The Parallel Crisis Continued: Trying to Save My Home While Everything Else Fell Apart - April - May 2022

By May 2022, I wasn’t just fighting a workers’ compensation battle. I was fighting to keep a roof over my head while the statutory support that should have protected my recovery remained withheld.

There is a misconception that workplace injury only affects a person’s health.

What often goes unseen is the chain reaction that follows when income disappears, statutory entitlements are withheld, and regulators fail to enforce compliance. The injury itself is only the beginning. The consequences spread into every part of a person’s life.

By April and May 2022, while I was sending notice after notice to my employer, insurer, regulators and elected representatives, another battle was quietly unfolding in the background.

I was trying to save my home. The timing couldn’t have been worse. 

For almost two years I had been attempting to have a legally binding Injury Management Plan implemented. I had repeatedly requested communication between the insurer, my treating doctors and allied health professionals. I had repeatedly sought the return-to-work support and statutory entitlements that should have been available under the workers compensation system.

Instead, I found myself trapped in endless delays, silence, obstruction and regulatory inaction.

At the same time, I was attempting to complete the purchase of a property and preserve what little financial security I had left.

The documents from April and May 2022 tell the story.

I was speaking with mortgage brokers, accountants, solicitors and real estate agents. I was gathering financial records, tax documents, bank statements and rental information. I was trying to secure financing and finalise settlement arrangements. I was doing everything expected of a responsible person trying to honour their commitments. Yet hanging over everything was the uncertainty created by the unresolved workers compensation claim and the ongoing failure of those responsible to comply with their obligations.

In correspondence with a financial adviser, I explained that the Injury Management Plan needed to be implemented and that my employer was required to comply with workers compensation obligations. I explained that I was temporarily surviving on income protection payments while waiting for the workers compensation system to function as intended.

The situation could have been fixed if the insurer complied with the law, if the employer complied with the law, if regulators enforced the law that included my statutory and human right to recover, return to my work in a safe environment, and my legally owed income was finally provided as we moved forward.

In early May 2022, something happened that gave me a brief moment of hope.

A representative from Walker Law Group advised that if my treating doctor completed a Certificate of Capacity, they intended to require the insurer to implement a return-to-work program and suitable duties obligations. Reading those words, I responded with relief.

“I feel like I can breathe.”

That simple sentence captures how desperate the situation had become.

Not because anything had actually been fixed.

Not because my entitlements had been restored.

Not because my employer had finally acted.

But because, after years of fighting alone, someone had finally acknowledged that obligations existed and that compliance should occur. For a brief moment, I thought help might finally be coming.

Yet while I was chasing legal remedies, another clock was ticking.

The property settlement deadline was approaching.

My property solicitor explained the risks in stark terms. Settlement was due by 27 May 2022. Failure to complete could result in penalty interest, a Notice to Complete, forfeiture of the deposit and potentially further legal action. The consequences were severe.

At the same time, I was being forced to prepare another property for sale.

An investment property in Melbourne was scheduled for auction. Marketing campaigns were organised. Inspection schedules were arranged. Auction fees were paid. Property values were adjusted downward in an attempt to secure a sale. Thousands of dollars were spent simply to keep the process moving.

The stark contrast:

On one side of my life, everyone involved in the property transactions understood urgency.

• Deadlines mattered.
• Settlement dates mattered.
• Financial consequences mattered.
• People communicated.
• People responded.
• People explained risks.
• People acted.

On the other side of my life, within the workers compensation statutory “scheme”, urgency and legal obligations disappeared entirely.

• Years had passed.
• An Injury Management Plan remained unimplemented.
• Weekly payments had never been paid.
• Return-to-work statutory obligations remained non-existent.
• Requests for assistance were met with silence, delays, deflection and greater systemic harm.

The difference was extraordinary.

The property system recognised that delaying action had consequences.

The workers compensation system seemed comfortable allowing those consequences to accumulate indefinitely.

By May 2022, I was effectively trying to perform a financial balancing act while standing on a collapsing platform.

Every day that compliance was delayed increased the risk to my financial security.

Every week that passed without appropriate support increased the pressure.

Every month of regulatory inaction brought me closer to outcomes that should never have occurred.

The struggle to save my home was not separate from the workers compensation story. It was one of its consequences.

When statutory entitlements are withheld, when injury management obligations are ignored, when return-to-work processes are not enforced, and when regulators do not intervene, the damage does not remain confined to a claim file.

It enters people’s homes, their finances, their relationships and every decision they make.

The fight to save my home was not a separate battle.

It was the real-world cost of a system that failed to do what it was supposed to do.

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Document 371-376

The Consequences of Silence - May 2022

10 May 2022

In my story, I’ve written about the kind of trauma that comes from being harmed. But there is another kind that comes from being abandoned.

The second can be harder to understand, because there’s often no single event to point to. No obvious moment where everything changed. Just an accumulation of silences. Unanswered messages. Missing support. People who once spoke freely becoming cautious, distant, or disappearing altogether.

