The Week Everything Depended on Compliance - May 2022

The final week of May 2022. 

Late May 2022 became a race to save my home before time ran out.

I was spending my days trying to save my home, convince a workers’ compensation system to follow its own laws, and somehow keep believing that if I knocked on one more door, someone would finally help. 

Every phone call, every email, every meeting with lawyers, banks and health professionals revolved around one simple reality: if the workers’ compensation scheme simply complied with its own legislation, everything else could finally begin to recover.

Instead, I found myself trying to hold together a collapsing house of cards that never should have been collapsing in the first place.

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By this stage I had reopened my workers’ compensation case with Walker Law Group.

I wasn’t asking them to create a miracle.

I was asking them to enforce laws that already existed.

• The insurer had never properly provided my weekly payments.
• The Injury Management Plan had never been implemented.
• There had been no replacement case manager after the initial (and ethical) case manager left.
• No rehabilitation liaison.
• No communication with my nominated treating doctor.

Instead, there had been repeated Independent Medical Examinations while the professionals actually responsible for my recovery remained excluded.  

Everything that was supposed to happen under workers’ compensation had been replaced with delay.

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At exactly the same time, another clock was ticking.

Settlement on the home I was trying so desperately to purchase.

The bank wasn’t the problem.

The mortgage wasn’t the problem.

The vendor wasn’t the problem.

The problem was that my income had been withheld for almost two years.

If the insurer complied with their obligations, the bank could process everything almost immediately.

I explained to my workers’ compensation solicitor:

“Approval can happen in one day based on CCI complying with workers compensation regulations this time…”  

One day.

That was all it would have taken.

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Instead, every delay created another consequence.

Settlement extensions.

Vendor pressure.

Penalty interest.

Humiliation.

The possibility of losing the deposit.

Months earlier I had believed my secure employment after twenty years would always protect me.

Now I was apologising to complete strangers because my own employer and insurer would not honour their legal obligations.

I even asked my conveyancing solicitor to apologise to the vendor on my behalf because I knew how patient she had been.

No one should ever have to apologise for circumstances created by systemic failure.

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The irony never left me.

Throughout this entire period, I wasn’t trying to leave work.

I was trying to get back to it.

Again and again I wrote almost identical words.

• I wanted my worker’s compensation entitlements.
• I wanted my return to work.
• I wanted my colleagues to support my recovery.

Not endless investigations.

Not endless IMEs.

Not endless legal arguments.

Simply the rehabilitation pathway the legislation already required.

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One email listed everything that had never happened.

• No weekly payments.
• No replacement case manager.
• No rehabilitation specialist.
• No communication with my nominated treating doctor.
• No consent process for communication with treating practitioners.
• No meaningful participation in my own recovery.

Reading that list today still shocks me.

Seeing it written together makes it impossible to ignore how many safeguards simply disappeared. 

It also shocks me that so many agencies in the system just ignored this list completely. SafeWork NSW; SIRA NSW; IRO funded workers’ compensation solicitors and the Personal Injury Commission. It always became someone else’s responsibility to enforce statutory compliance in this abusive and fragmented system. 

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I also asked my treating psychologist for a copy of the report CCI had requested in 2020.

I remembered its recommendations.

One recommendation stood out.

A rehabilitation liaison to coordinate my return to work.

Exactly the sort of practical intervention that could have reduced conflict, supported communication and helped everyone work towards recovery.

Instead, those recommendations disappeared into the system (or rather, ignored by both employer and insurer). 

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During that same week another thread from 2020 resurfaced.

I requested a copy of the Local Court’s decision not to list my Apprehended Personal Violence Order application against the national manager of employment and SAFETY, Rena Christmann. This individual was stalking, badgering, harassing and intimidating me “on behalf of the university”, and inciting mobbing, ostracism and victimisation, while also withholding workers’ compensation benefits and information to deny me my statutory right to recover in my job. 

I had followed every piece of advice I had been given.

Fair Work Ombudsman had directed me to the police.

Police had suggested an APVO because it involved workplace conduct.

Law Access had suggested the same.

 

Advice received before lodging the APVO application (September 2020): after speaking with NSW Police and Law Access NSW, I was advised to apply for an Apprehended Personal Violence Order because the harassment was continuing while I was on workers’ compensation.

Yet even that avenue had gone nowhere. The court registrar fobbed me off to the Fair Work Ombudsman, who were the ones who started this distressing circular harm, with no outcome of intervention, protection and safety. 

When I received the court’s response, I couldn’t help noticing they hadn’t even spelled the respondent’s name correctly.

After everything that had happened, even that small detail felt symbolic.

 

The Local Court’s response (22 September 2020): the application was declined because it involved a “work colleague”, with advice to pursue workplace avenues instead.

