Fair and Dignified Working Conditions: My November 2022 Pleas to the Catholic Church

 “All I asked for was a safe work environment to keep my health and dignity intact.”

On 10, 11 and 21 November 2022, I wrote again to the Catholic Church’s Justice and Peace Office, seeking help to stop the harm I was reporting at ACU.

These emails document the snowball effect I have described throughout this series: workplace harm, adverse action, withheld workers’ compensation payments and benefits, stolen leave entitlements, and a financial crisis that had reached my superannuation.

By 21 November 2022, I was writing about having to forfeit a $30,000 deposit on an investment property intended for my self-managed superannuation fund.

I was asking for intervention before even more of what I had worked for was destroyed.

——

10 November 2022: “Please understand my trauma”

On 10 November 2022, I was frightened and cautious about communications after years of trying to obtain protection. I wrote:

“Please understand my trauma.”

That evening, I was on my way to a general meeting at a Catholic Church parish, where, as I wrote, I felt:

“accepted, included and safe”

Those words described the safety and belonging I had been seeking while reporting harm within a Catholic university that publicly professes respect for human dignity.

What this email records is that I was asking for the seriousness of my concerns to be understood.

I described the shock of people failing to act:

“No one believed how serious or colluded … or just did nothing, which is the biggest trauma and shock of all.”

The distress wasn’t only about the employer conduct. It was also about reporting it repeatedly and still being left without effective protection. 

The distress was caused by the abandonment! 

——

11 November 2022: An insurer could restore church pews—where was my recovery support?

On 11 November 2022, I wrote again and described something I had heard at the parish meeting. According to my email, the parish financial report included $50,000 provided by Catholic Church Insurance (CCI) to restore pews damaged in connection with COVID arrangements.

I acknowledged that this claim had rightly been processed and the damage covered.

But hearing that report was deeply distressing in the context of my own experience with the same insurer.

In the email, I said that workers’ compensation payments had been withheld while I exhausted annual and long service leave to sustain an income. I also reported that:

• The case manager who had obtained an Injury Management Plan was no longer there to support my claim and CCI hadn’t provided a replacement case manager
• My treating health professionals hadn’t been contacted by the employer or insurer.
• Recommendations intended to support recovery and return to work hadn’t been implemented.
• Confidential documents had been shared without my permission.
• Conduct associated with the cause of my injury had continued.

These were serious allegations requiring investigation. I was describing what I considered workers’ compensation fraud and asking for the records to be examined.

My complaint was that payments and benefits under the statutory scheme had been withheld, forcing me to consume accrued entitlements and other resources to survive.

“The financial damage has been horrific. But I’m begging the Catholic Church to stop the abuse.”

I also called for safeguards extending beyond my individual circumstances:

“Compliance measures to protect employees in Catholic Church organisations must happen including audits.”

Fair and dignified working conditions needed to be demonstrated through action.

——

What I asked ACU governance to answer

In the 11 November 2022 email, I described my attempts to bring the misconduct to ACU governance.

I questioned the failure to follow policies and respectful, transparent complaints-handling processes. I also referred to communications with the Deputy Vice-Chancellor responsible for ethics, whose portfolio, I explained, included the library directorate and my work.

My question was direct: how could the conduct I was reporting be reconciled with the university’s identity and mission?

“If this gross negligence and denial of my human rights continues anymore, they will have to explain how this aligns to the identity and mission to the media.”

The emails also described the impact on my family, including letters sent to them “on behalf of the university”, which I experienced as offensive and intimidating.

I wrote about my parents’ sacrifices, the education they had helped make possible, and the values of dignity, responsibility and service with which I had been raised.

The harm reached beyond me. It affected my family and the life we had worked to build.

My request remained to recover in my job:

“It’s a matter of respect, dignity and my human right … to recover in my job.”

And I identified where leadership accountability lay:

“The buck stops with the VC and President. He must be held accountable to act and comply with policies, laws and regulations. Now.”

——

The recovery message attached to my appeal

The 11 November 2022 document also contains a workplace injury information poster identifying CCI as the employer’s workers’ compensation insurer and a university return-to-work contact.

Its instructions included:

“Tell your employer”

“See your doctor”

“Recover at work”

It stated:

“If you are able, stay at work or plan how to return to suitable work as early as possible.”

