SIRA NSW - Associate Director of “Customer Service” and Operations - Referred Elsewhere - April 2022

By 29 April 2022, I was running out of options.

For months I had been raising concerns about insurer misconduct, employer failures, the collapse of my recovery at work, and the complete absence of meaningful regulatory intervention. My financial situation was deteriorating rapidly. My health was deteriorating. My future was becoming increasingly uncertain.

What I received in return was another letter.

Another referral.

Another closed door.

 

In response to correspondence sent to the Minister for Customer Service, I received a response from SIRA’s Associate Director of “Customer Service” and “Operations”, advising that my concerns had already been addressed and directing me instead to contact the NSW Ombudsman. 

There was no acknowledgement of the seriousness of the issues being raised. No indication that anyone intended to investigate the underlying failures. No recognition of the escalating harm that was occurring while agencies passed responsibility from one desk to another.

This is how gatekeeping works in practice.

Not through overt refusals.

Not through a regulator explicitly stating that they will not act.

Instead, concerns are redirected. Complaints are recategorised. Correspondence is “treated” as already answered (when no substantive answer has been provided). People are sent elsewhere. The process becomes the outcome.

The result is that serious matters never reach the level of scrutiny they require.

What struck me most was not simply the referral itself.

It was the complete absence of humanity behind it.

By this point I was not a routine complainant seeking clarification about a process. I was a psychologically injured worker raising concerns about insurer conduct, employer conduct, and regulatory failures that were causing significant and escalating harm. 

I had repeatedly explained that I was in distress. I was isolated. I was frightened. My financial situation was deteriorating. My health was deteriorating. I had lost faith in the very institutions that were supposed to protect workers when things go wrong.

Yet the response was simply to send me somewhere else.

Back to another agency.

Back to another form.

Back to another process.

Back to another person who knew nothing about the history, nothing about the workplace, nothing about the university sector, and nothing about the increasingly apparent cultural and governance problems that exist within large institutions when power is left unchecked.

I was trying to navigate a situation involving a large employer, a specialised insurer, multiple legal representatives, and regulators unwilling to address serious failures of statutory compliance. 

The very purpose of risk management, governance, and regulation is supposed to be ensuring compliance with legal obligations and protecting people from harm.

Instead, I found myself trapped inside a system where responsibility seemed endlessly transferred but never exercised.

What makes this particularly troubling is that the complaint itself concerned failures by those very institutions. I was not seeking assistance with an unrelated matter. I was raising concerns about failures of injury management, failures of recovery at work, failures to comply with statutory obligations, and the significant harm being caused by those failures.

When a person has lost trust in a regulator because of their experience with that regulator, sending them elsewhere is not a solution. It is procedural deflection.

And when that person is vulnerable, isolated, frightened, and already experiencing significant psychological distress, the deflection itself becomes another source of harm.

The assumption behind these responses appears to be that people can simply continue navigating increasingly complex complaint pathways indefinitely. That they can keep retelling traumatic experiences to new agencies, new officers, and new decision-makers without consequence.

But every referral carries a cost.

Every referral requires the person to revisit events that may already be causing them significant distress.

Every referral communicates that nobody is prepared to take responsibility.

Every referral reinforces the message that protecting processes has become more important than addressing harm.

What I was experiencing was not customer service.

It was procedural abandonment.

 

A person facing powerful institutions should not have to fight every institution alone while those same institutions repeatedly direct them elsewhere.

That is not accountability.

That is a system exhausting the person until they give up and possibly die.

By April 2022, the financial consequences were already becoming severe. My ability to maintain financial stability was increasingly under threat. The regulatory failures were no longer abstract administrative concerns. They were having real-world consequences.

What nobody appeared willing to acknowledge was that regulatory inaction is not a neutral act.

When regulators fail to intervene in circumstances where intervention is required, harm continues.

Financial losses accumulate.

Health deteriorates.

Trust collapses.

People are left exposed to the consequences of conduct that should have been addressed.

The letter itself was brief.

The consequences were not.

