What happens when people who are directly involved in serious failures simply move on, while the injured worker remains trapped with the consequences?
There is something deeply disturbing about discovering that the people who were directly responsible for implementing a worker’s recovery simply disappear once the damage has been done.
In my case, the person identified on the Injury Management Plan as the employer’s return-to-work coordinator was responsible for coordinating communication between me, my nominated treating doctor, and allied health professional.
Yet that coordination never occurred.
The return-to-work coordinator became effectively unreachable. Phone calls went unanswered. Messages and emails disappeared into silence. I was never provided with the consent forms required to facilitate communication with my treating practitioners. No return-to-work plan was developed with my involvement. No rehabilitation provider was engaged. No meaningful collaboration took place. No trauma-informed support existed.
But somehow, despite all of that, my private information still managed to travel…
…not to my treating team…
…not to support my recovery…
…but into the hands of the very people whose conduct had already caused me harm.
The systems that were supposed to facilitate communication with my treating professionals appeared unwilling to do so. Yet information seemed capable of moving in other directions entirely. For an injured worker trying to understand what was happening, it created a profound sense of vulnerability, confusion, and distrust.
What troubles me most is that none of this occurred in isolation. The return-to-work coordinator was not acting within a vacuum. The senior executive overseeing employment relations and SAFETY at the university was, in fact, the primary source of the workplace stressors that led to my workers compensation claim. Yet the same individual continued to exercise influence over processes that were supposedly designed to support my recovery.
It was the return-to-work coordinator’s manager — the National Manager of Employment Relations and SAFETY — whose conduct formed a central part of my claim, continuing to direct and oversee actions within a statutory scheme that should have existed to protect an injured worker, not expose them to further harm.
As I reflected on these events, I was reminded of an article by workplace researcher Dr David Yamada titled “When Superficial Civility Supports Workplace Abusers and Their Enablers.”
The article explores how organisations can sometimes prioritise appearances, politeness, and procedural formality over genuine accountability, allowing harmful conduct to continue beneath a veneer of professionalism. The concept resonated deeply with my experience, where communications often appeared courteous on the surface (especially to the SafeWork NSW inspector who then shockingly said to me “I’m not here to play he said she said”), while substantive concerns about safety, recovery, and worker welfare remained unaddressed.
When Superficial Civility Supports Workplace Abusers and Their Enablers:
Going back to my story, from early 2021, after the damage was done, the return-to-work coordinator disappeared from the university.
Years later, my family discovered, through publicly available information, that she had moved into a work health and safety position within a NSW government agency. According to publicly available employment information, she commenced employment with the NSW Environment Protection Authority in early 2021.
What makes this particularly difficult to process is that she was not the only person who appeared to move on without accountability.
An insurer representative directly involved in my matter, the person I had tried to get answers from, including who would be the replacement case manager, also suspiciously left and later suspiciously re-appeared in a role elsewhere within the NSW public sector.
One moved into Transport for NSW. (See https://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/03/sira-nsw-and-illusion-of-regulation.html?m=1)
The other moved into the NSW Environment Protection Authority as a work health and safety manager.
Meanwhile, I remained where I had always been.
Still trying to recover.
Still trying to understand what had happened.
Still trying to obtain the return to work support and statutory entitlements that should have existed from the beginning.
The worker remained behind.
The financial damage remained behind.
The psychological injury remained behind.
The unanswered questions remained behind.
From my perspective, that is where public trust begins to erode.
People understand that employees change jobs. That is normal. What they struggle to understand is how serious concerns can be raised, extensive documentation can exist, significant harm can occur, and yet the people involved simply continue progressing into new and often more senior positions without any visible examination of what happened previously.
It creates a perception that accountability applies differently depending on who holds power and who does not.
Whether I agreed with it or not, my family eventually decided to contact the NSW Environment Protection Authority and inform them of what had occurred during this person’s employment at the university. The EPA correspondence contained allegations concerning failures to fulfil obligations under the Injury Management Plan and concerns regarding privacy and communication failures.
What happened next was unsettling.
Shortly after those concerns were raised, my family reported receiving calls from a private number. Not once, but twice.
When the calls were answered, the person on the other end allegedly hung up without speaking.
No explanation.
No conversation.
Just silence.
That pattern was disturbingly familiar.
A concerned friend of mine had experienced something similar after interactions involving senior management connected to the university. Viewed in isolation, any one of these incidents might seem insignificant. Viewed together, they contribute to a broader pattern that leaves people feeling watched, unsettled, and unsafe. (See http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/02/when-safety-is-denied-at-threshold-may.html).
I cannot prove who made those calls.
What I can say is that they occurred, they were reported to me, and they added to an already profound sense of unease, fear and distress.
What also continues to trouble me is the response I later received from the regulator.
When I formally complained to the NSW State Insurance Regulatory Authority in January 2021, one of the explanations offered was that the return-to-work coordinator was “qualified”. (See http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/01/when-regulators-close-ranks-systemic.html where SIRA NSW stated, on record, that it had liaised with SafeWork NSW and that: the employer’s Return to Work practices were “compliant” with workers compensation legislation, and the Return to Work Coordinator was “appropriately trained and qualified”).
But qualification was never the issue.
A person can be “qualified” and still fail to perform their duties.
A person can hold professional credentials and still engage in conduct that causes serious harm.
Lawyers are qualified.
Doctors are qualified.
Executives are qualified.
Qualifications do not answer the fundamental question.
The question is whether the person actually performed the role they were employed and authorised to perform.
Did anyone independently verify whether the obligations under the Injury Management Plan were fulfilled?
Did anyone verify whether communication occurred with the worker?
Did anyone verify whether communication occurred with the nominated treating doctor?
Did anyone verify whether communication occurred with the psychologist?
Did anyone verify whether the required consent processes occurred?
Did anyone verify whether a return-to-work program was actually implemented?
Or was it simply assumed that because somebody held a qualification, they must have been doing their job?
That response has always troubled me because it appears to confuse competency on paper with accountability in practice.
And perhaps that is the larger question that remains unanswered throughout this entire story.
How did a system designed to support injured workers allow so many failures to occur simultaneously?
And why did the employer allow it to happen?
Because qualifications are not what injured workers rely on.
They rely on actions.
They rely on safeguards.
They rely on people actually doing the jobs they were entrusted to do.
In my case, those safeguards never arrived.
And years later, I am still living with the consequences…
…Including the institutionalised wage that continues to this day…
Source: contemporaneous record of events - Document 303.
——
NOTE: SafeWork NSW would do well to take WHS reports coming from frightened staff in complex organisations like universities, seriously from now on. A life could depend on it.
There’s no excuse regarding a SafeWork NSW inspector telling a vulnerable employee “I’m not here to play he said she said” and “all they’ll do is show me their policies and I don’t want to ruffle feathers”, then leaving the poor soul in the hands of the very perpetrator to continue engaging in harmful and reckless conduct.
That attitude from SafeWork NSW has cost me years of my life and almost my life. The conduct of SafeWork NSW has been so serious, I now don’t feel safe directly engaging with the NSW WHS regulator anymore.
It’s finally been escalated via the proper systemic channels.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.