The Things We Cannot Control… and the Things We Can

“No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.”

Aesop

Today I learned that a genuinely kind man passed away in April.

Years ago, during one of the darkest periods of my own life, I helped him after he rescued a cat. Together we found her a forever home. He loved animals deeply, and I learned today that he even left a gift in his will to the Cat Protection Society. Two beloved cats now need new homes because he is no longer here.

His passing has stayed with me all day.

There are some things in life that are beyond our control. Serious illness, cancer, and many medical conditions remind us of that. We fight with every treatment available, we pray, we hope, and we love. But ultimately, not every outcome is ours to determine.

What is within our control is how we treat one another.

Whether we choose to make a phone call.

Whether we check in.

Whether we speak up when we see someone being harmed.

Whether we use our position to protect someone instead of remaining silent.

Over the past several years, while enduring institutional persecution, I’ve seen something that has profoundly changed my view of society. I have seen extraordinary compassion from a few people. But I have also witnessed something equally powerful: the inhumanity that can exist when people decide that someone else’s suffering is not their problem.

Silence is sometimes presented as neutrality.

It rarely feels neutral to the person living through the harm.

There is a difference between suffering that no human being can prevent and suffering that continues because people choose not to act.

Those choices matter.

Today I’m remembering a good man who showed kindness. It reflected who he was.

His life has reminded me that the measure of our humanity is not found in the words we post about compassion. It is found in what we do when someone in front of us is struggling and we have the ability to help.

Please don’t underestimate the impact of a phone call, a conversation, a simple act of courage, or a refusal to look away.

Sometimes those small choices can change the course of another person’s life.

Rest in peace, my dear friend. Thank you for reminding me what kindness looks like.

When the Systemic Harm Followed Me Home - June 2022

A workers compensation “claim” under a statutory scheme ended up becoming about survival.

By June 2022, I wasn’t simply trying to resolve a workplace injury. I was trying to stop every part of my life from collapsing under the weight of a system that had failed to do what it was legally established to do.

 

The irony still leaves me speechless.

Workers compensation legislation exists to support workers while they recover and return safely to work.

Instead, I found myself fighting to save my employment, my income, my health… and eventually, my home.

Everything became connected.

And SIRA NSW continued to do NOTHING. 

⸻

Throughout June 2022, my emails were not really focused on ensuring rehabilitation (except for this repeated unethical coercive bullshit on the 24 June 2022 - http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/07/repeating-trauma-june-2022.html). 

They were about settlement dates.

• Contract deadlines.
• Penalty clauses.
• Mortgage security.
• Property sales.

Whether I could settle on my new home before the vendor exercised their legal rights (the only person who seemed to have no human rights, let alone legal rights under a supposed statutory scheme, was me).

Every decision was being driven by one terrifying reality:

I had been left without the income support and return-to-work assistance I should have received years earlier.

If the workers compensation system had operated as intended, none of this should have been happening.

I wrote to my real estate agents:

“If someone makes an offer like $390,000 but can settle on or before 29 June, I’ll accept this over higher offers…”

I wasn’t chasing profit anymore.

I was trying to preserve certainty.

I needed security.

I needed one thing in my life that couldn’t be taken away.

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In another email, I tried to explain what had brought me to this point.

I wrote:

“The irony is that had employer and insurer complied with workers compensation regulations, I would never have been in this horrible situation. I’d have been back at work mid-2020 healthy and well with my dignity intact.”

That sentence still hurts to read because it was written in the middle of the crisis.

I already understood exactly what had happened.

The system that was supposed to prevent financial catastrophe had become the cause of it.

⸻

As deadlines closed in, I became increasingly desperate.

• I instructed my lawyers to negotiate.
• I asked questions about penalty notices.
• I sought extensions.
• I approved offers.
• I accepted legal advice.

Every email reflected someone desperately trying to prevent another irreversible loss.

I even began contemplating asking my brother to become a joint owner of my new home so I could complete settlement.

I wrote:

“I’d rather my brother gain from a business transaction than I lose my secure home just as everything is about to turn around for me.”

I now realise how extraordinary that sentence really was. 

An injured worker should never have to restructure their family’s financial future simply because statutory obligations were never enforced.

And little did I know then that the NSW Government regulators and other agencies were going to continue causing financial and systemic harm for several more years. How naïve of me. 