Years later, the financial records tell their own story. The losses became measurable. The health impacts became measurable. The consequences of allowing complaints to be endlessly redirected instead of properly investigated became measurable.

What was presented as a customer service process was, in reality, a system that prevented serious matters from being escalated to where they needed to go.

The greatest danger of poor complaints handling is not that complaints are rejected.

It is that people are slowly worn down by a process that appears designed to move responsibility rather than exercise it.

What stands out is not merely regulatory failure.

It is the extraordinary lack of humanity shown towards a person who was asking for help while being crushed by the consequences of that failure.

The referrals kept coming.

The harm kept growing.

And accountability remained somewhere else.

——

Final Reflection

What I find remarkable looking back on this letter is the date.

29 April 2022.

The very same day this response was being written, my local member for Kogarah, then Opposition Leader Chris Minns, was visiting my university employer and meeting with the Vice-Chancellor at the Blacktown campus.

The irony is difficult to ignore.

The reason I had gone to my elected representative in the first place was because the regulators were not regulating.

SafeWork NSW was not enforcing compliance.

SIRA was not enforcing compliance.

The very agencies established to oversee workplace safety, workers compensation, injury management and recovery at work had failed to provide protection when it was needed most.

I was not asking for a change in the law.

I was asking for the existing law to be followed.

I was asking for statutory obligations to be enforced.

I was asking for the protections built into the workers compensation system to function as Parliament intended.

Instead, I found myself being referred elsewhere.

Again.

And again.

And again.

By April 2022, I’d reached the point where I no longer believed the regulators would protect me. That loss of trust was the product of repeated experiences where serious concerns were minimised, redirected, or left unresolved while the harm continued to grow.

That is why I approached my local member. Because when the regulators responsible for enforcing compliance fail to act, where else is a citizen supposed to go?

What happened next, and the role played by my elected representative and others, is something that will unfold as my story continues.

But it’s important to remember this.

When institutional failures occur, they are never experienced by just one person.

They ripple through families.

They affect parents.

They affect siblings.

They affect partners, friends and entire support networks.

When one family member is left exposed to prolonged harm, the consequences are carried by everyone who loves them.

My family are also constituents of the Kogarah electorate.

They watched what was happening.

They raised concerns.

They sought help.

And like me, they were looking for someone, somewhere, to intervene before the damage became irreversible.

For now, I leave readers with another piece of the story from that very same day:

Solemn Expressions and Social Media Posts – 29 April 2022

https://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-social-media-post-i-saw-on-29-april.html?m=1

Because sometimes the most revealing moments are not found in official letters.

They are found in what was happening around them.

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Document 330.

——

For what I was put through by SIRA NSW up to this point, see also:

http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/01/sira-nsw-when-system-sends-you-in.html

http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/01/sira-nsw-when-system-is-silent-harm-is.html

http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/01/when-regulators-close-ranks-systemic.html

http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/02/please-dont-neglect-us-what-i-asked-of.html

http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/02/sira-nsw-closed-my-complaint-phone.html

http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/03/sira-nsw-and-illusion-of-regulation.html

http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/04/sira-nsw-regulator-that-didnt-regulate.html

And the degrading doozy:

http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/04/is-it-safe-to-open-what-that-question.html

And yet the SIRA NSW senior complaints manager, claims they take complaints seriously! Put on record, in the same record they wrote that the complaint was closed, again. While repeatedly shutting down my very serious complaint, with no investigation, no compliance and no enforcement on the other key stakeholders: namely the university employer and its specialised insurer! 

http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/05/we-take-complaints-seriously-sira-nsw.html

Imagine if I had stolen over $1.2 million from my public university employer or insurer! Isn’t this same conduct in my direction also fraud? This financial damage is ongoing. That total is on the conservative side of the estimated financial damage, as reported to APRA and now also provided to SIRA NSW. 

https://www.sira.nsw.gov.au/workers-compensation/fraud

Yet I’m still begging SIRA NSW for my legally owed weekly payments to be enforced, to begin with, for some immediate financial relief, under a statutory scheme, that should have been provided by Catholic Church Insurance from at least mid-2020! 

