26–28 May 2022
By late May 2022, I was no longer writing emails because I believed someone would suddenly discover compassion, courage, or integrity and intervene.
I was writing because I was running out of places to turn.
The events of 9 May 2022 had broken something in me.
For six months, I had been pleading for help. I was asking for help regarding serious workplace misconduct, psychosocial hazards, retaliation, workers’ compensation non-compliance, and the complete failure of a statutory system that was supposedly designed to protect workers from harm.
Instead, I found myself sitting alone in my car outside the Kogarah electorate office, sobbing, frightened, and feeling utterly abandoned.
As I wrote only weeks later:
“I sat in the car on 9 May, parked outside the Kogarah electorate office, sobbing profusely, frightened and alone, finally feeling completely helpless and uncared for and betrayed.”
That captures the reality better than any retrospective account ever could.
I had spent months trying to engage with my local state MP, Chris Minns. Months of emails. Months of requests. Months of hoping that someone in a position of authority would at least listen.
What I received instead felt like another chapter in a pattern that had become painfully familiar.
People would express concern.
People would tell me they understood.
People would imply they wanted to help.
Then, somehow, their own interests would take priority, and I would be left behind.
Again.
And again.
And again.
By May 2022, I was watching opportunities for political advancement, institutional reputation management, and strategic relationships take precedence over a worker, an electorate constituent, whose life was unravelling in plain sight.
I had become expendable.
What made it particularly painful was that I wasn’t simply fighting an employer.
I was fighting for my livelihood, my home, my health, my surviving family, and my future.
The consequences were no longer theoretical.
I was supposed to settle on my home.
Instead, I was facing the possibility of losing everything.
The deposit.
The stamp duty.
The years of sacrifice.
The dream of finally having security.
In one of those emails, I wrote:
“I was supposed to have settled in owning my home on Friday 27 May.”
That single sentence carried years of effort, sacrifice, and hope.
Every delay mattered.
Every day mattered.
Every failure by institutions to act had real-world consequences.
And yet those consequences were being carried entirely by me.
By this point, I had exhausted avenue after avenue.
- SafeWork.
- SIRA.
- The NTEU.
- Political representatives.
- Internal university governance.
- Workers’ compensation processes.
The people and organisations who were supposed to intervene had either failed to act, deferred responsibility, or simply disappeared behind “process”.
The result was not merely “administrative failure”.
It was human suffering.
I’ve spent twenty years serving an institution that spoke about dignity, community, justice, compassion, and human flourishing.
I’ve dedicated myself to students, colleagues, and the university community.
Yet when I became injured and vulnerable, those values seemed to vanish.
The language remained.
The reality did not.
I found myself asking questions that no worker should ever have to ask.
If the Catholic Church values life, why was I being left in circumstances that were destroying mine?
If workplace safety matters, why was nobody enforcing the obligations that already existed?
If dignity matters, why was I being treated as disposable?
If compassion matters, where was it?
I genuinely want answers.
The desperation in my emails during those days reflected the reality of my circumstances.
By late May, the situation had become so overwhelming that I found myself writing:
“I don’t want this negligence to end up taking my life.”
Those words were written because I was frightened.
I was exhausted.
I was carrying trauma that exceeded anything I had experienced before, including the devastating loss of my father to suicide.
That is a difficult statement to write, but it is true.
- The constant uncertainty.
- The financial pressure.
- The social isolation.
- The humiliation.
- The betrayal.
Together, they created a level of fear that is difficult to adequately describe.
- I was trying to survive.
- I was trying to return to work safely.
- I was trying to preserve my home.
- I was trying to protect my family.
- I was trying to recover from an injury.
And I was trying to do so within systems that seemed determined to ignore their own statutory obligations.
One of the most painful aspects of this period was thinking about my father.
My father was a lifelong Labor supporter.
- He believed in fairness.
- He believed in workers.
- He believed in looking after ordinary people.
I often found myself wondering what he would think if he could see what was happening.
Not only what had been done by my employer and insurer, but the indifference that followed from so many others who had the power to help and chose not to.
In one email, I wrote:
“It wasn’t just disrespect toward me. It was a let down and disrespect toward my late father, a Labor supporter through and through.”
That was not political.
It was personal.
The one time his daughter desperately needed help, I felt as though everything he had believed about fairness and standing up for ordinary people had been abandoned.
His death by suicide had already left a permanent wound in our family.
The events of 2022 reopened many of those wounds.
The difference was that this time I was facing the crisis alone.
What these emails capture is despair.
They capture what happens when someone spends years trying to do everything properly, follows every process available to them, seeks help through every official channel, and discovers that none of those channels are prepared to act.
Those emails were distress signals.
They were written by someone desperately trying to stop further harm.
What remains most troubling is that the issues I was describing were never confined to my own circumstances.
I believed then, and I believe now, that there are systemic failures within workplace, regulatory, workers’ compensation, and governance systems that allow people to disappear into a void once they become “inconvenient”.
- A worker reports harm.
- A worker becomes injured.
- A worker challenges misconduct.
- A worker loses income.
- A worker becomes isolated.
- And eventually, the worker is expected to disappear quietly.
I refused to disappear.
That refusal has come at an enormous cost.
But these emails remain an important record of what was happening in real time.
Not after the fact.
Not with hindsight.
