I wasn’t simply tired from stress, but exhausted from carrying a crisis almost entirely alone while continuing to send notice after notice to people who had the power to intervene.
This email was sent to Chris Minns and Cheryl Han at the Kogarah electorate office during one of the most difficult periods of my life. It was Greek Easter. I was isolated, overwhelmed, financially terrified, and desperately trying to hold together both my health and my family relationships while trapped in a workers compensation system that had already failed me repeatedly.
And still, I kept writing.
Still, I kept asking for help.
I apologised for the length of my emails because by that stage I had become painfully aware that distress itself can make people uncomfortable. But what choice did I have? I was alone navigating an escalating situation involving workplace harm, regulator failures, financial collapse, and the ongoing refusal to properly implement an Injury Management Plan that already existed.
I wrote honestly about the reality of what was happening around me.
I explained that I was alone that Easter because of family strain and the broader damage this workplace matter had caused. I explained that the hostility, mobbing, and fear of further incivility had reached a point where I could no longer cope with it psychologically.
What stands out to me now is how little I was asking for.
I was asking elected representatives to continue supporting the implementation of an existing Injury Management Plan — a legal obligation within a statutory system that was supposed to exist to protect injured workers.
That was all.
I even explained that a friend had encouraged me to see an accountant and mortgage broker because of fears there would be further delays in my university employer and insurer implementing the plan. Imagine the position that places someone in: trying to negotiate survival strategies while waiting for basic statutory obligations to be honoured.
And still, I remained grateful.
Grateful to a friend who had her own serious health conditions but still found the strength to guide and support me when institutions would not.
Grateful to members of a Catholic parish who I hoped might help me through what had become psychologically unbearable.
Grateful for any human support at all.
Reading this email now, what strikes me most is the contrast between the vulnerability in these messages and the silence that followed so many of them.
These were not vague complaints.
These were direct notices.
Clear warnings.
Repeated requests for intervention.
Repeated explanations that the situation was deteriorating and becoming dangerous to my health, financial security, and family stability.
This series is called Notice After Notice for a reason.
Not because nobody knew.
But because they did know.
And the notices kept coming anyway…
…but they allowed the non-compliance of statutory obligations to continue… they allowed the wage theft to continue too…
Source: contemporaneous record of events -Document 309.
——
I’m Dying
Not in the way people imagine when they hear those words.
Not from a terminal illness.
Not from a single catastrophic event.
But from something much slower.
Something that is happening in plain sight.
Loneliness.
Social isolation.
The gradual erosion of human connection.
Over the years I have written extensively about the workplace injury, the employer and insurer misconduct, the regulatory failures, the financial devastation, and the endless notices that were ignored. But there is another consequence that is harder to quantify and far less visible.
The isolation.
The silence.
The disappearance of people.
When I first raised concerns about psychosocial safety at work, I had colleagues, professional networks, friends, community connections, and the ordinary social interactions that come with twenty years in a workplace.
As the time passed, those connections disappeared.
Some people became frightened.
Some withdrew.
Some simply stopped responding.
Others may have been told things I will never know.
I do not know what conversations occurred behind closed doors. I do not know what narratives were created. I do not know what warnings were given.
What I do know is that the result was isolation.
The same isolation that appears repeatedly throughout these blog posts.
The unanswered messages.
The empty weekends.
The birthdays spent alone.
The holidays spent alone.
The fear of picking up the phone because there is nobody left to call.
The exhaustion of carrying trauma without the protective buffer of community.
Before continuing, I encourage readers to watch the presentation below by psychologist and loneliness researcher Julianne Holt-Lunstad. Her work helped me understand what I was experiencing. Prolonged social isolation has measurable consequences for physical health, psychological wellbeing, and even mortality.
Julianne Holt-Lunstad explains that loneliness is not merely an emotional experience. It is a health issue. A public health issue. One that increases the risk of premature death and affects physical as well as psychological wellbeing. Human beings are wired for connection. When those connections disappear, the consequences are measurable.
Holt-Lunstad found that loneliness is associated with a significantly increased risk of mortality, while strong social connections increase the likelihood of survival by approximately fifty percent. The health effects are so substantial that they have been compared to other major public health risk factors.
For years I have been trying to explain that what has happened to me was never a workplace dispute. I reported psychosocial hazards, a serious WHS issue.
The VC and senior executives of my university community, a university with a commitment to the dignity of the human person in its Identity and Mission, and a focus on community engagement, chose to retaliate with the most reprehensible WHS violations, by engaging in greater psychosocial hazards: deliberate social isolation and mobbing.
But SafeWork NSW allowed this to continue from when I first reported it to the WHS regulator in August 2020. To this day, I’m dying slowly and painfully, a little bit more each day, alone, frightened, vulnerable, waiting for SafeWork NSW and SIRA NSW to intervene and save me from this serious misconduct of employer and insurer. I have no choice but to wait for someone to save me.
I have no choice but to hope and pray that there’s some humanity left in our society to save me from this deliberate torture of social isolation being executed by those currently in governance at ACU along with Catholic Church Insurance. But it I has become urgent.
It is not simply a workers compensation claim.
It is the destruction of social connection.
The removal of community.
The removal of belonging.
The experience of being left alone while fighting battles that no individual should ever have to fight alone.
What frightens me most is that this isolation emerged while I was desperately trying to seek help.
While I was writing notices.