SIRA NSW and SafeWork NSW have been barriers to my statutory right to recover safely in my job! What is that?!

Once We Repaired Things — Part 8 - “Honey, Honey, Honey” — And What Was Really Going On

 

People might assume it was just a relationship*.

It wasn’t.

It was hope.

Hope that after everything I had survived, I would not have to spend the rest of my life alone.

That is what died here.

 

 

*Although how easily disposable people and relationships have become - that’s why this story is called “Once we repaired things”.

⸻

By July 2017, things had started to unravel, but not for the reasons Paul believed.

The truth was far more complicated than that, and far more painful.

For years I’ve carried the memory of being patronised with the words, “Honey, honey, honey, that’s why it didn’t work out between us.” Every time I think about those words, I’m transported back to one of the most frightening, vulnerable and traumatic periods of my life.

What stays with me isn’t simply what was said. It’s the complete misunderstanding of what was actually happening to me at the time.

Paul thought he understood why I was upset. He thought he understood my anger. He thought he understood my attempts to communicate with him.

But he didn’t understand any of it.

Back in May, when communication suddenly changed, I genuinely thought something might have happened to him. Yet I could feel a coldness that hadn’t been there before, and I couldn’t understand where it had come from.

What Paul couldn’t see was that I was already struggling long before I discovered the reason for that coldness.

I was burnt out in a way that’s difficult to explain to anyone who has never experienced it. It wasn’t the kind of burnout that follows a busy week or a stressful project, but the kind that settles into every part of your life and slowly drains your ability to cope. I was exhausted before the day even began. I was emotionally worn down. I was trying to hold myself together while feeling as though the ground beneath me was becoming increasingly unstable.

At work, things were already becoming deeply distressing. These were the early signs of problems that would later grow into something much larger and far more destructive. At the time, however, all I knew was that I was struggling. I was carrying unrealistic pressures, trying to maintain my professionalism and dignity, and feeling increasingly overwhelmed by circumstances I couldn’t fully understand.

Alongside that, I was carrying something even more personal.

I was still living with the trauma of losing my father to suicide.

That wasn’t an abstract issue to me. It wasn’t a topic for intellectual debate. It wasn’t a social issue that existed at a “comfortable” distance.

It was my life.

It was my family’s life.

It was my grief.

At that same time, I found myself confronting ignorance and hostility within the Greek Orthodox community when trying to speak about issues that were deeply personal to me. I couldn’t understand how people could be so lacking in compassion toward those who were suffering. I couldn’t understand how people could choose judgement over empathy, particularly when lives were at stake.

I was angry, but not for the reasons people assumed.

I was angry because I was tired of watching suffering being dismissed.

I was angry because I was tired of watching stigma destroy lives.

I was angry because I was carrying grief, exhaustion and fear while being expected to remain endlessly patient with people who showed little understanding of what others might be going through.

——

By July 2017, all of those pressures were colliding at once.

Then I discovered the reason for the coldness.

There was someone else. In the middle of all this, Paul chose to tell me he had a girlfriend, he was in a relationship, and then, in my most vulnerable moment where all this insensitivity and inhumanity collided, he said, “Honey, honey, honey, that’s why it didn’t work out between us.” 

How could a man I trusted to be authentic, as he believed himself to be, come across in a way that appeared so fake? 

What followed was humiliation.

While I was desperately trying to understand what had happened between us, trying to explain myself and trying to correct what were serious misunderstandings, I felt as though I had already been discarded.

I felt as though I had become irrelevant.

I felt as though I had been reduced to a gap filler, a backup plan, something that had been convenient until it no longer served a purpose.

What made it so devastating was the complete disregard for the human being standing in front of him.

I was already struggling.

I was already frightened.

I was already carrying more than most people realised.

And yet the overwhelming impression I was left with was that none of that mattered.

The only explanation that seemed to exist for my distress was him.

The only explanation that seemed to exist for my attempts to communicate was him.

