The Week Everything Depended on Compliance - May 2022

The final week of May 2022. 

Late May 2022 became a race to save my home before time ran out.

I was spending my days trying to save my home, convince a workers’ compensation system to follow its own laws, and somehow keep believing that if I knocked on one more door, someone would finally help. 

Every phone call, every email, every meeting with lawyers, banks and health professionals revolved around one simple reality: if the workers’ compensation scheme simply complied with its own legislation, everything else could finally begin to recover.

Instead, I found myself trying to hold together a collapsing house of cards that never should have been collapsing in the first place.

⸻

By this stage I had reopened my workers’ compensation case with Walker Law Group.

I wasn’t asking them to create a miracle.

I was asking them to enforce laws that already existed.

• The insurer had never properly provided my weekly payments.
• The Injury Management Plan had never been implemented.
• There had been no replacement case manager after the initial (and ethical) case manager left.
• No rehabilitation liaison.
• No communication with my nominated treating doctor.

Instead, there had been repeated Independent Medical Examinations while the professionals actually responsible for my recovery remained excluded.  

Everything that was supposed to happen under workers’ compensation had been replaced with delay.

⸻

At exactly the same time, another clock was ticking.

Settlement on the home I was trying so desperately to purchase.

The bank wasn’t the problem.

The mortgage wasn’t the problem.

The vendor wasn’t the problem.

The problem was that my income had been withheld for almost two years.

If the insurer complied with their obligations, the bank could process everything almost immediately.

I explained to my workers’ compensation solicitor:

“Approval can happen in one day based on CCI complying with workers compensation regulations this time…”  

One day.

That was all it would have taken.

⸻

Instead, every delay created another consequence.

Settlement extensions.

Vendor pressure.

Penalty interest.

Humiliation.

The possibility of losing the deposit.

Months earlier I had believed my secure employment after twenty years would always protect me.

Now I was apologising to complete strangers because my own employer and insurer would not honour their legal obligations.

I even asked my conveyancing solicitor to apologise to the vendor on my behalf because I knew how patient she had been.

No one should ever have to apologise for circumstances created by systemic failure.

⸻

The irony never left me.

Throughout this entire period, I wasn’t trying to leave work.

I was trying to get back to it.

Again and again I wrote almost identical words.

• I wanted my worker’s compensation entitlements.
• I wanted my return to work.
• I wanted my colleagues to support my recovery.

Not endless investigations.

Not endless IMEs.

Not endless legal arguments.

Simply the rehabilitation pathway the legislation already required.

⸻

One email listed everything that had never happened.

• No weekly payments.
• No replacement case manager.
• No rehabilitation specialist.
• No communication with my nominated treating doctor.
• No consent process for communication with treating practitioners.
• No meaningful participation in my own recovery.

Reading that list today still shocks me.

Seeing it written together makes it impossible to ignore how many safeguards simply disappeared. 

It also shocks me that so many agencies in the system just ignored this list completely. SafeWork NSW; SIRA NSW; IRO funded workers’ compensation solicitors and the Personal Injury Commission. It always became someone else’s responsibility to enforce statutory compliance in this abusive and fragmented system. 

⸻

I also asked my treating psychologist for a copy of the report CCI had requested in 2020.

I remembered its recommendations.

One recommendation stood out.

A rehabilitation liaison to coordinate my return to work.

Exactly the sort of practical intervention that could have reduced conflict, supported communication and helped everyone work towards recovery.

Instead, those recommendations disappeared into the system (or rather, ignored by both employer and insurer). 

⸻

During that same week another thread from 2020 resurfaced.

I requested a copy of the Local Court’s decision not to list my Apprehended Personal Violence Order application against the national manager of employment and SAFETY, Rena Christmann. This individual was stalking, badgering, harassing and intimidating me “on behalf of the university”, and inciting mobbing, ostracism and victimisation, while also withholding workers’ compensation benefits and information to deny me my statutory right to recover in my job. 

I had followed every piece of advice I had been given.

Fair Work Ombudsman had directed me to the police.

Police had suggested an APVO because it involved workplace conduct.

Law Access had suggested the same.

 

Advice received before lodging the APVO application (September 2020): after speaking with NSW Police and Law Access NSW, I was advised to apply for an Apprehended Personal Violence Order because the harassment was continuing while I was on workers’ compensation.

Yet even that avenue had gone nowhere. The court registrar fobbed me off to the Fair Work Ombudsman, who were the ones who started this distressing circular harm, with no outcome of intervention, protection and safety. 

When I received the court’s response, I couldn’t help noticing they hadn’t even spelled the respondent’s name correctly.

After everything that had happened, even that small detail felt symbolic.

 

The Local Court’s response (22 September 2020): the application was declined because it involved a “work colleague”, with advice to pursue workplace avenues instead.