By May 2022, I was no longer simply fighting workers compensation statutory non-compliance by employer and insurer.

I was living inside something that felt like a psychological thriller. I’ve said this before. And that’s what it truly feels like. 

The workplace injury itself had been devastating enough. I had asked for a safe work environment. I had asked for agreed boundaries and for protections that should never have been controversial. Yet somehow, those simple requests had triggered a chain of events that would consume every aspect of my life.

My health deteriorated.

My finances collapsed.

My professional reputation was attacked.

My future became uncertain.

And perhaps most disturbing of all, I found myself increasingly alone.

Looking back through the text messages from that period is heartbreaking.

I can see myself reaching out to colleagues, trying to maintain human connection while everything around me was falling apart. I can see myself explaining what was happening. Trying to make sense of it. Trying to survive it.

At first there were conversations.

Then there were shorter replies.

Then there were long gaps.

Then silence.

I still don’t know what was said behind closed doors.

I don’t know whether people were warned off, intimidated, frightened, instructed, or simply overwhelmed by what they were witnessing.

What I do know is that something happened, because people who had known me for years suddenly became absent at precisely the moment I needed support the most.

That is one of the cruellest aspects of workplace mobbing and social isolation.

The target is left trying to understand what they’ve done wrong when, in reality, they’ve done nothing wrong at all.

What made it even harder was that I was dealing with institutional power.

I was confronting senior leadership and failures within systems that were supposed to protect workers.

I was confronting decisions that had devastating financial consequences.

The result was not merely financial loss.

It was financial annihilation.

Everything I had spent decades building was placed at risk.

Entitlements were withheld.

My home was threatened.

My future became uncertain.

The pressure was relentless.

It felt as though every source of stability in my life was being systematically stripped away.

And yet what traumatises me most, even now, is not the financial damage.

It is what I learned about people.

I had already experienced trauma in my life.

I know what loss looks like.

I know what grief feels like.

I know what it means to survive difficult circumstances.

But nothing prepared me for discovering how many people are capable of witnessing profound harm and simply looking away.

That’s been the hardest lesson.

Not that one person could behave unconscionably.

Not that one institution could fail.

But that so many people could see what was happening and choose silence.

The email I sent to the Sydney Catholic Archdiocese came from that place of despair.

I was writing as a human being who believed serious wrongdoing had occurred and who could no longer understand why nobody with authority seemed willing to intervene.

By then, fear had become a constant companion.

Not ordinary fear.

The kind of fear that develops when every safeguard you believed existed, failed at the same time.

It’s a fear that develops when the systems designed to protect you, instead leave you feeling exposed and isolation becomes “normal”.

My experience of psychological injury taught me something.

Psychological injury isn’t just what happens to a person.

It’s what happens around them.

It’s the silence.

The abandonment.

The exclusion.

The uncertainty.

The sense that reality itself has become distorted.

Years later, I still struggle to comprehend the scale of what occurred.

Not because I cannot understand misconduct, but because I struggle to understand indifference.

The greatest trauma was never discovering that harm could be done.

The greatest trauma was discovering how many people could watch it happen…

… And say nothing.

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Document 321-322.

———

Further Reading: Why Dignity Matters in the Workplace

I have written about psychological injury, organisational misconduct, retaliation, social isolation, financial harm and the devastating consequences that followed after I raised concerns about workplace safety.

At the heart of all of those experiences lies something much more fundamental.

Dignity.

An article published by Emerald Publishing, Why Dignity Matters in the Workplace, explains that healthy workplaces are built on dignity—where people feel recognised, safe, valued and able to raise concerns without fear. It argues that relationships flourish when dignity becomes “the medium of exchange” and that many leaders unintentionally violate dignity simply because they have never been taught to recognise it. (Emerald Publishing)

Reading that article, I found myself reflecting on how profoundly the opposite experience can affect a person’s life.

When a worker loses not only their income, but also their voice…

When they are socially isolated after speaking up…

When colleagues become silent…

When reporting safety concerns leads to fear instead of protection…

When the systems designed to protect workers fail to intervene…

The injury extends far beyond employment.

It becomes an injury to human dignity.

That is why this story has never been just about one workplace or one workers compensation claim.

It’s about what happens when dignity is replaced with fear, silence and exclusion.

If workplaces genuinely want to prevent psychological harm, then psychosocial safety cannot simply be another policy sitting on a shelf. It must be reflected in how people are treated when they raise difficult issues, question unsafe practices or ask for help.

Dignity is not a luxury.

It is one of the foundations of psychologically safe work.

Further reading:

Hicks, D. (2022, 25 January). ‘Why dignity matters in the workplace’. Emerald Publishing. [Online blog]: https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/opinion-and-blog/why-dignity-matters-workplace

Distress and Betrayal - May 2022

9 May 2022

“I’m Not OK”

By 9 May 2022, something inside me was breaking.

