Notice After Notice — Part 3: Email to Chris Minns’ Kogarah Electorate Office - March 2022

10 March 2022 — Email to Cheryl Han, Kogarah Electorate Office

By March 2022, I was exhausted.

I was exhausted from the workers compensation battle itself, and also from constantly trying to hold my life together while the people and systems responsible for worker safety continued doing nothing meaningful to stop the harm.

On 10 March 2022, I emailed Cheryl Han at the Kogarah electorate office again.

At that point, I had spent nearly two years trying to get basic obligations fulfilled — lawful injury management, proper return-to-work coordination, communication with my treating professionals, financial stability, and some form of human support from my workplace.

Instead, I felt abandoned inside a system that kept generating processes while avoiding accountability.

The instability had affected every aspect of my life — financially, psychologically, socially, and professionally.

I explained that I needed proof of employment from the university and needed the process started for returning to my work.  

Not eventually.

Immediately.

While statutory obligations continued to be ignored, I was trying to save my home and preserve what I had spent almost two decades building professionally.

I described living with fear, neglect, and social isolation.  

And despite everything, I was still trying to reconnect with my workplace ethically and constructively. I was still asking for proper injury management coordination. I was still asking for communication between a return-to-work coordinator, my GP, and allied health professionals so that an appropriate plan aligned with the injury management plan could finally occur.  

I was still trying to return safely to work.

Still trying to preserve dignity.

Still trying to believe somebody would finally step in and stop what was happening.

Instead, I described being left “alone and in the dark.”  

That captures this period of my life more accurately than almost anything else, because that’s what prolonged systems failure feels like.

You keep notifying people. You keep documenting harm. You keep asking for lawful intervention. You keep believing someone will finally recognise how serious the situation has become.

And yet the notices keep accumulating while the silence continues.

I also wrote about the financial destruction that had occurred because regulators and claims management systems had allowed me to be financially crushed instead of protected.  

The withholding of support, the delays, the lack of coordination, and the failure to implement lawful injury management obligations compound over time. Financially. Psychologically. Socially.

Toward the end of the email, I referenced the university’s Vice Chancellor and the discussion around restoring institutional integrity. But I also wrote something important:

“There’s no integrity if I’m still neglected and not a part of my workplace immediately.”  

That was the contradiction I could no longer ignore.

Integrity is not branding.

Integrity is how institutions respond when one of their own workers repeatedly asks for help and continues to be left without support.

And so the institutionalised wage theft continued…

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Document 296.