The Sound of Silence - June 2022

22 & 29 June 2022

There comes a point when asking for help becomes harder than carrying the suffering alone.

By 22 June 2022, I’d reached that point.

I wasn’t writing to strangers.

I wasn’t writing to people who didn’t know me.

I was writing to colleagues in Ministry. People who spoke about dignity, compassion, justice and community. People who knew me. People who had worked alongside me. People who knew I had dedicated more than twenty years of my life to our university community.

And yet, despite everything that had happened, I still found myself pleading to be heard.

In an email on 22 June 2022, I wrote:

“I’ve got no support and I’m very, very sick and alone… I need human support like every human person.”

Those words weren’t written to make anyone feel guilty.

They were written because they were true.

⸻

My life had become a series of parallel crises.

My workers’ compensation claim remained unresolved.

My publicly funded university employer, who’d injured me in their decision to take aggressive adverse action for my requesting a psychosocially safe work environment, had still not made me feel safe.

The systems that were supposed to protect workers had failed to intervene.

My family’s privacy had also been violated by the University’s leaders.

That was my family’s privacy. It wasn’t something I ever expected to become intertwined with my workplace.

What distressed me most was that deeply private and tragic family circumstances hadn’t been treated with the dignity and confidentiality every person deserves.

Privacy is not a privilege.

It is part of respecting the dignity of every human person.

⸻

Throughout those weeks, I kept returning to one word.

Integrity.

Not legal strategy.

Not public relations.

Integrity.

In that same email of 22 June 2022, I wrote:

“I need integrity not hypocrisy.”

Those words came from profound disappointment.

Because mission statements are easy to publish.

The Gospel is easy to quote.

Strategic plans are easy to write.

But integrity is revealed when someone within your own community is suffering.

It is revealed by whether people step towards that person…

…or quietly step away.

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A week later, on 29 June 2022, I found myself writing to my solicitor, not about legal tactics, but about survival.

I wrote:

“This is the outcome when no one listens.”

Those words weren’t directed at one person.

They reflected years of trying to be heard.

By my employer.

By my insurer.

By regulators.

And, perhaps most painfully, by members of a university community whose mission spoke so often about compassion, justice and the dignity of the human person.

Revisit my reflection on the Staff Code of Conduct for ALL staff: http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/10/its-what-you-do-that-defines-who-we-are.html

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One sentence from that email says it all:

“I’m not here to save the world. Right now, I’d be happy to just save myself.”

That was EXHAUSTION.

For years, I found myself battling a failed regulatory system to save:

My career.

My health.

My home.

My future.

By the end of June 2022, I was simply trying to survive.

⸻

I don’t remember those weeks only because of the legal battles or the endless correspondence.

I remember them because I was still hoping that someone would hear what lay beneath the words.

Just someone willing to stop long enough to see that one of their own colleagues was drowning.

Perhaps that is what saddens me most.

Not that I kept asking for help.

But that I kept believing someone would answer.

And all I could hear…

…was the sound of silence.

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 367-368.

⸻

Further Reading

In The Pain of Unbelonging: Why Workplace Bullying Hurts, psychologist Dorothy Suskind explores how workplace bullying damages our fundamental human need to belong. She explains that organisational silence, exclusion and institutional betrayal can leave people feeling isolated, unseen and disconnected from the very communities where they felt they belonged.

Much of that resonated with me.

The isolation has been one of the hardest parts of this journey.

But where my story differs is in what comes next.

I have never accepted that this should be the end of my relationship with the university community I served for more than twenty years.

The silence I experienced wasn’t simply colleagues drifting away. It was a culture where fear prevented people from reaching out, even when they wanted to. Workplace bullying doesn’t affect only its target. It changes the behaviour of everyone around it.

I won’t allow the abuse of power, failures of governance and breaches of statutory obligations to determine the ending of my story.

There must be accountability and natural justice. As Senator Tony Sheldon said, “public money comes with public accountability.” (See https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-19/senate-inquiry-interim-report-university-governance/105795694). 

As for “closure”, closure does not come from quietly accepting what should never have happened.

For me, this story ends when those with responsibility finally do what they should have done from the beginning: protect the dignity, safety and rights of the people entrusted to their care.

Suskind, D. (2025, 5 July). ‘The Pain of Unbelonging: Why Workplace Bullying Hurts.’ Psychology Today. [Online]: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/bully-wise/202507/the-pain-of-unbelonging-why-workplace-bullying-hurts/amp 

The Parallel Crisis: Dismantling My Future While the System Looked Away - June 2022

21–24 June 2022

On paper, the ten documents this post is based on are about selling a property.