It also acknowledged that being away from work can affect health, wellbeing, financial circumstances and relationships with family and friends.

Those were precisely the consequences I was reporting.

The recovery message existed on paper. My correspondence asked why the practical cooperation needed to make it meaningful hadn’t followed.

——

21 November 2022: The crisis had reached my superannuation

On 21 November 2022, I sent another email, titled:

“Fair and Dignified Working Conditions | Justice and Peace Office”

Its opening recorded the immediate financial crisis:

“Tomorrow I have to put in writing to the vendor’s solicitor that I can’t proceed with the investment property in my superannuation trust and I forfeit the $30,000 deposit.”

I explained that I had originally held sufficient funds to purchase the property outright. According to my account, I had needed to draw on those resources to preserve the home I lived in.

“I have to tell my conveyancer tomorrow too. She still thinks I’m good to go.”

This email records the anticipated forfeiture and the steps I expected to take. It shows how far the crisis had progressed by that date.

The snowball effect had reached assets intended to support my retirement. The threatened loss included both the deposit and the opportunity to receive rental income into my superannuation fund.

I again asked for accountability:

“Can people with some moral fibre within them please hold governance accountable and make the abuse stop.”

I also asked for my accrued entitlements to be restored and for CCI to comply with workers’ compensation requirements.

“I finally need a break before I finally break.”

——

A plea for action, dignity and recovery

Across these three emails, I was asking for protection, cooperation and a safe path to recover in my job.

I was also asking the Catholic Church to confront the gap between its public commitments to fair and dignified working conditions and the conduct I was reporting within a Catholic university and its specialised insurer.

The correspondence records contact from the recipient. It doesn’t establish what intervention followed. But it does establish what I communicated: serious allegations, escalating financial consequences, profound distress, and repeated requests for help.

By 21 November 2022, those requests had become urgent warnings about the destruction of my retirement plans.

The final plea in that email was simple:

“Please can someone make this abuse stop now.”

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 565-566.

Once We Repaired Things - Part 13: The Call I Couldn’t Answer

It was a Tuesday in March 2019. At about five or five-thirty that afternoon, I was driving home after a day that had brought grief painfully close again.

At 2pm that afternoon, we’d been informed that our colleague Dan had died. We learned that he had taken his life over the weekend.

A young man. A son, a brother, a friend, a colleague. Someone whose absence would reach far beyond the campus where we knew him.

For me, the news also brought back my father.

That’s something people don’t always understand about losing someone to suicide. Hearing of another death can return you to your own loss, even years later. You grieve for the person who has died, for the people who love them, and you find yourself remembering what happened to your own family.

That afternoon, I was carrying all of that home.

Then my phone rang.

It was Paul.

——

What had already happened that day

I have written about this day in Part 5 of my initial bullying, discrimination and harassment complaint.

Staff were gathering in the student centre for support. My manager told me to go there, then later criticised me for not finding a colleague who’d left the library in shock. She and Dan had been good friends and had studied together.

I had looked in rooms along the way. The campus minister was calling her mobile, and two other colleagues were searching further across campus.

Yet I was still criticised.

On a day when we were trying to absorb a colleague’s death, I found myself having to defend what I had done. I was distressed by the news and by the memories it brought back. The manager’s treatment added to that distress when I needed some room to breathe.

I remember wondering what she could possibly have expected from me.

——

Listening to grief, and experiencing it

I had spent time talking with the campus minister about what was happening in my private life and about my experience of losing my father.

I had said much less about what was happening at work. I was frightened that anything I disclosed would get back to my manager and bring more passive-aggressive treatment. That fear kept me quiet for a long time, even while the situation was affecting my health.

After Dan’s death, I remember Ann reflecting on how our conversations had given her some understanding of suicide bereavement before it affected someone she knew.

As I recall, his office was across the hallway from hers, or nearby. His death was suddenly part of her own working world.

There’s a difference between listening compassionately to someone’s experience and feeling that loss enter your own life. Listening matters enormously. But knowing the person, expecting to see them again, and then learning that they’ve died brings an understanding that can’t be acquired through listening alone.

And when the person is your parent, your child, your sibling or your partner, there are further layers.

How did I miss this? How did I not know?

Those questions can remain with a family. They don’t establish that anyone could have foreseen or prevented the death. But they can still be agonising.

