“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Author unknown (but it’s been misattributed to Albert Einstein).
5–24 July 2022
By July 2022, I wasn’t just fighting to recover from a workplace psychological injury.
I was fighting to hold onto every part of my life that had once provided stability.
The damage had spread far beyond work.
The conflict and trauma that followed reached places I never imagined it could. Then came another loss that might seem insignificant to someone reading a file.
It wasn’t insignificant to me.
By July 2022, another consequence of everything that had happened was almost impossible to put into words.
I lost my GP.
Not because he retired.
Not because I chose to leave his practice.
After more than 35 years as his patient, his sister, who managed the practice, wrote to advise that he could no longer treat me.
I understood why.
It became another casualty of a crisis that should never have escalated this far.
My GP had known me since I was a child. He knew my medical history. He knew my family. He knew who I was before any of this happened.
There wasn’t even an opportunity for a proper goodbye.
No final consultation.
No sense of closure.
After everything else that had been taken, even losing the doctor who had cared for me for most of my life became another layer of grief.
They had cared for my family for decades. They were caught in something they neither created nor deserved.
But understanding it didn’t make it hurt any less.
I never had the opportunity for one final consultation.
No chance to say goodbye.
No opportunity to thank the doctor who had known me since I was a child, who understood my history long before any workplace injury or workers’ compensation claim ever existed.
When people think about the impact of workplace psychological injury (and a statutory “scheme” that doesn’t actually protect the statutory rights of workers), they don’t think about the ripple effects.
They don’t think about relationships collapsing under the strain.
They don’t think about family conflict.
They don’t think about trusted healthcare providers becoming casualties of a situation that should never have escalated in the first place.
Yet that’s exactly what happened.
On 5 July 2022, I wrote to my now second workers’ compensation solicitor explaining what had happened. I explained that I needed to find a new nominated treating doctor. I described attending an initial consultation with a new GP and trying to establish care all over again, while also arranging appointments with my nominated allied health professional, so I could obtain a Certificate of Capacity and simply restore some income.*
Reading that email now, I don’t hear someone giving a routine update.
I hear someone desperately trying to rebuild the foundations of life one piece at a time.
I wrote:
“I managed to save my home but at huge loss that would never have happened had employer and insurer complied with worker’s compensation and WHS laws.”
And then the sentence that captured everything:
“For now I just need to get a certificate with some capacity to get my income back and the support to recover that I have been denied unlawfully for too long.”
That was all I wanted.
Just the lawful support that should have existed from the very beginning.
*No one had ever explained to me how the systemic “process” worked. Either they assumed I knew, or had withheld that information to disadvantage me.
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Two weeks later, on 19 July 2022, I wrote again to my solicitor.
By then I had begun sending packages of evidence to the Fair Work Ombudsman, documenting events dating back to 2 July 2019. Because repeatedly reliving the trauma was overwhelming, I explained that I could only send the material in stages.
I also asked a question that had been growing louder in my mind:
How does this system actually work?
I asked about the role of a barrister because I simply couldn’t understand why no one seemed prepared to examine the evidence as a whole.
I explained that this wasn’t a standard workers’ compensation dispute.
I wrote that I was experiencing mobbing and ostracism—not self-isolation—and that those distinctions mattered. I questioned where procedural fairness and natural justice existed when the evidence supporting my concerns appeared never to be properly reviewed.
On 22 July 2022, my solicitor replied that a barrister would only be retained if the matter proceeded to litigation before the Personal Injury Commission and that, at that stage, one was not considered necessary.
But that response didn’t answer the question I was really asking.
It wasn’t about whether another lawyer would become involved.
It was about why the system itself seemed incapable of seeing the complete picture.
So I wrote back on 24 July 2022.
I explained what had become painfully obvious to me:
“A big problem is a lack of cohesion between fair work / industrial relations law and worker’s compensation law. It leaves employees open to disadvantage, confusion and even manipulation…”
Those words still resonate today.
By that stage I had already gone through multiple lawyers.
Employment lawyers.
Workers’ compensation lawyers.
Industrial advice.
Yet every professional necessarily looked through the narrow jurisdiction they practised in.
Employment law.
Workers’ compensation law.
Industrial law.
Each piece was examined in isolation.
No one seemed able—or willing—to examine what happened when all of those systems collided.
That fragmentation became its own form of harm.
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In that same email, I identified the central actors responsible for my situation: senior HR staff responsible for safety, the WHS manager, my union, the insurer, and managers within SIRA and SafeWork NSW. I questioned why serious complaints of workplace health and safety hazards appeared to be dismissed or trivialised and asked where the transparency was regarding the procedures that governed these decisions. I ended with perhaps the most important sentence of all:
“I need to understand how the process works.”
That sentence wasn’t written by someone trying to manipulate the system (others abusing their power were doing that).
It was written by someone trying to understand it.
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I don’t believe the biggest problem was that individual organisations failed me.
It was that each institution could point to another.
- The employer pointed to the insurer.
- The insurer pointed to the Commission.
- The Commission dealt only with certain issues.
- SafeWork looked narrowly at workplace safety.
- SIRA looked narrowly at scheme administration.