Earlier that day, I was in my car outside the Kogarah electorate office after discovering what had happened behind the scenes. The very office I had turned to for help had become part of the silence. The office of my own elected representative.

I had gone there seeking assistance with regulatory failures. I had gone there because SafeWork NSW, SIRA NSW, my employer and the insurer had all failed to act.

I believed my local member would help ensure that the laws the regulators were expected to enforce, were actually enforced by SIRA NSW and SafeWork NSW.

Instead, I found myself confronting a different reality.

I was confronted with a political office that appeared more interested in protecting relationships and institutions than protecting a vulnerable constituent whose life was unravelling because of regulatory failure. 

The betrayal was devastating.

What followed on 9 May 2022 was a series of emails sent in distress to Cheryl Han at the Kogarah electorate office, to ACU governance, to lawyers, and eventually to the Sydney Catholic Archdiocese.

These emails reveal just how frightened and alone I had become.

In one email I wrote simply:

“I’m not ok.”

Those three words carried the weight of everything that had happened over the previous three years.

I was facing the possibility of losing my home. 

(See http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-home-i-was-trying-to-secure-and.html and http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/05/stability-existed-then-was-illegally.html ). 

I had exhausted leave entitlements.

(See http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/09/theft-of-two-decades-of-accrued-leave.html ).

I was still trying to have an Injury Management Plan implemented that had existed for almost two years.

(See http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/06/injury-management-plan-legally-binding.html and http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/09/injury-management-and-rehabilitation.html ).

My employment and statutory entitlements were needed to secure my mortgage arrangements.

I was trying to save what remained of my life.

And I was doing it entirely alone.

That isolation is what stands out most when I read these emails today.

When my father died by suicide years earlier, the grief was overwhelming, but I was not completely alone. My family was around me. Friends were around me. There were people who stepped in to shield us from further harm while we struggled to survive the shock.

This was different.

This time there was no protective circle.

No support network.

No institution stepping forward.

No regulator intervening.

No insurer assisting.

No employer cooperating.

And now, even the office of my elected representative was unwilling to act.

The emails repeatedly return to the same themes: 

fear, isolation, desperation, and a simple plea for someone to do their job.

I was asking for lawful treatment.

I was asking for communication.

I was asking for cooperation.

I was asking for implementation of an Injury Management Plan.

I was asking to recover and return to the job I had held since 2001.

I was asking for the opportunity to save my home.

I was asking for dignity.

None of these should require a worker to feel that they need to ask for permission. They are statutory rights. This should NEVER have happened!

Again and again, I described feeling frightened and alone. Again and again, I spoke about losing my home, losing my livelihood and losing hope.

One passage captures the despair perfectly:

“I’m frightened and alone. I’m paralysed with fear.”

That’s the language of somebody trying desperately to survive.

The emails also reveal something else.

I was still trying to believe that people would eventually do the right thing.

I still believed that if enough information was provided, if enough evidence was supplied, if enough people were informed, someone would step in.

Someone would recognise the harm.

Someone would stop it.

Someone would care.

That hope was fading, but it was not yet gone.

What makes these emails confronting is the contrast between what was happening publicly and what was happening privately.

Attached to one of the emails were social media posts showing public statements about workplace safety.

Statements about protecting workers.

Statements about doing better.

Statements about preventing harm.

At the very same time those messages were being shared publicly, I was sending emails begging for help because the systems supposedly designed to protect workers had completely failed me.

The words sounded compassionate.

My lived experience felt anything but.

Perhaps the most heartbreaking aspect of these documents is how often I referred to dignity.

Not money.

Not revenge.

Not punishment.

Dignity.

The dignity of being treated fairly.

The dignity of recovering in my job.

The dignity of keeping my home.

The dignity of being heard.

The dignity of knowing that my family had not suffered for nothing.

As a daughter of Greek migrants, I repeatedly spoke about Philotimo — the idea that dignity, honour, responsibility and respect extend beyond the individual to the family itself. The humiliation I felt was not mine alone. It affected my mother. It affected my family. It touched wounds that were already deep from the loss of my father.

What strikes me most is not anger.

It is vulnerability.

These emails document a person at the edge of her endurance.

Someone who had spent years trying every official avenue available, complied with process after process, had asked repeatedly for help and received silence in return.

By 9 May 2022, I was no longer writing because I believed another email would solve the problem.

I was writing because I did not know what else to do.

And perhaps that is the most troubling question these documents raise.

How does a worker who reported psychosocial hazards in 2019 end up, nearly three years later, sending emails saying “I’m not ok” to regulators, politicians, church leaders, lawyers and university executives?

How many systems have to fail before a person reaches that point?

Because by 9 May 2022, I wasn’t writing from a position of strength.

I was writing from a place of fear.

And still, nobody stepped in.

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Document 318-319.