⸻

These emails communicate someone trying to solve impossible problems.

Every message is practical.

Every decision is logical.

Every option is explored.

I kept adapting because I believed that eventually someone inside the system would do their job.

I still believed compliance mattered.

⸻

But buried amongst the practical discussions were moments where the emotional toll finally surfaced.

I wrote to my real estate agents:

“I’m avoiding my email tonight and tomorrow morning. I’m meeting up with my mum tomorrow and I’m so freaked out by daily morning distress and frustrations in emails.”

That quote says everything.

My mornings had become associated with dread.

Every new email carried another problem.

Another threat.

Another delay.

Another reminder that I was completely on my own.

⸻

Then I wrote something that still brings me to tears.

“It’s my mum at the foot of the cross watching her child being abused and persecuted by society when she asked for help… that hurts me the most.”

That wasn’t legal language.

That wasn’t argument.

That was grief.

Not simply for myself.

For my mum.

She had watched her daughter ask for help through the proper channels.

She watched me trust the system.

She watched that trust be repaid with years of harm.

⸻

In another email I wrote:

“The banks must comply with regulations. But the regulator for personal injury matters makes exceptions for larger organisations who commit workers compensation fraud and turn a blind eye to the insurer’s non-compliance.”

The rules seemed to apply to everyone except those with the greatest responsibility to follow them.

Every deadline imposed on me was enforced.

The statutory obligations owed to me appeared negotiable.

⸻

These documents capture something that’s rarely spoken about.

Financial harm caused by institutional failure doesn’t stop at bank balances.

It spreads.

• It reaches your family.
• Your relationships.
• Your sense of security.
• Your health.
• Your future.
• Your ability to make decisions.

Eventually, it reaches the place every person should feel safest.

Home.

By June 2022, I wasn’t simply trying to buy a home.

I was trying to stop an avoidable institutional failure from taking yet another piece of my life.

And all the while, I still believed that once the regulators enforced compliance, everything would finally start to turn around.

I had no idea that years later I would still be waiting…

While the institutional wage theft continued.

To be continued…

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 393-400.

Repeating the Trauma - June 2022

14–17 June 2022

By June 2022, I was preparing to explain my trauma all over again.

Because just when all was progressing for CCI to finally communicate with my NTD, Turks Legal suddenly enters the scene again, “on behalf of the insurer”. 

Another email arrived “requiring” yet another IME. 

Another “independent” practitioner. 

Another date circled on the calendar.

24 June 2022.

The words themselves had become exhausting.

“We require you to attend an independent medical examination on 24/06/2022.”

Not would you be willing?

Not how are you coping?

Simply…

“We require you.”

I was given no choice but to attend.

But this time I made one thing absolutely clear.

“I will be requiring a support person during the consultation. Please ensure CCI are aware that it’s inappropriate for a practitioner to deny a person this right for work-related psychological injuries.”

It shouldn’t have been something I had to fight for. Someone to witness the IME “transaction”. 

Also, someone suffering a psychological injury should never have to argue for the right to feel safe during an “assessment” supposedly designed to “evaluate” that very injury.

Yet here I was…

Putting it in writing.

Again.

But I do have one question for Catholic Church Insurance:

Why was CCI so adamant to do whatever it took to NOT communicate with my NTD and comply with their injury management and return to work obligations? 

These IMEs by CCI’s chosen practitioners were repeatedly used as obstruction to their injury management and return to work statutory obligations. 

WHY, CATHOLIC CHURCH INSURANCE? 

And what does ALL this reveal to us about the integrity, ethics and professional conduct of IME “practitioners” used in workplace psychological injury cases?  

WHERE ARE THE SAFEGUARDS? 

⸻

What made this IME particularly painful was that it wasn’t even new.

It was the same practitioner who had “examined” me more than a year earlier (an examination never needed in the first place. What was “required” was return to work compliance!) 

I wrote to my lawyers:

“It’s the same practitioner as the one assigned on 31 March 2021. I’m going to be repeating myself again, yet with another torturous year of injuries.”

One sentence captured everything.

Another torturous year.

Not because my original workplace injury had simply continued…

But because the system itself had become another source of injury.

⸻

I found myself trying to explain something that seemed obvious to me.

How could an injured worker continue being sent from one “assessment” to another while the people responsible for coordinating recovery had never coordinated recovery at all?

