even new.

It was the same practitioner who had “examined” me more than a year earlier (an examination never needed in the first place. What was “required” was return to work compliance!) 

I wrote to my lawyers:

“It’s the same practitioner as the one assigned on 31 March 2021. I’m going to be repeating myself again, yet with another torturous year of injuries.”

One sentence captured everything.

Another torturous year.

Not because my original workplace injury had simply continued…

But because the system itself had become another source of injury.

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I found myself trying to explain something that seemed obvious to me.

How could an injured worker continue being sent from one “assessment” to another while the people responsible for coordinating recovery had never coordinated recovery at all?

I wrote:

“I’m the only one who’s made efforts to implement the injury management plan, along with … my NTD.”

RECOVERY was NEVER meant to be something the injured worker carried ALONE.

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By then I wasn’t just talking about an IME.

I was trying to explain years of accumulated failures.

I wrote that my treating doctor had never been contacted by a case manager.

I described repeatedly asking for communication.

Repeatedly asking for collaboration.

Repeatedly asking for protection.

Instead, I had been left alone to navigate a system that expected me to recover while denying me the very processes designed to support recovery.

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As I wrote to my solicitor, the words became less legal and more human.

“My right to a voice in my recovery was repeatedly denied and ignored.”

That was the real injury.

Not simply being unheard once.

Being unheard over…

and over…

and over again.

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Then came one of the most heartbreaking admissions in the correspondence.

“I never viewed the … letter because I was distressed and humiliated, betrayed and abused and degraded by employer, insurer, union, and the NSW government departments meant to ensure our safety. It’s trauma.”

Trauma survivors avoid opening or reading certain correspondence. 

You might ask why don’t they “just read the letter.”

Because reading the words written means reliving the trauma, humiliation and indignity. 

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By this point I wasn’t only trying to explain what had happened.

I was trying to explain what I still wanted…

…despite the years of aggressive adverse action by the senior executives of a nationally registered, publicly funded university employer and NSW STATE REGULATORS WHO DON’T ENFORCE COMPLIANCE ON ALL KEY STAKEHOLDERS …

…I wrote:

“I want to recover in my job.”

Not compensation, as per coercion down such a path, aided and abetted by the specialised insurer CCI (but restitution for the serious financial loss from this institutional wage theft must now happen, hence PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY).

I want my statutory workers compensation right to:

Recovery.

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What strikes me most about these emails to Walker Law Group, isn’t the legal references.

It’s the desperation between the lines.

The hope that surely…

surely…

someone would finally stop and ask what was actually happening.

Instead, I found myself compiling legislation, documenting events, explaining procedural failures, identifying obligations, and trying to hold together my health while preparing to recount the same traumatic story to yet another CCI coerced IME “practitioner”.

I wasn’t recovering.

I was becoming an expert in surviving abusive systems.

And perhaps the saddest sentence I wrote during those days wasn’t about legislation at all.

It was this:

“I’m starting to feel no one cares about me in this society.”

No one should ever reach the point where that feels true.

Yet for me, in June 2022, after years of asking for help, that was exactly how it felt.

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 355-356.

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Further reading 

I wasn’t only fighting yet another traumatic and unjustified IME.

I was fighting to reclaim the conditions that allow a human being to flourish.

I came across an article by Dr Wendy Purcell, “A Fairer Society is One that is Flourishing.” She writes that flourishing is about far more than the absence of illness. It’s about having meaningful work, financial security, dignity, purpose, healthy relationships, agency over our own lives, and the opportunity to become our fullest selves. She argues that these should not be privileges enjoyed by some, but universal human rights in a fair society. 

My lived experience has been the opposite, given how current ACU leaders treated me, my family, and who knows how many others. Human flourishing must be acted upon, not only talked about in bite sized videos and posts regarding Ethics on LinkedIn (see http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/05/the-deputy-vice-chancellor-of-ethics_01727877882.html). 

This is a Catholic university committed to the dignity of the human person in its very mission statement. The current leaders should not be there, nor should Catholic Church Insurance have continued such unlawful and disgraceful corporate conduct. 

The workplace injury itself was devastating, but what followed stripped away many of the very foundations that research identifies as essential for human flourishing. My health deteriorated. My financial security disappeared. My career was interrupted. My dignity was eroded. Relationships came under enormous strain. Even my sense of agency—my ability to have a voice in my own recovery—was repeatedly taken from me.

No one should have to spend years proving they deserve the opportunity to recover.

A workers’ compensation system should not merely determine liability. It should help restore the conditions that enable an injured worker to flourish again—to recover their health, dignity, return to work and place in their community.