This was one of the most bewildering experiences of the entire ordeal. I followed the advice I had been given. Police directed me one way. Law Access supported that advice. The Local Court then declined the application because it was considered a workplace matter and referred me back to workplace processes. By that stage I had already reported the matter through my employer, the workers’ compensation system and SafeWork NSW. Each system pointed towards another, while the conduct I was reporting continued.

It reinforced a feeling I had lived with for years.

That I was trying desperately to protect myself while everyone else treated the situation as administrative paperwork.  

⸻

I also found myself turning to elected representatives.

I had reached the end of every formal pathway I knew.

I wrote to my federal MP, Linda Burney.

I had already spent months trying to engage my state representative, Chris Minns. See http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-day-i-almost-didnt-come-back.html for the almost tragic outcome from that engagement. 

By then I was exhausted.

I wrote words that are difficult to read.

“I fought so hard to save my livelihood, my surviving family, my home and my life.”  

I wasn’t writing political correspondence anymore.

I was writing survival letters.

⸻

Throughout those emails one sentence appears over and over again.

“I just want my return to work entitlements.”

Not compensation.

Not revenge.

Not publicity.

Return to work.

Recovery.

Safety.

Dignity.

Those remained remarkably consistent despite everything that was happening around me.

⸻

Then another fear emerged.

I believed information about reopening my workers’ compensation claim had again reached the very manager I had repeatedly asked to be protected from (see above).

Whether that perception ultimately proved correct or not, what mattered was what it reveals about my psychological state after years of conflict.

I no longer trusted the system that was supposed to protect me.

Every unexpected development felt like another threat.

That is what prolonged workplace trauma does.

It teaches you to expect danger even where safety should exist.

I pleaded once more:

“Please get her away from me and get my worker’s compensation benefits… to recover safely in my job as per injury management plan.”  

⸻

I can see that this wasn’t really a story about buying a unit.

The unit became something much bigger.

It represented stability.

Safety.

Somewhere permanent after years of instability.

Owning that home meant finally being able to stop fighting simply to survive financially and begin focusing on recovering psychologically.

Instead, every delay inside the workers’ compensation system pushed that possibility further away.

That is what these documents capture so clearly.

Not a person refusing to engage with rehabilitation.

A person repeatedly asking for rehabilitation while desperately trying to stop every other part of her life from collapsing around it.

And the wage theft continues to this day…

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 337-338, 342-344

⸻

Significant Development

Only a few months after these events, the NSW Government introduced the Work Health and Safety Amendment Regulation 2022, which expressly recognised and regulated psychosocial hazards in the workplace. 

Work Health and Safety Amendment Regulation 2022 under the Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (NSW) for Psychosocial Hazards - https://legislation.nsw.gov.au/view/pdf/asmade/sl-2022-551 

This represents an important acknowledgment by the NSW Government that psychosocial hazards require proactive management and that workplace psychological health deserves the same systematic attention as physical safety.

The amendments defined a psychosocial hazard as one arising from the design or management of work, the work environment, workplace interactions or behaviours, and acknowledged that these hazards can cause psychological harm. Importantly, they imposed a positive duty on employers to identify, eliminate or minimise psychosocial risks so far as is reasonably practicable, rather than waiting until workers became psychologically injured.

The Regulation also requires employers to consider factors such as:

• the duration, frequency and severity of exposure to psychosocial hazards;
• how multiple hazards interact or combine;
• the way work is designed, managed and supported;
• workplace interactions and behaviours; and
• the information, training, instruction and supervision provided to workers. 

Once We Repaired Things – Part 9 - The Midnight Call

There are those moments in life that divide everything into before and after.

For me, one of those moments came just after midnight.

People often assume relationships end because of one argument. This wasn’t about one argument. It was about what happened when I tried to explain why I was hurting—and discovered there was no room for my voice.

By then, I had already spent months believing I had finally found someone authentic. Not another so-so.

After years of deeply confronting experiences trying to find a life partner, I wasn’t playing games.

I had just turned forty, and I knew exactly what I wanted.

I wanted honesty.

Loyalty.

Kindness.

Someone whose values reflected my own.

Someone with whom I could build a peaceful future.

Meeting people had become increasingly difficult. Too many experiences had left me questioning whether genuine kindness, integrity and emotional maturity still existed. Dating often felt confronting and, at times, unsafe. I had already written about one of those experiences in an earlier post.

Then I met Paul.

For the first time in a very long time, I genuinely believed I had met someone different.

For the first time in a very long time, I allowed myself to believe that perhaps I had finally found what I had been hoping for all those years.

For me, this attempt was my last hope.

But as I wrote in Part 4 – The Text That Changed Everything, one message sealed my fate. (http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/04/once-we-repaired-things-text-that.html). 