Then there are the comments people make.

I’ve already written about the stigma and hurtful attitudes my family encountered in parts of the Greek Orthodox community. I will keep speaking about that. Faith should give bereaved families compassion, dignity and support. Judgement and ignorant commentary add suffering to people who are already trying to live with an unbearable loss.

Families remember those words too.

——

Before the phone rang

By March 2019, the stress in my working and personal life had become too much.

I had been diagnosed with hypertension. I was trying to keep functioning in a workplace where I felt frightened, undermined and worn down. At the same time, I had been trying for quite a while to communicate with Paul.

I needed him to listen. I needed a chance to explain what was happening to me and what his behaviour was doing to me.

Instead, I had experienced calls in which I felt blasted by anger and could barely get a word in. I experienced those calls as aggressive. Afterwards, I was left with everything I had been trying to say still trapped inside me, but with a layer of hurt and shame added that compounded the trauma.

That inability to communicate was crushing.

So when his name appeared on my phone while I was driving home that afternoon, I felt fear.

I can’t tell you what he intended to say in that particular call. I didn’t answer it. But I can tell you why I was afraid: I remembered the calls that had come before it.

I feared another encounter in which he would yell over me and I would have no space to explain anything.

On that day, I couldn’t bear it.

——

The call I couldn’t answer

I was driving. I had just learned that we had lost Dan to suicide. My father’s death was painfully present in my thoughts again. I had also endured my manager’s unfair and harmful criticism. Again.

Seeing Paul’s call brought another surge of distress.

I felt as though my blood pressure had shot up. I was frightened about what that level of stress could do to me, and about whether I could keep concentrating safely on the road if I answered on Bluetooth.

I remember thinking that I could have an accident. I feared a serious medical event. Those were the thoughts going through my mind as I tried to get home.

I didn’t answer.

I think he called twice. I also think he left a voicemail, although I can’t now be certain of those details.

I didn’t listen to a message, and I didn’t retain one.

That means I can’t describe its contents. What I remember clearly is the fear that stopped me from answering and the decision to protect myself from further distress while I was driving.

There was already more than enough happening inside that car.

——

What I wish Paul had understood

Paul, if you read this, I want you to understand the circumstances in which your call reached me.

We had just learned that a young colleague had died by suicide.

I was remembering my father.

I was already suffering under the strain of what was happening at work. I had hypertension. I had been trying to communicate with you, and previous calls had left me afraid of being shouted down again. I had a gut feeling about this call being the same too.

You may not have known what had happened on campus that day. But you did know how you’d spoken to me before.

Someone’s earlier behaviour shapes how their next call is received. An incoming call can bring fear before a single word is spoken.

I wish you’d stopped to consider how much hurt I was already carrying, and how much more I could possibly tolerate.

I needed you to listen and understand.

——

The harm kept compounding

The pressures were accumulating. There was no real space between them in which to recover.

The workplace harm continued. The personal distress continued. Bereavement could be brought back sharply by another loss. My health was already showing the strain.

In the years that followed, the consequences spread further into my finances, my home and my retirement savings. I’m documenting the alleged workers’ compensation fraud involving ACU and CCI elsewhere in this blog, together with the failures of the systems from which I sought protection.

My income and statutory benefits were withheld. The damage compounded while I kept reporting what was happening and asking for help.

I want that conduct independently investigated and those responsible held accountable. The full financial consequences also need to be properly calculated, including the investments and retirement plans disrupted along the way.

But this part of my story concerns something deeply personal.

What happened with Paul hurt me profoundly. I had wanted connection with him. I had kept trying to communicate, even while I was struggling to get through my working days.

On that Tuesday afternoon, his call reached someone who was grieving, frightened and exhausted.

——

Why I’m telling this story

I didn’t set out to spend years documenting harm or challenging powerful institutions. I wanted to do my work, live my life and be treated with respect by the people around me.

I tried to resolve things. I tried to explain. I tried to follow the appropriate processes.

Eventually, I needed to speak publicly because the harm had continued and so much of what I had said had gone unheard.

To understand how I got here has to acknowledge what happened before it.

That includes the afternoon I saw Paul’s name on my phone and felt afraid to answer.

We had lost Dan. I was remembering Dad. I was trying to drive home safely.