The only explanation that seemed to exist for my anger was him.

My grief didn’t  matter.

My trauma didn’t  matter.

My burnout didn’t matter.

The battles I was fighting at work didn’t matter.

The hostility I was experiencing elsewhere didn’t matter.

Everything seemed to be reduced to a simplistic explanation that revolved around him.

That’s why the words “Honey, honey, honey” have stayed with me for so many years.

Those words weren’t only dismissive.

They were degrading.

They reduced me to something I was not.

They erased everything that was actually happening in my life.

They turned a frightened, traumatised and overwhelmed woman into a stereotype.

Most of all, they denied me the opportunity to be heard.

——

What I needed at that time wasn’t judgement. I needed understanding.

What I needed wasn’t assumptions. I needed curiosity. (I’ve always said, arrogance and ignorance are a dangerous combination).

What I needed wasn’t somebody telling me who I was. I needed somebody willing to ask what I was carrying.

Instead, I felt as though I was being spoken down to by a man whose ego had become larger than his ability to see the person standing in front of him.

That’s a difficult thing to write. It’s even more difficult to admit how vulnerable I was at the time.

I genuinely needed compassion and kindness.

I genuinely needed somebody to stop and ask whether I was okay.

Instead, I felt discarded, dismissed and stripped of dignity at a time when I had very little left to hold onto.

What breaks my heart is how alone I was. I still am.

——

I was fighting battles on every front. I was carrying grief, trauma, burnout and fear. I was trying to make sense of a world that increasingly felt indifferent to suffering, and I was desperately searching for understanding from people I believed cared.

Years later, I would find myself fighting entirely different battles against institutional abuse, bullying, harassment, regulatory failure and the erosion of dignity in workplaces that spoke constantly about values while failing to live them.

But perhaps that’s why my personal story also matters. 

Before those battles began, I already knew what it felt like to be unheard.

I already knew what it felt like to be dismissed.

I already knew what it felt like to have people decide who I was without first taking the time to understand me.

And I’m still carrying that hurt today.

Alone.

To be continued…

——

Now we’re all learning the battle I’ve been fighting. On 60 Minutes, aired 14 June 2026:

Why universities have become one of the most dangerous places to work. People suffering in silence from the dangerous culture in universities. 

It took the life of a husband and father. I was going to fight this battle, no matter what happened. Because suicide prevention is my mission, and having safe workplaces is where suicide can and should be prevented. 

I was suffering, but I was never silent. I’ve been screaming for help. But who was listening all these years? 

I’ve been completely alone. 

All this links right back to the premise of my blog. 

https://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/p/the-premise-of-this-blog.html?m=1

That’s why I’m writing my story, and in this part of my story, three significant areas of my life collided. 

The link below is to that part of my story, describing what was actually going on, when Paul chose to diminish me with, “Honey, honey, honey, that’s why it didn’t work out between us”. 

https://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2024/09/part-2-suicide-and-greek-orthodox-church.html?m=1

To quote one paragraph from the above post, placing in context my justified anger:

“This is the truth why I was distressed at that time. And why I finally took several weeks off work and went to grief and trauma counseling, seven years later. The manager from the library dared to send me a text where she wrote, “I can see you’re in a really dark place right now”. I just yelled back at the phone, “Oh fuck off”! That narcissist and those like her, are never to patronise me again. They must stop interfering and gossiping about my pain that they don’t know anything about, nor my life.”

Other relevant posts relating to working in “one of the most dangerous places” right now : universities. 

https://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2024/07/part-3-bullying-discrimination-and.html?m=1

https://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2024/07/organisational-culture-ethics.html?m=1

——

In case you missed the previous parts to this story… how much more was I expected to tolerate? 

http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/01/once-we-repaired-things-relationships.html

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

http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/03/once-we-repaired-things-part-3.html

http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/04/once-we-repaired-things-text-that.html

http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/05/once-we-repaired-things-part-5.html

http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/05/once-we-repaired-things-there-is-no.html

http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/06/once-we-repaired-things-part-7-non-e.html