That is what I was asking for.

And that is what I am still asking for.

Dr. Wendy M. Purcell  (2022, 14 January). A fairer society is one that is flourishing. [Online blog] : https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/opinion-and-blog/a-fairer-society-one-flourishing 

CCI - A Simple Question That Should Never Have Needed Asking - June 2022

In June 2022, I had reached a point I never imagined possible.

Catholic Church Insurance had asked me to complete a medical authority so they could contact my treating doctor. I completed the form, but after everything that had happened over the previous two years, I found myself asking a question that should never have needed to be asked.

Why was I, the injured worker, expected to sign declarations of honesty and cooperation, while there was no equivalent requirement for the employer or insurer?

I wrote:

“I need to ask, given my experience in the last couple of years. Why isn’t a similar agreement signed by employer and insurer representatives, especially the checkboxes also agreeing that these entities will not provide false, misleading or fraudulent information.”

It was a remarkable position to be in.

I wasn’t refusing to cooperate.

I had signed the authority.

I had limited my consent to information relating to my work injury because trust had already been damaged. Then I simply asked for the same commitment from those administering the scheme.

I continued:

“I need the same verification given my experience, including insurer and employer failing to cooperate, communicate and collaborate to implement the legally binding injury management plan we had agreed on.”

The Injury Management Plan already existed. It had been agreed. Yet the very organisations responsible for implementing it had failed to do so, while I continued trying to engage with them and the system in good faith.

I reminded CCI that I had done everything reasonably expected of an injured worker.

“I have all the records compiled of my repeated attempts and that I, the injured employee, took all reasonable steps to mitigate damages…”

Then I added something that still resonates with me today:

“Had CCI done so previously, the damages would’ve been contained.”

Those words reflected years of escalating harm that could have been prevented if the statutory obligations designed to protect injured workers had simply been followed.

I finished that email with cautious optimism:

“I expect the insurer to comply with worker’s compensation regulations this time. Contacting my treating doctor … is a positive start.”

I wanted to believe CCI would finally do the right thing and comply.

But later that same day, after receiving only a brief acknowledgement — “Thank you for completing the form Vicki.”  — I found myself writing again.

I asked for something very simple:

“Can I please have the same written verification that CCI are going to comply with worker’s compensation regulations and also not provide false and fraudulent information as I agree. I expect support to return to my job at ACU as per injury management plan.”

Think about that for a moment.

An injured worker was asking an insurer to confirm, in writing, that it would comply with the law.

Compliance.

Honesty.

Just the same standard expected of me.

As the evening went on, my frustration became impossible to hide.

Believing the regulator was not investigating my complaint, I wrote that I had referred my evidence elsewhere and that public scrutiny would eventually expose what had occurred. I again asked for the verification I had requested.

Yet despite all of the legal arguments, the regulatory failures and the growing paper trail, my final email that evening returned to the human reality behind the case.

I wrote:

“I just want to get back to my job of twenty years. I need the bullying by mobbing that’s still happening … to stop. Worker’s compensation and its benefits are meant to help you recover in your job. Not take everything you worked for and earned away. I need a voice in my own recovery.”

That is what this was always about.

Not litigation.

Not paperwork.

Not endless correspondence.

I simply wanted to recover, return safely to the career I had built over twenty years, and have a genuine voice in decisions affecting my own health and future.

Instead, I found myself asking one of the most extraordinary questions imaginable:

If I am required to promise honesty, why aren’t the institutions entrusted with protecting injured workers required to do the same?

Before ending that day, I forwarded the correspondence to my Nominated Treating Doctor.

For the first time in a long time, I genuinely believed the workers compensation system might finally begin operating as it was intended.

I wrote:

“I look forward to finally recovering back in my job as per injury management plan agreement.”

Then I explained what had gone so wrong over the previous two years:

“The reason it wasn’t was because you as my NTD, … my allied health professional and me, the injured employee, were completely left out of the compliance and key stakeholder equation.”

That sentence still stops me.

Most people assume that an injured worker’s recovery is led by the treating doctor, the treating psychologist or allied health professionals, and the worker themselves. That is certainly what I believed. Yet my experience was that the very people responsible for supporting my recovery had been sidelined, while decisions continued to be made without meaningful collaboration with the treating team.

I asked my GP for one thing:

“Please support me to hold CCI accountable to get me recovering in my job as Senior Library Coordinator HEW 8 Step 4 at ACU Strathfield campus library. It’s time the law is enforced on insurer and employer.”

That email communicates what this journey has always been about.

Not compensation.