I wrote:

“I’m the only one who’s made efforts to implement the injury management plan, along with … my NTD.”

RECOVERY was NEVER meant to be something the injured worker carried ALONE.

⸻

By then I wasn’t just talking about an IME.

I was trying to explain years of accumulated failures.

I wrote that my treating doctor had never been contacted by a case manager.

I described repeatedly asking for communication.

Repeatedly asking for collaboration.

Repeatedly asking for protection.

Instead, I had been left alone to navigate a system that expected me to recover while denying me the very processes designed to support recovery.

⸻

As I wrote to my solicitor, the words became less legal and more human.

“My right to a voice in my recovery was repeatedly denied and ignored.”

That was the real injury.

Not simply being unheard once.

Being unheard over…

and over…

and over again.

⸻

Then came one of the most heartbreaking admissions in the correspondence.

“I never viewed the … letter because I was distressed and humiliated, betrayed and abused and degraded by employer, insurer, union, and the NSW government departments meant to ensure our safety. It’s trauma.”

Trauma survivors avoid opening or reading certain correspondence. 

You might ask why don’t they “just read the letter.”

Because reading the words written means reliving the trauma, humiliation and indignity. 

⸻

By this point I wasn’t only trying to explain what had happened.

I was trying to explain what I still wanted…

…despite the years of aggressive adverse action by the senior executives of a nationally registered, publicly funded university employer and NSW STATE REGULATORS WHO DON’T ENFORCE COMPLIANCE ON ALL KEY STAKEHOLDERS …

…I wrote:

“I want to recover in my job.”

Not compensation, as per coercion down such a path, aided and abetted by the specialised insurer CCI (but restitution for the serious financial loss from this institutional wage theft must now happen, hence PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY).

I want my statutory workers compensation right to:

Recovery.

⸻

What strikes me most about these emails to Walker Law Group, isn’t the legal references.

It’s the desperation between the lines.

The hope that surely…

surely…

someone would finally stop and ask what was actually happening.

Instead, I found myself compiling legislation, documenting events, explaining procedural failures, identifying obligations, and trying to hold together my health while preparing to recount the same traumatic story to yet another CCI coerced IME “practitioner”.

I wasn’t recovering.

I was becoming an expert in surviving abusive systems.

And perhaps the saddest sentence I wrote during those days wasn’t about legislation at all.

It was this:

“I’m starting to feel no one cares about me in this society.”

No one should ever reach the point where that feels true.

Yet for me, in June 2022, after years of asking for help, that was exactly how it felt.

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 355-356.

——

Further reading 

I wasn’t only fighting yet another traumatic and unjustified IME.

I was fighting to reclaim the conditions that allow a human being to flourish.

I came across an article by Dr Wendy Purcell, “A Fairer Society is One that is Flourishing.” She writes that flourishing is about far more than the absence of illness. It’s about having meaningful work, financial security, dignity, purpose, healthy relationships, agency over our own lives, and the opportunity to become our fullest selves. She argues that these should not be privileges enjoyed by some, but universal human rights in a fair society. 

My lived experience has been the opposite, given how current ACU leaders treated me, my family, and who knows how many others. Human flourishing must be acted upon, not only talked about in bite sized videos and posts regarding Ethics on LinkedIn (see http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/05/the-deputy-vice-chancellor-of-ethics_01727877882.html). 

This is a Catholic university committed to the dignity of the human person in its very mission statement. The current leaders should not be there, nor should Catholic Church Insurance have continued such unlawful and disgraceful corporate conduct. 

The workplace injury itself was devastating, but what followed stripped away many of the very foundations that research identifies as essential for human flourishing. My health deteriorated. My financial security disappeared. My career was interrupted. My dignity was eroded. Relationships came under enormous strain. Even my sense of agency—my ability to have a voice in my own recovery—was repeatedly taken from me.

No one should have to spend years proving they deserve the opportunity to recover.

A workers’ compensation system should not merely determine liability. It should help restore the conditions that enable an injured worker to flourish again—to recover their health, dignity, return to work and place in their community.

That is what I was asking for.

And that is what I am still asking for.

Dr. Wendy M. Purcell  (2022, 14 January). A fairer society is one that is flourishing. [Online blog] : https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/opinion-and-blog/a-fairer-society-one-flourishing