This was one of the most bewildering experiences of the entire ordeal. I followed the advice I had been given. Police directed me one way. Law Access supported that advice. The Local Court then declined the application because it was considered a workplace matter and referred me back to workplace processes. By that stage I had already reported the matter through my employer, the workers’ compensation system and SafeWork NSW. Each system pointed towards another, while the conduct I was reporting continued.

It reinforced a feeling I had lived with for years.

That I was trying desperately to protect myself while everyone else treated the situation as administrative paperwork.  

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I also found myself turning to elected representatives.

I had reached the end of every formal pathway I knew.

I wrote to my federal MP, Linda Burney.

I had already spent months trying to engage my state representative, Chris Minns. See http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-day-i-almost-didnt-come-back.html for the almost tragic outcome from that engagement. 

By then I was exhausted.

I wrote words that are difficult to read.

“I fought so hard to save my livelihood, my surviving family, my home and my life.”  

I wasn’t writing political correspondence anymore.

I was writing survival letters.

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Throughout those emails one sentence appears over and over again.

“I just want my return to work entitlements.”

Not compensation.

Not revenge.

Not publicity.

Return to work.

Recovery.

Safety.

Dignity.

Those remained remarkably consistent despite everything that was happening around me.

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Then another fear emerged.

I believed information about reopening my workers’ compensation claim had again reached the very manager I had repeatedly asked to be protected from (see above).

Whether that perception ultimately proved correct or not, what mattered was what it reveals about my psychological state after years of conflict.

I no longer trusted the system that was supposed to protect me.

Every unexpected development felt like another threat.

That is what prolonged workplace trauma does.

It teaches you to expect danger even where safety should exist.

I pleaded once more:

“Please get her away from me and get my worker’s compensation benefits… to recover safely in my job as per injury management plan.”  

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I can see that this wasn’t really a story about buying a unit.

The unit became something much bigger.

It represented stability.

Safety.

Somewhere permanent after years of instability.

Owning that home meant finally being able to stop fighting simply to survive financially and begin focusing on recovering psychologically.

Instead, every delay inside the workers’ compensation system pushed that possibility further away.

That is what these documents capture so clearly.

Not a person refusing to engage with rehabilitation.

A person repeatedly asking for rehabilitation while desperately trying to stop every other part of her life from collapsing around it.

And the wage theft continues to this day…

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 337-338, 342-344

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Significant Development

Only a few months after these events, the NSW Government introduced the Work Health and Safety Amendment Regulation 2022, which expressly recognised and regulated psychosocial hazards in the workplace. 

Work Health and Safety Amendment Regulation 2022 under the Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (NSW) for Psychosocial Hazards - https://legislation.nsw.gov.au/view/pdf/asmade/sl-2022-551 

This represents an important acknowledgment by the NSW Government that psychosocial hazards require proactive management and that workplace psychological health deserves the same systematic attention as physical safety.

The amendments defined a psychosocial hazard as one arising from the design or management of work, the work environment, workplace interactions or behaviours, and acknowledged that these hazards can cause psychological harm. Importantly, they imposed a positive duty on employers to identify, eliminate or minimise psychosocial risks so far as is reasonably practicable, rather than waiting until workers became psychologically injured.

The Regulation also requires employers to consider factors such as:

• the duration, frequency and severity of exposure to psychosocial hazards;
• how multiple hazards interact or combine;
• the way work is designed, managed and supported;
• workplace interactions and behaviours; and
• the information, training, instruction and supervision provided to workers. 

Reading this legislation, I cannot help but reflect on my repeated reports to my employer and to SafeWork NSW from 2020 onwards, and my repeated requests to recover safely in my job.

For years, I repeatedly reported psychosocial hazards affecting my health and wellbeing. I sought support, requested intervention, documented my concerns, and repeatedly asked to return to work safely through the Injury Management Plan that had already been agreed upon. Instead, those risks were not effectively managed, and the regulatory response from SafeWork NSW did not result in the protections needed.

These amendments demonstrate that the risks I had been describing for years were recognised in law as psychosocial hazards requiring systematic management.

They reinforce the importance of identifying and managing psychosocial hazards before they cause further harm. The retaliation experienced by my university employer must now be carefully scrutinised. 

I need to highlight that the 2022 Regulation did not create my right to a psychologically safe workplace or my right to recover and return to work. Those rights already existed. What the amendments did was make explicit the kinds of psychosocial hazards and risk controls that should have been recognised and addressed much earlier in my case.

Furthermore, the workers’ compensation scheme already contemplated recovery and return to work, and my Injury Management Plan had already been agreed. The issue was never the absence of legal duties—it was the failure to implement and enforce them.