Not litigation.

Not endless disputes.

Recovery.

Returning to the university community I had served since 2001.

Returning to my role.

Returning to the life I had worked so hard to build.

That was all I ever wanted.

What happened next has never made sense to me.

After years of my Nominated Treating Doctor being excluded from coordinating my recovery, there was finally movement towards the statutory process actually occurring. I genuinely believed things were about to change.

I didn’t know it then, but the optimism I felt would be short-lived.

Before that process had any opportunity to occur, I found myself being directed to yet another IME with Olivia Lee. 

Turks Legal, “on behalf of CCI”, sprung into action, yet again, with this OBSTRUCTION. 

Instead of allowing my treating team to coordinate my recovery as contemplated by the legislation and the Injury Management Plan, the process took another turn.

Once again, the focus shifted away from my treating doctor…

…and back towards another Independent Medical Examination.

WHY?

WHY DID CATHOLIC CHURCH INSURANCE REPEATEDLY DO THIS? 

The timing remains deeply troubling to me. Within days of my treating doctor finally being brought into the process, that opportunity disappeared and the claim moved back towards another IME. 

I still have these questions about why the statutory recovery process was not allowed to proceed. 

And the institutionalised wage theft continued.

To be continued…

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 360, 364-365.

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Further reading 

I came across a blog post by Professor David Yamada, “Workplace Bullying and Mobbing: Toxic Systems and the Eliminationist Mindset”. It resonated with me because it describes severe workplace bullying not simply as the actions of one individual, but as a system in which different organisational actors can each play a role.

Professor Yamada identifies what he describes as the typical "players" in a workplace mobbing campaign:

• The main aggressor(s) – in my case, I believe this began with the conduct of my direct workplace leaders that led me to raise formal psychosocial safety concerns.

• The supervisor or boss of the main aggressor(s) – the organisational leadership that, in my experience, did not intervene effectively and instead allowed the situation to continue.

• Peers recruited, pressured or incentivised to join in – what I experienced as workplace mobbing, where my much needed connections with colleagues was removed and I felt increasingly isolated within a community I proudly served since 2001.

• Human Resources – who became responsible for “managing” complaints and disciplinary processes rather than restoring a psychologically safe workplace.

• Legal counsel – whose involvement shifted from resolving the underlying safety issues to defending organisational decisions and communicating with me through a distorted “legal lens”. The conduct was unethical and aggressive adverse action, rather than the integrity to align with the University Identity and Mission and comply with WHS regulations. 

For years, I’ve tried to explain that what happened to me resulted in a frightening level of systemic abuse, as more and more parts of the organisation (and further beyond the initial organisation itself), became involved over time. As each new participant entered the process, the possibility of simply recovering and returning to work seemed to move further away. 

And yet, I fought a serious and extensive level of systemic failure, to bring recovery and returning back to my work into the spotlight, making it fully visible again as I write my story. I want to finally move recovering and returning to my work in the right direction - closer and closer in my direction. 

Requesting a safe work environment is a generally protected workplace right and recovery at work is another protected right under a statutory scheme that should have protected me too.

Professor Yamada's framework articulates the problem clearly: the problem is systemic problem, not a personal one. 

But regulators in the system, like SafeWork NSW and SIRA NSW, the very regulators we trust to ensure safety and compliance, repeatedly chose to redirect the “problem” as “personal” rather than systemic, as my story of lived experience and contemporaneous records clearly show. 

The regulatory processes have been a big part of the problem. 

In my case, the greatest tragedy is that the Injury Management Plan we all had agreed on (before the “system” reared its ugly head again), had one purpose: to support my recovery and my return to work.

Instead, the focus gradually shifted away from recovery and towards processes, investigations, legal correspondence and organisational defence. 

What the insurer did and what they put on record, via the Independent Review Office (another part of the “system” that doesn’t ensure independent verification), when I demanded answers in writing, is completely indefensible, and Catholic Church Insurance know it. 

And so then more “players” were recruited into the “system” to obstruct procedural fairness and natural justice - a group of IME practitioners. 

Accountability is way overdue and the whole system needs an overhaul. 

All I want is to recover, return safely to my substantive HEW 8 Step 4 professional role, and continue serving the university community that’s been my workplace since 2001.

If you're interested in understanding workplace mobbing from a systems perspective, Professor David Yamada's blog post is worth reading:

Workplace Bullying and Mobbing: Toxic Systems and the Eliminationist Mindset

https://newworkplace.wordpress.com/2017/08/02/workplace-bullying-and-mobbing-toxic-systems-and-the-eliminationist-mindset/