While I was asking regulators to enforce laws.
While I was asking an employer and insurer to comply with statutory obligations.
While I was asking elected representatives to intervene.
While I was asking people to simply acknowledge what was happening.
And the silence grew.
The irony is that the same research offers a simple antidote.
Kindness.
Human connection.
Small acts that remind people they matter.
A phone call.
A message.
An invitation.
A conversation.
A willingness to stand beside someone who is suffering.
Research shows that even small acts of kindness can reduce loneliness and social isolation for both the person receiving support and the person offering it.
Their kindness has carried me further than they will ever know.
But kindness should never have been required to compensate for systemic failure.
No regulator should leave a person isolated.
No employer should leave a worker isolated.
No insurer should leave an injured worker isolated.
No elected representative should leave a constituent isolated.
And yet here I am.
Years later.
Still writing.
Still documenting.
Still hoping that somewhere within these institutions there are people willing to recognise that behind every file, every complaint number, every claim, every investigation, and every notice after notice, there is a human being.
A human being whose survival depends on something as simple, and as essential, as being seen.
By April 2022, I had already sent countless emails pleading for intervention, safety, accountability and support. I had contacted regulators, unions, insurers, SafeWork NSW, SIRA NSW, legal representatives, university executives, and my local electorate office. I kept trying because I genuinely believed that if the right people finally understood the seriousness of what was happening, someone would step in before everything collapsed completely.
Instead, I found myself writing yet another email to the Kogarah electorate office. Again.
This was a worker in crisis trying to survive what had become systemic institutional failure.
In this email, I wrote to my local MP, now Premier, Chris Minns, and his electorate officer, Cheryl Han. I also included a now-retired professor from my university community, someone my family had known and respected for many years. He was genuinely concerned by how distressed I had become. His response was a lifeline of humanity at a time when I felt abandoned by almost every institution I had turned to for help. While others responded with silence, indifference or procedural deflection, he responded with kindness. I remain deeply grateful for that. He embodied the mission and identity the university professes to uphold — one grounded in compassion, dignity and care for others — values that had been painfully absent from my experience for far too long.
I explained that I understood how busy the electorate office was during an election period, but I also explained something else: that people had stopped listening to me long before this point.
When institutions stop listening to someone reporting harm, danger, legal breaches and psychological deterioration, the consequences become catastrophic.
I wrote:
“Not listening is the greatest disrespect to the dignity of the human person.”
That sentence mattered greatly to me, because the university constantly spoke publicly about dignity, ethics, mission and community. Yet behind the scenes, I was experiencing the complete opposite.
By this stage, I was no longer speaking only about psychological harm. I was speaking openly about financial devastation and survival. I explained that if I lost my home because of unlawful conduct and failures within the workers compensation system, I would not survive it.
I also wrote about my family, that they had become collateral damage, being dragged into something they never asked to be part of. (None of us did. What I had asked for was a psychosocially safe work environment). I described the humiliation, privacy violations, intimidation and distress that spread beyond me and into the people I loved most.
One of the deepest wounds was what this institutional abuse did to us. We had already lost my father to suicide years earlier.
Grief had already existed in our family.
This process intensified it.
What I kept trying to explain to people was that this was never just about a compensation dispute. It was about human beings. It was about the consequences of institutional power being exercised without humanity, accountability or safeguards.
I also made something else very clear in this email — something that remains critically important now.
It was never the responsibility of TAL to carry the burden that belonged under the statutory workers compensation scheme.
The responsibility sat with Catholic Church Insurance and the workers compensation system that was supposed to regulate and enforce compliance.
I repeatedly tried to explain this to regulators.
I repeatedly tried to explain that my legally binding Injury Management Plan had not been implemented by insurer and employer.
I repeatedly tried to explain that there had been failures in return-to-work obligations, failures in communication with treating practitioners, failures in support, failures in coordination, and failures in basic compliance obligations.
And yet, instead of enforcement, I experienced silence.
Or worse — procedural deflection.
By this stage, I was openly describing what the environment around me felt like:
“the creepy feeling of incivility, hostility and mobbing”
When every door you knock on is shut, especially the doors of organisations whose role is to protect workers and enforce the law, something happens psychologically to a person.
You stop feeling like a citizen.
You stop feeling protected by the system.
You start feeling disposable.
Perhaps the most heartbreaking section of this email was where I wrote about what I believed was the only thing that could save my life above everything:
“The answer is reinstatement and continuity as though [this] never happened.”
Restoration.
I wanted my life back.
I wanted my career back.
I wanted the safety, dignity and continuity that should never have been taken from me in the first place.
I also acknowledged someone who had treated me professionally and ethically during the early stages of my claim — the initial case manager from Catholic Church Insurance. I wrote that her professionalism likely saved my life before she was removed as my case manager and never replaced.
This story has always been about accountability where accountability was required.
And by 19 April 2022, I was still begging people to intervene before the damage became irreversible.
At the end of the email, I listed the legislation I believed had been violated, including workers compensation legislation, work health and safety legislation, anti-discrimination laws, privacy laws and fraud provisions.
But underneath all the legislation, all the legal terminology, all the policies and all the procedures, the message itself was painfully simple.
Please listen.
Please act.
Please stop this before I lose everything.
And still, the notices continued…
…And so did the institutionalised wage theft…
Source: contemporaneous record of events -Document 308.