In reality, they document something entirely different.

They record what happens when a statutory workers’ compensation scheme fails to do the very job it exists to do.

While my nationally registered, publicly funded university employer continued to ignore its legal obligations, while the specialised workers’ compensation insurer failed to implement my agreed Injury Management Plan or restore my income, and while the state regulators responsible for enforcing compliance failed to intervene, I wasn’t rebuilding my life.

I was dismantling it.

Over four days, these documents record the collapse of years of financial security—not because of poor financial decisions, but because every safeguard that should have protected an injured worker had failed.

 

My own words, written at the time, tell that story far better than hindsight ever could.

⸻

By June 2022, I had been trying for over two years to have the workers’ compensation scheme operate as intended.

• My Injury Management Plan had never been implemented.
• My return to work had never occurred.
• My weekly income had never been restored.

Instead of recovering, I was funding my own survival.

Like many Australians, I had worked hard for years to build some financial security. My Melbourne investment property wasn’t simply bricks and mortar. It represented years of work, careful planning and sacrifice.

It was never supposed to become my emergency fund.

Yet that is exactly what it became, because the statutory protections that should have prevented this financial catastrophe simply failed.

⸻

The first emails show someone trying desperately to hold everything together.

I wasn’t negotiating from a position of confidence.

I was negotiating while traumatised.

I was someone whose nervous system had been overwhelmed after years of institutional failure.

Yet while I was trying to manage that trauma, the practical realities of life didn’t stop.

Mortgage deadlines still existed.

Property contracts still had to be negotiated.

Bills still arrived.

⸻

I now had to sell my investment property urgently to settle on and save my principal home. 

The offer that came was $352,250.

It was substantially lower than the property was worth. For the investment buyer, this wasn’t personal. It was just business. For me, it was very personal. It was everything I worked hard for and built responsibly in acquiring some humble assets and future security. 

I was placed in this vulnerable situation by a nationally registered, publicly funded university employer and its specialised insurer. All because I was so overworked and suffocating from a manager who was so toxic, that I’d reached breaking point in my health, safety and wellbeing, I was left with no choice but to request a psychosocially safe work environment. 

I almost lost my mind with this “offer”. I was cornered. Again. 

My instinct was to refuse.

I replied:

“I can’t accept this offer. Please proceed with the auction on Saturday, and depending what the outcome is, we’ll go from there.”

But that in itself posed risk. The outcome was uncertain. The offer was concrete. This was a financially coercive circumstance caused by employer in adverse action and insurer in an extension of this corporate misconduct. I guess Catholic Church Insurance assessed the “risk” and considered me an easy target to annihilate. Wrong decision, but they came close many times to succeeding in such morally bankrupt behaviour. 

The next sentence in my email regarding my initial refusal of that offer, still breaks my heart to read today.

“If anything happens to me, I want there to be something of value left for my family.”

That sentence wasn’t about property.

It was about the level of despair I had reached after years of fighting systems that were supposed to protect workers but instead left me carrying every consequence myself.

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While these negotiations were taking place, the legal pressure was mounting.

My solicitor advised that the vendor had extended the Notice to Complete only until 29 June 2022, warning that “time [was] of the essence.”

Every deadline increased the pressure.

Every delay inside the workers’ compensation system made those commercial deadlines harder to meet.

These weren’t parallel stories.

They were the same story.

One crisis was feeding the other.

⸻

As the pressure intensified, even opening correspondence became overwhelming.

When my solicitor forwarded another letter regarding the purchase of my Sydney home, I couldn’t bring myself to process it alone.

Instead, I forwarded it to someone else and wrote only seven words:

“Please read for me. I’m so scared.”

That captures something the formal documents never could.

Trauma doesn’t just affect your emotions.

It affects your ability to think.

To process information.

To make decisions.

To cope with ordinary life.

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The documents also record me explaining this to the people trying to help me.

Writing to my lender and the real estate agent, I explained:

“My health and cognitive functioning is in a declined state at the moment, so I appreciate the support of details needing to be clarified, put in writing.”

This was contemporaneous evidence of the impact that years of chronic workplace trauma and regulatory failure had already had on my functioning.

⸻

Eventually, I reached the point where there simply weren’t any good options left.

The property could pass in.

The purchase of my home could collapse.

Or I could accept a substantial loss.

So I did something I never wanted to do.

I sent a one-line email.

“I accept.”

One word. 

Accept. 

Behind that one word sat years of financial planning that I knew I was about to dismantle.