I didn’t expect certainty.

I didn’t expect life to be uncomplicated.

I expected honesty.

I expected that if something difficult arose, we would sit down together, talk openly, listen to one another and work through it with mutual respect.

Instead, everything became uncertain.

After Easter, Paul called and suggested we catch up for a coffee.

We had a genuinely pleasant conversation.

I told him about my upcoming trip to Italy in June.

He told me about his plans to travel later that year.

For the first time since receiving that text, I felt hopeful again.

I truly believed we would finally sit down together and have a conversation.

I needed that conversation. I needed to speak.

Then the communication began to fade.

Days passed.

Messages went unanswered.

I didn’t know what had happened.

Given everything I had already experienced in my life, I became genuinely worried that something had happened to him.

That fear wasn’t irrational to me.

Losing my father to suicide had changed the way I experienced silence.

I knew how suddenly lives could change.

I knew what it meant to lose someone without warning.

I was thinking, Is he alright?

I needed to speak with him. 

I needed to have the kind of conversation where two people listen.

Where each person has the opportunity to explain what they’re feeling.

Where questions are answered with honesty instead of assumptions.

That conversation never happened. This happened instead - http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/06/once-we-repaired-things-part-8-honey.html

Now with a new level of trauma and eggshell walking, I kept repeating, “Let me speak.”

Instead, my phone rang just after midnight.

That phone call was never about trying to understand each other.

Before I had even finished my first few sentences, it became painfully clear that there would be little room for what I was trying to say.

By the time the call ended, I had lost my voice.

Everything I had been carrying—my fears, my history, my grief, the reasons I needed to be heard—was left exactly where it had been when the phone first rang.

Only now I was carrying something else as well.

The shock of realising that the conversation I had waited for was not going to happen.

By the time the phone rang, I was already frightened.

I’d already been humiliated and degraded. 

I already felt as though I was disposable.

I had spent days trying to find the right words.

I was already walking on eggshells, because I was afraid that if I said one wrong thing, the opportunity for an honest conversation would disappear altogether.

The first words I heard were,

“What’s going on!?”

It wasn’t the question that frightened me.

It was the tone.

Before I had spoken more than a few words, I knew this wasn’t going to be the respectful conversation I needed.

I kept trying to explain.

I kept trying to ask questions.

I pleaded,

“Let me speak.”

But every attempt was abruptly cut off before I could finish. I felt intimidated, unsafe. I was already traumatised and demeaned. How was I supposed to speak under more hostile conditions? 

During that midnight call, Paul told me he didn’t know what he wanted (then he should have spared me my last hope because I knew exactly what I wanted). 

He told me his ex had liked something about him (I was competing with ego). 

He said he regretted not speaking with me, but that he still would have done what he did because he had a history with his ex;

(although I chose not to relive and write example after example of my history with men and dating, I did write about one, just before I met Paul - http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/12/men-dating-point-where-tolerance-ends.html). 

Those words hit me one after another.

Like emotional stones.

Each one landed before I had the chance to respond to the one before it.

I remember sitting there trying to understand why that mattered so much when everything I had valued in him suddenly seemed invisible.

The man I believed I had come to know—the man I believed was kind, authentic, gentle and emotionally honest—felt as though he had disappeared.

In his place was someone I no longer recognised.

Perhaps that was one reason the experience affected me so deeply.

Growing up, I had already witnessed what outside interference could do to families.

I had seen how quickly trust could unravel.

How relationships could change.

How people could become strangers to one another.

Whether that was what was happening here or not, my nervous system recognised the feeling immediately.

It felt frighteningly familiar.

I remember him saying that I went “nana” (I don’t know which of these two incidents Paul was referring to - 

1. http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/04/once-we-repaired-things-text-that.html or
2. http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/06/once-we-repaired-things-part-8-honey.html - 

but what about http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/02/once-we-repaired-things-part-2.html). 

At one point I asked why he thought I had become so upset.

“I don’t know… maybe you were jealous!”

I remember gasping.

That single word erased everything I had been trying so desperately to explain.

Growing up, I’d already witnessed the damage jealousy could do to families and relationships.

I’d spent much of my life trying to be the opposite of that.

To trust.

To care.

To communicate honestly.

Yet in one sentence I became a stereotype before I had even been heard.

Later, I tried to explain why I’d reached out.

I told him I had been genuinely worried about him. I had feared something had happened.

His response stopped me cold.

“I don’t know why you cared! We weren’t dating!” (He was yelling every answer at me). 

Those words landed like a physical blow.

They came after weeks of believing we would meet for coffee.

After a warm conversation about Italy.

After believing we were still going to sit down together and talk.

