By March 2022, I was no longer simply trying to navigate a workers compensation dispute.
I was trying to survive the collapse of every system that was supposed to protect me.
What began as requests for workplace safety, injury management, and lawful return to work processes had escalated into something much darker: prolonged psychological harm, financial destabilisation, social isolation, fear, and the growing realisation that the institutions I had trusted for most of my adult life were unwilling to intervene.
By then, I had already tried regulators.
I had tried internal university processes.
I had tried the union.
I had tried formal complaints.
I had tried cooperation.
I had tried patience.
And still, years later, I remained cut off from my job, deprived of statutory entitlements, psychologically deteriorating, and begging for basic human communication.
That is what led me to the office of my local electorate representative for Kogarah.
I went there because SafeWork NSW and SIRA had failed to stop the harm.
When people look at public systems from the outside, they often assume there is always another pathway available. Another escalation point. Another authority figure who will finally intervene.
But eventually, after enough doors close, a person reaches the point where they simply start asking anyone in public office to help make the harm stop.
That was where I had reached.
In one email sent on 4 March 2022 to the office of the then Opposition Leader and my elected representative for Kogarah, Chris Minns, and to the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Ethics at the university, I wrote:
“I can’t tolerate this negligence and cruelty anymore.”
Those words were written by someone already psychologically exhausted from prolonged exposure to unresolved workplace harm and systemic failure.
The email itself shows something important that many people still do not understand about psychosocial injury: workers often continue desperately trying to return to work long after systems have already begun breaking them down.
I didn’t want conflict.
I wanted recovery.
I wanted lawful injury management.
I wanted communication with my doctor.
I wanted the return to work process that should have existed years earlier.
I wrote plainly that the staff responsible for my safety and wellbeing had “never communicated with my GP to devise a return to work plan”.
I described discovering that key forms and processes had not even been actioned.
I explained that the trauma had become so severe I could no longer safely engage with ordinary workplace communication channels without fear and hypervigilance.
That is what prolonged psychosocial harm looks like in real life.
Not policy documents.
Not corporate wellbeing campaigns.
Not public mission statements about ethics and dignity.
Real psychosocial harm looks like a worker becoming frightened to even open emails or listen to voice messages because institutional processes themselves have become associated with danger.
And yet, even then, I was still trying to cooperate.
Still trying to recover.
Still trying to return to work.
I wrote:
“Please ensure I have a supportive colleague call me and include me in the community I never left.”
That sentence still devastates me because exclusion itself became part of the injury.
After more than twenty years of service to the university community, I found myself pleading not just for lawful entitlements, but for basic human inclusion.
What also stands out to me now about these documents is how far outside formal systems I had already been pushed.
I was not contacting my electorate office because I believed politics would solve my problems.
I was there because every formal mechanism that was supposed to protect workers had already failed.
My issue was SafeWork NSW.
My issue was SIRA NSW.
My issue was injury management failures, psychosocial hazards, withheld entitlements, and the refusal to enforce statutory obligations.
That was the crisis.
And yet, looking back now, some of the interactions with the Kogarah electorate office feel deeply unsettling.
At one point, Cheryl Han from the Kogarah electorate office emailed, asking me to resend the Vice-Chancellor’s details because she could not locate the earlier email.
At the time, I complied immediately.
I was desperate for help.
But with hindsight, I find myself questioning why a distressed constituent needed to repeatedly provide publicly available executive contact details for one of Australia’s major universities, while pleading for intervention regarding serious workplace and regulatory failures.
The Vice-Chancellor’s details were publicly available online.
My concerns had already been clearly documented.
This had nothing to do with political networks or campaign relationships.
I was asking for help because state systems responsible for worker protection had catastrophically failed.
While I was trying to save my job, my health, my housing security, and my family relationships caused by this institutional harm, the interactions around me increasingly felt procedural, detached, and performative rather than protective.
And still, meaningful intervention never came.
The emails also reveal how deeply the harm had already penetrated every aspect of my life.
I wrote openly that I needed my employment restored and adverse action to stop, so I could secure finance for a home loan in the community where I felt safe.
The failures surrounding injury management and statutory compliance were already rippling outward into:
- housing security,
- financial survival,
- psychological wellbeing,
- family relationships,
- and basic human functioning.
Work is not merely income.
For many people, it is identity, dignity, community, stability, and purpose.
That is why the prolonged withholding of lawful processes and entitlements becomes so destructive.
One of the most painful parts of these documents is that, despite everything, I still believed someone would eventually intervene.
I still believed ethics mattered.
Particularly because my unit ultimately sat under the portfolio of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Ethics.
Ethics.
That word mattered deeply to me.
Ethics is not what institutions publish about themselves.
Ethics is what people do when someone becomes vulnerable.
Ethics is whether statutory obligations are followed when there is pressure not to follow them.
Ethics is whether leaders intervene when harm escalates directly in front of them.
By this point, I had deteriorated to the extent that I openly wrote:
“This experience has been more traumatic than my dad’s suicide.”
I never imagined I would publicly revisit those words.
But they form part of the evidence of what prolonged institutional and regulatory failure can do to a human being when psychosocial hazards are ignored, minimised, or allowed to escalate unchecked.
What makes this period even harder to process now is what came later.
Years after these interactions, Cheryl Han’s name appeared in NSW Parliamentary proceedings concerning separate allegations involving electoral funding and alleged straw donor activity connected to the Kogarah electorate office.
Although those are separate matters, for me, seeing those names emerge publicly in parliamentary integrity discussions profoundly changed how I emotionally understood my own earlier interactions with the Kogarah electorate office during one of the worst periods of my life.
I was not approaching that office as a political actor.
I was a constituent in crisis.
I was someone begging for intervention while systems failed around me.
And later, when parliamentary proceedings publicly raised questions about integrity involving some of the same individuals connected to those interactions, the sense of betrayal deepened significantly.
As stated in the NSW Parliament on 6 May 2026:
“Fundamentally, this issue goes to integrity.”
Integrity was exactly what I had been searching for when I walked into that electorate office.
Integrity was what I believed public institutions were supposed to uphold.
Integrity was what I believed workplace systems, regulators, unions, and elected representatives existed to protect.
Instead, what I experienced was abandonment.
Yet still, to date, my remarkably simple request remains.
I want to return to work.
With dignity.
With safety.
With lawful support.
With my entitlements restored.
With the injury management plan finally implemented.
With someone, somewhere inside these systems, finally deciding that a worker’s life matters more than institutional self-protection.
And the institutionalised wage theft continued…
Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 264 and 270
Parliamentary Reference
NSW Legislative Council Hansard, 6 May 2026 — Election Campaign Funding
Questions by The Hon. Mark Latham and responses by The Hon. John Graham, with comments by The Hon. Damien Tudehope concerning allegations connected to the Kogarah electorate office.
Official Hansard record:
NSW Parliament Hansard – Election Campaign Funding (6 May 2026)
Supplementary Question for Written Answer:
NSW Parliament Hansard – Supplementary Question (6 May 2026)