⸻

The following day, I explained why.

“It’s a very low offer but a quick settlement.”

Those words were written because I’d been cornered financially by circumstances that should never have existed.

⸻

The remaining documents I analysed for this post show the machinery of survival going into motion.

• The fully executed contracts.
• The Vendor Statement.
• The Discharge Authority.
• The Security Swap.
• The Loan Variation.

The proceeds from selling my Melbourne investment property would now be used to preserve the roof over my head in New South Wales. 

To a bank, these were routine transactions.

To me, they represented years of work disappearing because the statutory scheme had failed to prevent exactly this outcome.

⸻

This is the part of workers’ compensation that statistics never capture.

People think compensation disputes are simply disagreements about benefits.

They don’t see: 

• The investments quietly sold.
• The retirement plans abandoned.
• The savings consumed.
• The properties lost.
• The financial futures rewritten.

They don’t see injured workers financing the consequences of regulatory failure while those responsible for enforcing compliance simply look away.

⸻

I don’t see these ten documents as conveyancing records.

I see them as evidence that regulatory failure never stays inside a regulator’s office.

It reaches into:

• Bank accounts.
• Mortgage files.
• Property settlements.
• Investment portfolios.
• Retirement planning.

And eventually into every decision an injured worker is forced to make simply to survive.

The workers’ compensation claim was still unresolved.

The insurer was still failing to comply with its statutory obligations.

The regulators were still failing to enforce compliance.

But while they delayed, my life kept moving.

Deadlines still existed.

Contracts still had to be signed.

Properties still had to settle.

And piece by piece, I was dismantling the future I had spent decades building—not because I had made poor financial decisions, but because the statutory scheme designed to protect workers failed to do the very job it was created to perform.

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 401- 410.

“Please No More Torture” - June 2022

21–22 June 2022

By late June 2022, I was no longer just fighting a workers compensation claim.

I was fighting to hold on to my home, my dignity, my health and, quite honestly, my hope.

Two years had passed since I had lodged my workers compensation claim. Throughout that time I had repeatedly asked for the protections the legislation was supposed to provide. A case manager. Communication with my nominated treating doctor. A return to work process. Weekly payments. Protection from the workplace contact that had caused my psychological injury, the national manager of employment relations and SAFETY.

Instead, I found myself emotionally preparing for yet another IME.

On 22 June 2022, I wrote to my lawyer:

“I’ve had a gutful of this system set up to destroy lives.”

Those were the words of someone who had reached breaking point.

For two years I believed that if I simply kept providing documents, answering questions, complying with every request and waiting patiently, eventually SOMEONE inside the system would do what the legislation required.

Instead, every delay created another obstacle.

In that same email I described what had happened. Again!

“My leave entitlements were used up while being abused and harassed… CCI deliberately withheld entitlements to allow this to happen…”

I listed what had occurred: the absence of a case manager after July 2020, repeated requests for information by CCI that had already been provided, the failure to obtain reports from my treating doctor at the appropriate time, and the continuing contact from the university “representative” whose conduct was the cause of my psychological injury.

I also wrote something that still frustrates me to read today.

“Does one’s records of evidence mean anything in this state’s ‘system’?”

That sentence wasn’t really a question.

It was despair.

By then I had accumulated folders upon folders of documents.

• Emails.
• Medical certificates.
• Reports.
• Complaints.
• Chronologies.
• Evidence.

Yet none of it mattered in the NSW workers compensation statutory scheme that, to me, felt like a scam!

The evidence never seemed to outweigh the power of the institutions involved.

As my financial situation deteriorated, I wrote:

“I’m on the brink of losing my home from the financial abuse alone…”

and

“I’m really frightened about my home right now and I’m not going to suffer systemic abuse anymore.”

Those weren’t legal submissions. They were cries for help.

The following correspondence reveals something else that often goes unnoticed in these systems.

Trauma makes administration incredibly difficult.

My workers compensation solicitor asked me to send the unlawful, undignified, humiliating letter after being hunted down in aggressive adverse action for 1.5 years since I requested a psychosocially safe work environment. I tried EVERYTHING to stop the abuse! 

My efforts are WELL DOCUMENTED!

Do these workers compensation solicitors have no sensitivity and compassion? Instead of a trauma-informed approach somewhere - anywhere - in this horrific system, I felt repeatedly retraumatised. 

I replied:

“[That] letter should be in one of the attached emails I sent on Friday. I can’t look at it. It’s trauma and humiliating.”