Not after years of reflection.
They capture the reality of what it feels like when every door appears to be closing, when fear begins to overwhelm hope, and when the people and institutions who should have stepped forwards instead step away.
Perhaps the line that best captures where I was emotionally at that point is one of the final pleas I wrote:
“Can someone please save me. I want to recover in my work as per injury management plan and enterprise agreement. I want to live like a dignified human being.”
They were the words of a worker who had spent nearly three years trying to be heard.
- A worker trying to save her home.
- A worker trying to save her family from more trauma.
- A worker trying to save her life.
In late May 2022, I was still asking one simple question:
Would anyone finally listen before it was too late?
Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 339-340.
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Further Reading
Power, C.A. (2023). ‘Just Hit Me Already: Obscured Workplace Abuse and Discrimination.’ ADVANCE Journal 4(1). https:/ / doi.org/ 10.5399/ osu/ ADVJRNL.4.1.10.
A thought-provoking paper I’ve read while documenting my own experience is “Just Hit Me Already: Obscured Workplace Abuse and Discrimination” by social psychologist Cathleen A. Power.
Although the paper is based on the author’s own workplace experience, many of the concepts she explores resonated strongly with my own journey.
Power describes workplace abuse that leaves “invisible bruises”—psychological injuries that can be every bit as devastating as physical injuries, yet are often dismissed because they are harder to see or prove. She examines how workers who raise legitimate concerns can experience retaliation, isolation, and what researchers call institutional betrayal: the failure of the very organisations and systems that are expected to protect them.
One of the themes that resonated most deeply with me is the way the paper describes how the person reporting the harm can gradually become viewed as the problem rather than the harm itself. The focus shifts away from investigating misconduct and instead turns towards questioning, scrutinising or blaming the worker who spoke up.
That theme has echoed throughout my own experience.
After reporting psychosocial hazards and seeking a safe workplace, I expected the regulatory system to investigate whether employers and insurers were complying with their legal obligations. Instead, many of my experiences with the systems responsible for worker protection left me feeling that the focus had shifted onto me rather than the conduct I was reporting.
For me, some of the deepest trauma didn’t come only from the workplace itself. It came from experiencing secondary harm while trying to engage, in good faith, with the very systems responsible for preventing further harm. I continued documenting, continued reporting, and continued hoping that someone within those systems would recognise the ongoing psychosocial risks and intervene before more damage was done.
This paper offers a valuable framework for understanding why psychological workplace harm can become so difficult to escape when institutions fail to recognise, investigate or respond appropriately to reports of harm.
Themes that resonated with my own experience
While every workplace and every case is different, several themes explored in this paper closely reflect patterns I have documented throughout my own story.
Invisible bruises
Power describes psychological workplace abuse that leaves no visible injuries, making it difficult for workers to demonstrate the extent of the harm. My own psychological injury developed over years through cumulative psychosocial hazards, retaliation, prolonged uncertainty, financial pressure and ongoing exposure to workplace conflict. There was no single dramatic event that captured the full extent of the harm. Instead, it was the accumulation of repeated experiences that ultimately caused profound psychological injury.
Institutional betrayal
The paper explores institutional betrayal—when organisations and systems that people reasonably expect to protect them instead contribute to further harm. Throughout my experience, I repeatedly sought assistance from my employer, workers’ compensation insurer, union, regulators and other oversight bodies, believing they would investigate my concerns and ensure compliance with legal obligations. Instead, I experienced compounding harm as the processes themselves became an additional source of trauma.
Retaliation for speaking up
One of the strongest parallels for me was the author’s discussion of retaliation after raising legitimate workplace concerns. My injury began after reporting psychosocial hazards and seeking a safe work environment. Rather than seeing those hazards effectively addressed, I experienced years of continued conflict while trying to exercise rights that were intended to protect workers raising health and safety concerns.
When the complainant becomes the “problem”
Perhaps the most confronting theme in the paper is the observation that attention can shift away from the reported conduct and towards the person reporting it. There were many occasions where I felt that the focus moved from investigating the psychosocial hazards and workers’ compensation issues I had raised to questioning, scrutinising or responding to me instead. That shift caused profound secondary trauma.
Listening theatre
Power describes what she calls “listening theatre”—processes that appear to invite consultation or feedback but ultimately result in little meaningful change. Throughout my journey, I attended meetings, lodged complaints, prepared extensive documentation, responded to requests for information and engaged with multiple parliamentary inquiries because I genuinely believed those processes existed to resolve problems. Too often, however, the experience felt procedural rather than protective, leaving me with the sense that I had been heard without meaningful action following.
Willful ignorance
The paper also examines willful ignorance—the active avoidance of uncomfortable information that challenges existing assumptions or institutional interests. I spent years documenting events, preserving records and providing evidence because I believed careful documentation would assist those responsible for investigating my concerns. Yet I felt significant aspects of that evidence were overlooked, minimised or not meaningfully engaged with, despite the serious issues I was attempting to raise.
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Reading this paper helped me understand that researchers are increasingly examining patterns of workplace abuse, institutional betrayal and psychological harm that extend well beyond any one individual case. While this paper is not about my circumstances, it provides a thoughtful framework for understanding why psychosocial injuries and institutional responses can become so complex, and why workers can experience further harm while seeking help from the very systems established to protect them.