- Industrial relations operated separately.
- Employment law operated separately.
- Regulators worked within their own legislative boundaries.
Each system saw only one fragment.
No one took responsibility for the whole.
And when nobody sees the whole picture, catastrophic harm can occur while every institution insists it has stayed within its own lane.
That is how people fall through the cracks.
Not because there are no laws, but because the system is so fragmented that accountability disappears between them.
That is why I am writing this.
My story is not unique.
Too many workers enter these systems believing someone will eventually look at all the evidence.
Too many discover that every institution examines only its own small corner.
Meanwhile, lives unravel.
- Families fracture.
- Homes are nearly lost.
- Trusted doctors disappear.
- Careers are damaged.
- Health deteriorates.
And all because someone had the audacity to ask for something every worker is entitled to:
A psychosocially safe workplace.
Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 430 & 436.
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Reference: what psychosocial safety is supposed to look like
I want to finish this post with a Safe Work Australia infographic titled Managing psychosocial hazards at work, because it puts into remarkably simple terms what I had been asking for all along.
Safe Work Australia identifies psychosocial hazards including poor support, poor organisational justice, bullying, harassment, traumatic events, poor organisational change management and conflict or poor workplace relationships. It makes another important point: exposure to psychosocial hazards can cause both psychological and physical injury, and psychosocial risks are to be managed through a risk-management process just as physical workplace risks are.
The second page is perhaps even more significant to my story. It describes four steps: identify, assess, control and review. And underneath that process is something fundamental: consultation with workers. Safe Work Australia says psychosocial hazards can be identified by talking and listening to workers and by reviewing reports and records. Risks should then be assessed, eliminated where possible or otherwise minimised, with controls monitored and reviewed to ensure they remain effective.
That’s what makes this infographic so difficult for me to look at after everything documented in this story.
- I was talking.
- I was reporting.
- I was putting things in writing.
- I was producing records.
- I was asking to be heard.
I was asking for the psychosocial hazards affecting me to be addressed so that I could be safe at work and recover in my job.
Instead, by July 2022, I was writing to yet another solicitor asking:
“Where is the procedural fairness and natural justice in this system?”
And days later:
“I need to understand how the process works.”
Meanwhile, the consequences had escaped the workplace altogether. They had spread into my finances, my home, my health, my family relationships and ultimately even a trusted medical relationship of more than 35 years.
That’s why psychosocial safety cannot be treated as a HR slogan, a policy document or something that matters only until somebody has been injured.
The Safe Work Australia infographic describes prevention and risk management: identify the hazards, assess the risks, control them and review whether those controls are working, with consultation with workers throughout that process.
My story isn’t simply about what can happen when prevention fails and an injured worker is then left to navigate fragmented systems after the damage has been done.
In my case, after I raised concerns about psychosocial safety, the response through the employer’s HR “processes” (who didn’t comply with their own policies and procedures), didn’t protect me from harm but instead subjected me to adverse action. That distinction is fundamental to my story.
And what happened at the beginning doesn’t excuse what happened afterwards.
Once I became injured by HR executives, “on behalf of the university”, there were still responsibilities and statutory processes that were supposed to operate. I continued trying to obtain the support, income, injury management and pathway to recovery that I was entitled to receive. If my employer wouldn’t do the right thing, I expected its workers’ compensation insurer, Catholic Church Insurance, to fulfil its own obligations within the workers’ compensation system. The existence of an injury didn’t erase those obligations, and it didn’t erase me.
This is one of the most important points I want this story to record:
I still assert my statutory right to recover in my job.
Recovery shouldn’t mean that an injured worker is written off, shuffled between jurisdictions or treated as though the injury has somehow diminished their value as a person or employee.
I am a human being.
I was a worker asking to be safe. When I was injured by HR, especially by the national manager of employment relations and SAFETY, I was still a worker entitled to be treated with dignity and to have the systems designed to protect injured workers actually operate.
That included “no contact” measures to be honoured, which they were not. Even when psychological guarding from the above HR individual was recorded on a legal medical document in this scheme, it was not respected by employer, insurer or any of the agencies and law enforcers I reported it to in this “system”. The harassment from the stressor continued.
That’s also why the fragmentation matters so much. Workers’ compensation, work health and safety, employment law and industrial relations may occupy different legal and regulatory jurisdictions, but the human being caught between them doesn’t divide neatly into separate jurisdictions.
There’s only one me.
One life.
One job.
One family.
One home.
One health.
And while different organisations and regulators could look at individual pieces through their own limited lenses, I was living the cumulative consequences of all of them at once.
By July 2022, those consequences had reached even a medical relationship that had existed for more than 35 years.
Yet I was still trying.
Still producing records.
Still asking questions.
Still trying to understand the system.
Still trying to recover.
This should NEVER have been a legal battle.
I asked for a psychosocially safe workplace.
And after everything that followed, I still assert something that should NEVER have needed this much fighting to preserve:
my right to recover in my job.
Safe Work Australia. (2022). ‘Managing psychosocial hazards at work infographic’. [Online]: https://www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/doc/infographic-managing-psychosocial-hazards-work