I needed to speak! We were dating before that text message! It was my life too! And for me, it was my last hope! And it’s NOT who I am! But I have to live with it for the rest of my life! 

I wasn’t embarrassed because I cared.

I was heartbroken that caring itself seemed to require justification.

I had shown compassion regarding the loss of his father to dementia.

I understood what it meant to lose a parent, even though my own experience had been very different.

Yet when I explained why I had become so frightened, there seemed to be no curiosity about what experiences had shaped that fear.

No attempt to understand.

No opportunity for me to explain.

I wasn’t trying to control him. I wasn’t demanding anything from him.

I was frightened.

I was relieved to know he was alive.

I simply wanted the conversation we had never been allowed to have.

Instead, I found myself trying to justify why I cared at all.

The conversation became louder.

More hostile.

At one point the phone connection broke up.

“I can’t hear you,” I said quietly. 

“I’m talking as loud as I can!!!”

That wasn’t what I meant.

I wasn’t criticising him.

I simply couldn’t hear him.

Even that became another reason for the conversation to escalate.

Paul wasn’t talking. He was yelling at me.  

I became more distressed because I couldn’t get a sentence out.

Every time I tried to explain what was happening inside me, I was interrupted and shut down.

Every attempt to slow the conversation down only seemed to move it further away from understanding.

Then came the words that still haunt me and echo inside me.

“Move on!!!”

Move on?

Move on to what?

Move on from what I believed was my last opportunity to build the life I had always hoped for?

Move on to accepting that perhaps I would never know what it felt like to have someone truly beside me?

Move on to watching other people build families, memories and ordinary happiness while quietly grieving the life I had hoped might still be possible?

What did Paul expect me to “move on” to, again?

(Let’s look at the modern dating experience for women - https://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/02/my-personal-story-part-2-there-is-no.html?m=1 )

Before I could answer, he ended the conversation.

“Leave me alone!”

The line went dead.

We hadn’t reached any understanding. We hadn’t resolved anything.

The conversation ended because I was no longer allowed to speak.

I sat there in silence, shaking, gasping for air. 

I have never forgotten that feeling.

It isn’t simply that I struggled to get a word in.

It’s that I stopped feeling recognised as the person Paul was getting to know.

I lost my voice because I couldn’t finish a sentence.

But I also felt as though I lost my identity.

The woman who valued honesty, loyalty, compassion and genuine communication disappeared behind assumptions that never reflected who I am.

Once someone has reduced you to a stereotype, it becomes almost impossible to have a real conversation, because they’re no longer responding to you. They’re responding to the person they’ve already decided you are. 

(Eg. https://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/10/interlude-mrs-harris-goes-to-paris.html?m=1 ).

The next morning, I somehow had to get dressed and go to work.

I sat around boardroom tables trying to contribute to meetings while fragments of that midnight phone call replayed over and over in my mind.

“Maybe you were jealous!”

“I don’t know why you cared!”

“Move on!”

“Leave me alone!”

“My ex liked something about me…I regret not speaking with you but I still would’ve done it because I had a history with my ex!” 

(But we did have an opportunity to speak…after we’d both calmed down and thought rationally. What happened instead was this : https://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/06/once-we-repaired-things-part-8-honey.html?m=1).

That midnight call has given me nightmares all these years. 

Again.

And again.

And again.

Going back to immediately after that midnight call, I fought back tears while trying to appear composed at work.

Everyone needed something from me professionally.

I kept giving.

To work.

To other people.

To the relationship I believed I was building.

But nothing seemed to come back to fill me up.

What frightened me wasn’t simply the possibility of losing someone I genuinely really cared about and mutually had strong feelings for. 

It was the confronting realisation that this was my future.

That this had been my last hope and it was thrown into the garbage after Paul decided who I was, without actually knowing, and truly getting to know, who I was. 

Who I am. 

That after everything I had already survived, I’ll never experience the quiet joy of sharing an ordinary life with someone who genuinely walked beside me.

Not someone who controlled me.

Not someone who dismissed me.

Not someone who overrode my voice.

Someone who listened.

Someone who respected me.

Someone who chose to work through life’s difficult conversations together.

I was grieving the possibility that I might never experience that kind of partnership.

This grief has never left me.

This grief is too much. 

That midnight call was the first time I realised how profoundly frightening it is when someone you’ve trusted has already decided there is no need to hear the rest of what you have to say.

Years later, when I found myself pleading to be heard in entirely different circumstances, that same feeling would return.

Different people.

Different circumstances.

The same desperate plea.

“Please…

…let me speak.”

All the while, I had been repeating those very same words to Paul…

To be continued…

Links to:

Other parts of my personal story. The real person behind Paul’s stereotype. 

http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/01/my-personal-story-part-1.html

As for my own history, there are plenty of posts on this blog.