Later, after accidentally sending the wrong document, I wrote:

“I think it’s within this attachment. I can’t look at it. Please no more torture.”

And then:

“I’m sorry I forgot to attach. I need a break. This is so unjust and wrong. It’s just abusive and wrong.”

This is why injured workers struggle to complete paperwork or repeatedly submit incorrect documents.

The system is the cause!!! 

Sometimes the very document you’re being asked to retrieve is itself part of the trauma!!!

It means reliving it!

Every attachment can become another psychological injury.

Every request can reopen the wound.

On the same morning I also wrote privately to a colleague in the Directorate of Identity and Mission:

“I have a right to dignity in my job too, don’t I?… I have a right to be treated with dignity… because I’m a human person too.”

No worker should ever have to remind institutions that they are a human being, especially ones with an entire directorate dedicated to the University’s Identity and Mission, that includes a commitment to the dignity of the human person. 

The irony was impossible to ignore.

I was surrounded by organisations whose stated purpose was care, rehabilitation, health, justice or professional advocacy.

Yet I found myself pleading simply to be treated with dignity.

My correspondence even reflected the depth of my faith and my exhaustion.

I wrote:

“Jesus, my Saviour, has done His part for too long. I need human help to lift the cross too. Pharisees ignoring me, or Simon of Cyrene helping me?”

That wasn’t theology. It was loneliness.

By this point, I no longer believed I could carry the burden alone.

What I needed wasn’t another undignified and unethical report from yet another unethical IME.

Not another procedural step and yet another delay.

I needed someone—anyone—to simply help.

To see me.

These emails capture something important.

This wasn’t just psychological injury caused by a nationally registered, publicly funded university employer.

It was the cumulative harm of a system that repeatedly failed to recognise the human being inside the claim.

And perhaps the saddest sentence of all wasn’t about the law.

It was simply this:

“I need support. I’ve had enough systemic abuse.”

Sometimes that’s all an injured worker is really asking for.

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 357-359, 361.

——

Further reading 

Badcock, J.C., Holt-Lunstad, J., Garcia, E., Bombaci, P., & Lim, M.H. (2022). ‘Position statement: addressing social isolation and loneliness and the power of human connection.’ Global Initiative on Loneliness and Connection. [Online]: https://www.gilc.global/general-6 

The hidden injury: forced social isolation

The injury wasn’t only psychological.

It wasn’t only financial.

It was social.

In April 2022—only two months before these emails were written—the Global Initiative on Loneliness and Connection (GILC) released its international Position Statement Addressing Social Isolation and Loneliness and the Power of Human Connection. Position Statement 1 begins with a simple but profound principle:

Social connection is essential to health and wellbeing.

The statement explains that social connection is not merely having people around you. It means having relationships that are trustworthy, supportive and of sufficient quality that you know you’re not facing life alone. It concludes that poor social connection carries significant risks to both physical and psychological health, and calls for coordinated action across organisations, communities and governments to reduce social isolation and support social wellbeing.

That is exactly what was taken from me.

When I requested a psychosocially safe work environment, I wasn’t simply excluded from a workplace.

• I was progressively separated from colleagues I had worked alongside for years.
• Professional relationships disappeared.
• My identity as a university employee was deliberately dismantled by the senior executive group.
• Instead of support, I experienced exclusion.
• Instead of connection, I experienced isolation.
• Instead of rehabilitation, I experienced prolonged procedural conflict.

The workers compensation system focused almost exclusively on medical reports, legal processes and re-traumatising IMEs.

But almost nobody recognised that forced social isolation is itself harmful.

The legislation was designed to protect injured workers.

Instead, the failures to implement that statutory scheme left me without income, without a return-to-work process, without meaningful support, and increasingly without the ordinary human connections that make recovery possible.

For me, the financial damage and the social damage cannot be separated.

Losing hundreds of thousands of dollars was devastating.

But being cut off from the professional community that had been part of my life since 2001 was equally as harmful.

The Global Initiative on Loneliness and Connection argues that organisations and policymakers should evaluate not only financial costs but also the consequences for social health and wellbeing.

That’s a conversation largely absent from workers compensation and WHS. 

My story isn’t simply about stolen wages.

It’s also about what happens when a nationally registered, publicly funded university employer, together with institutions established to protect workers, allows a person to become socially isolated simply because they asked for a psychosocially safe workplace.

That kind of isolation isn’t an unfortunate by-product.

It becomes part of the injury itself.

And the irony that a third employment lawyer advised to make a claim because, “It’s not worth your health.” See http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/05/i-advise-you-make-workers-compensation.html