I had nothing left for another painful call.

That day, leaving the phone unanswered was how I got myself home.

To be continued…

What I Told ACU Governance About My $30,000 Deposit—and the Losses That Followed - November 2022

The $30,000 Deposit Was a Warning. The Financial Damage Didn’t Stop.

On 21 November 2022, I wrote to the solicitor handling a property purchase I had planned to make outright through my self-managed superannuation fund. I explained that I could no longer proceed and would have to forfeit the $30,000 deposit.

I wrote:

“I was initially set up to purchase this property outright in my SMSF. I need to ensure it’s noted for the financial loss now and rental income it would’ve generated for my superannuation fund and retirement.”

The email shows governance@acu.edu.au in its Bcc field. I included ACU’s general governance address so the university would be informed of the financial damage as it was happening. This was a warning in November 2022, not an explanation I put together years later.

The $30,000 was only the deposit. I also lost the opportunity to own the property outright through my superannuation fund, receive its rental income and benefit from any future capital growth. Those potential losses require proper assessment, but they cannot be dismissed simply because they’re harder to put into a single figure.

This was part of a snowball effect, and it didn’t stop in November 2022. I’m still not receiving the weekly workers’ compensation payments owed to me. ACU and Catholic Church Insurance have still not cooperated to provide suitable duties and a safe path back to work at my HEW 8 level under the injury management arrangements. I haven’t resigned. I want to recover and return to my work in a safe environment.

Without that income or a safe path back to my duties, the financial pressure has continued to compound. It’s reached my superannuation and the ATO consequences I now face. I shouldn’t be left to bear the burden of institutional failures and then face further consequences for the steps I took to survive them.

The system failed me, and now the system is threatening to punish me for its own failures. To me, the continuing deprivation of income, the loss of financial security and the pressure created by institutional inaction amount to financial abuse and coercive control on a systemic scale. These are serious concerns involving a publicly funded university employer and its specialised insurer. They demand examination of the evidence, not another attempt to pass responsibility elsewhere.

ACU governance didn’t intervene to stop the damage after I brought it to their attention. The record now calls for answers: 

who received the email through the governance address, what did they do with my warning, and why were the financial and work consequences allowed to continue?

I’m calling for a thoroughly external and independent investigation. It must be independent of ACU’s Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, the lawyers involved, and anyone whose conduct or decisions may need to be examined. It must follow the evidence across ACU, Catholic Church Insurance and the regulatory responses. It must address not only the original conduct I reported, but what happened after the institutions involved were warned about the continuing harm.

The forfeited deposit is one documented point in a much longer chain of harm. 

By October 2026, the question was no longer just why I lost that investment. It was why the institutions I warned had still not brought the continuing damage to an end. That question remains unanswered.

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Document 563.

——

Update — 12 October 2026

The ATO has now provided some relief. That gives me breathing space, but it doesn’t repair the financial damage or resolve the circumstances that brought me here. I still owe the ATO and face the challenge of arranging repayments while I’m still not receiving the weekly workers’ compensation payments legally owed to me under a statutory scheme. 

What’s the point of a statutory scheme if it doesn’t provide the safety net and protection by having an effective regulator who genuinely stops employers, insurers and their lawyers from engaging in unethical conduct, finding ways to manipulate the system and undermine a STATUTORY SCHEME! 

How am I meant to repay that debt, meet my living expenses and afford medical care while the income and safe return-to-work arrangements I have repeatedly sought, remain unresolved? I have exhausted every regulatory and legal avenue available in good faith and documented all the failures and loopholes that allow this harm to happen! 

I need a sustainable way forward, not temporary relief followed by the same financial pressure that drove me to use my superannuation to protect my home and meet basic living costs.

My concerns extend particularly to CCI’s conduct. Its own commissioned factual investigation recorded my request for protective no-contact measures in Incident 24. It issued the Injury Management Plan on 25 June 2020, yet I was left without a replacement case manager to coordinate its implementation after the original case manager departed. In my view, these failures require scrutiny in their own right, not treatment as merely an issue between me and my employer.

I allege workers’ compensation fraud and suspect collusion between ACU and CCI. Those allegations require a genuinely independent investigation, not assumptions in either direction. My records document governance awareness at both institutions. I’ve also provided APRA with evidence of the financial harm and the need for restoration.

The ATO’s relief doesn’t remove the need to establish how this happened, why regulatory intervention failed to stop it, and what must now be done to restore my financial security and support recovery in my job. 

One person shouldn’t have to carry the responsibility for making an entire statutory system operate as intended.

I asked for help to return safely to my work. Why was I still pleading in November 2022?

On 15 November 2022, I sent another account to both SIRA NSW and SafeWork NSW, of what had happened after I reported workplace psychosocial hazards and made a workers’ compensation claim. I also asked for something I had sought throughout: action that would allow me to recover and return safely to my work and my university community.

The document brought together correspondence from 2020 and 2021. Reading the dates in sequence raises questions about how my claim was handled, what happened to the insurer’s injury management plan, and why my repeated requests for help had still not produced a safe path back to work.

——

A plan issued, but where was the support?

Catholic Church Insurance (CCI) issued an Injury Management Plan on 25 June 2020. Its goal was a return to my pre-injury duties. I wanted to work with my treating professionals, a case manager, a return-to-work coordinator and rehabilitation support to make that possible. In my November 2022 account, I said the plan had never been implemented.

The claim form itself became another source of distress. I had reported my injury and submitted my first certificate of capacity in May 2020. Yet, as my 2 October 2020 email to CCI records, I had only learned about the claim form through WIRO on 1 October 2020. I sent the form to CCI the next day.

By then, I told the insurer, I had used my personal, annual and long service leave, was facing financial distress, and remained exposed to the employer conduct I had reported. I wrote:

“I request clear communication, updates and transparency with the next steps in the process from this moment on.”

CCI confirmed on 6 October 2020 that it had received my claim form. This claim form, and knowledge about its existence, had been withheld from me since the start of the claim in late May 2020. I continued to seek information about its requests to my doctor, the medical evidence it held and when it would make a decision. My 21 October 2020 response challenged several statements relayed by CCI, including whether it had requested clinical notes. CCI declined the claim on 22 October 2020, according to the chronology I compiled.

These exchanges deserve careful examination. A worker trying to recover should be able to find out what the insurer needs, what action it has taken and who is coordinating the return-to-work process.

——

The questions I kept asking

On 13 January 2021, I complained to WIRO about CCI’s handling of my claim. I said the insurer’s failure to communicate and cooperate had left me exposed to further distress while I was trying to return safely to work. After CCI responded, I asked why I hadn’t been assigned a case manager to carry forward the June 2020 plan.

I put that question directly to CCI through IRO on 18 October 2021:

“Why did CCI not assign a case manager to me from July 2020, to communicate with my GP and psychologist, and implement the injury management plan as agreed on 25 June 2020?”

I also asked why the psychologist’s return-to-work recommendations hadn’t led to action, why I had learned about the claim form months after reporting my injury, and how information from a factual investigation prepared for the insurer came to be proposed for use in an employer investigation. I had serious concerns about the handling of private information concerning me and my family.

Those were requests for specific explanations. I wanted the records checked and answers given in writing.

——

The cost of being passed between systems

My November 2022 account describes attempts to obtain help from the insurer, IRO, SIRA, SafeWork NSW and others. I reported the conduct I experienced as harassment and adverse action, and I asked for it to stop. I remained concerned that responsibility for my safety and recovery was being passed around while the harm continued.

In correspondence from August 2021, I wrote to CCI about what workers’ compensation was meant to achieve: helping an injured worker recover safely at work. I asked the insurer to act on its injury management plan, address my lost leave and help me return to my substantive role. By October 2021, my request through IRO was painfully simple:

“Give us the start of good news, transparency and positive action.”

On 15 November 2022, I was still asking for my entitlements, my workplace support network and a safe return to the work I had done for two decades. I described being frightened, financially strained and distressed by the continuing “process”. And I still didn’t receive answers to my questions about CCI’s obligations or restore the workplace support I sought and needed for my recovery.

I have raised allegations of serious misconduct and possible fraud. Those allegations require an independent examination of the evidence and fair responses from the organisations concerned. They should neither be accepted nor dismissed without that work being done.

The question remains: 

What happened to the 25 June 2020 Injury Management Plan, and why did I have to keep pleading for clear communication, protection and a safe way to recover in my work?

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Document 562.