Fair Work Ombudsman - Another Door, Another Referral - July 2022

By July 2022, I had run out of places to turn within the New South Wales system.

I had reported serious WHS failures to SafeWork NSW. I had pleaded with SIRA to enforce the workers’ compensation legislation that was supposed to protect injured workers. I had sought legal advice, contacted ministers, approached my union, spoken to police, even attempted to obtain protection through the courts.

Every path seemed to end the same way.

Someone else.

Somewhere else.

Someone else’s responsibility.

So I went federal.

——

On 12 July 2022, I wrote to the Fair Work Ombudsman, hoping that perhaps a federal workplace regulator would finally review what had happened.

My opening words reflected how urgent my situation had become:

“I request your assistance and support in this serious work matter… I have already tried and exhausted every professional and government service I could think of to ensure procedural fairness and natural justice.”

The letter wasn’t simply another complaint.

It was a detailed summary of years spent trying to resolve the matter through every proper avenue I could identify.

I listed everything I had already done.

• Three employment law firms.
• NSW Police.
• The Local Court.
• National Tertiary Education Union 
• SafeWork NSW.
• SIRA.
• IRO.
• Workers’ compensation solicitors.
• State ministers.
• My local Member of Parliament - Chris Minns. 

I was documenting the fact that every system seemed to point me somewhere else.

By then, I also explained something far more personal.

“I finally felt exploited in society, not just within the university, now causing a risk of losing my home…”

That sentence captures exactly where my life was by July 2022.

This was no longer only about a workplace safety issue.

The financial consequences were escalating rapidly.

Everything I had worked for was beginning to unravel.

Yet despite all of that, I was still trying to resolve the matter through proper legal and regulatory channels.

I asked the Fair Work Ombudsman to review my evidence, investigate non-compliance, consider enforcement powers, and help bring an end to ongoing workplace mobbing.

——

Eight days later, on 20 July 2022, I sent Part Two of my evidence.

By then, the emotional cost of preparing it had become overwhelming.

I admitted something I hadn’t anticipated:

“I realised that it is more traumatic than I initially thought it would be, as I review and relive…”

Every timeline I prepared required reopening years of emails, correspondence, medical records and legal documents.

Every folder meant reliving another part of the story.

Still, I kept going because I believed someone, eventually, would read the evidence and act.

I wrote:

“Please help from a Fair Work perspective.” 

——

Then, on 25 July 2022, the response arrived.

After “reviewing” my “enquiry”, the Fair Work Ombudsman advised that it “appeared” I needed assistance from the Fair Work Commission, not the Ombudsman, and referred me to information about stop bullying orders and general protections. 

Objectively, it was a referral.

Subjectively, after everything that had already happened, it was another closed door.

By that stage I had already lost much of my trust in the system.

Every response triggered another cycle of fear.

The suggestion that I pursue a Stop Bullying Order showed just how disconnected the process felt from the reality I was living. 

See the FWC case on public record I’ve already written about to demonstrate this systemic and regulatory failure:

1. http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/05/the-unfair-work-commission-denying.html
2. http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/07/the-unfair-work-commission-denying.html
3. http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/07/the-unfair-work-commission-denying_31.html

This wasn’t workplace conflict. It wasn’t between two colleagues.

I had exercised a lawful workplace right by requesting a psychosocially safe work environment. That should have triggered compliance with work health and safety obligations.

Instead, it triggered years of serious adverse action.

What followed wasn’t an attempt to make my workplace safe. The very people who should have been ensuring compliance became part of the machinery that justified not complying!

The more I persisted in asking for my rights, the further the situation escalated.

Every opportunity to do the right thing seemed to be replaced with another process, another letter, another justification, another referral, another barrier.

And I had already informed the Fair Work Ombudsman, in my letter (as the list above shows), that I had already tried THREE EMPLOYMENT LAWYERS! 

See http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/04/employment-lawyer-3-part-5-unacceptable.html! 

And http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/05/i-advise-you-make-workers-compensation.html! 

I was STILL being sent in circles! Do these public servants actually read anything!? 

——

By July 2022, I wasn’t looking for another process.

I was asking a much simpler question:

Who was going to enforce the laws that were already supposed to protect me?

As I’ve mentioned, by then, I had already spoken with employment lawyers about pursuing a General Protections application.

The estimates I received were confronting. I was being quoted legal costs beginning at around $40,000, with no certainty of recovering those costs even if I succeeded. For someone whose income had already been devastated because statutory workers’ compensation obligations had not been complied with, that wasn’t a realistic option.

The suggestion of a Stop Bullying Order also failed to recognise the reality of my situation. Perhaps in a future post, I’ll share the brazenness in the letter from Matthew Condello of Clayton Utz, dated 29 January 2021. It comes across as having been emboldened by the “successful” tactic used in the FWC by his legal peer Rena Christmann and fellow repeat offender of medical malpractice, Deepinder Miller. Refer to the cited case above. And if I appear bold in what I write, it comes down to a combination of concrete evidence and traumatic harm these people caused! They have all brought disrepute to their legal and medical professions! 

Furthermore, these orders are often associated with preventing ongoing workplace bullying where the behaviour can be stopped prospectively. My experience was different. I wasn’t describing conflict with a co-worker. The bullying, adverse action and failures to protect me originated within the employer’s own senior leadership and with their employment relations’ unethical and corrupted “processes”!

How was a worker—already suffering the financial consequences of prolonged statutory non-compliance—supposed to fund that?

And for what?

To enter yet another legal process while the statutory workers’ compensation scheme, which already imposed obligations on my employer and insurer, remained unenforced?

It made no sense.

As I’ve already mentioned and cited, I had also become aware of proceedings involving another university employee before the Fair Work Commission. This reinforced my fear that an employee could endure enormous personal exposure while still not receiving the protection they sought. For me, it confirmed that this was not the path that was going to restore my safety, my work or my life.

So when the Fair Work Ombudsman referred me elsewhere, I didn’t experience it as guidance.

I experienced it as another institution saying, in effect:

“Not us. Try someone else.”

That had become the pattern.

Each regulator, each agency and each authority looked at one small piece of the puzzle (conveniently skewed to parts not in their “remit” and ignoring parts that were) or misinterpreted what was being reported (let alone ever bothering to review the records of evidence), before directing me to somebody else.

Meanwhile, nobody appeared willing to take responsibility for the whole picture.

And while the systems debated jurisdiction, I was the one living with the consequences.

I was the one watching my financial security disappear.

I was the one left alone, in this huge power imbalance, fighting to save my home, my career, my health and eventually my superannuation.

Every referral came with another emotional cost.

Every letter reopened the trauma.

Every “try somewhere else” left me sitting alone, frightened and helpless, asking the same question I had been asking for years:

If every regulator can point to someone else, who is left to protect the worker?

——

By July 2022, the issue was no longer only about workplace and organisational behaviour.

I had already been injured by my employer, with a continuation of the same misconduct by the specialised insurer, Catholic Church Insurance.

I had already spent years trying to have my workplace rights recognised.

Most importantly, I was already within a statutory workers’ compensation scheme that was specifically intended to protect injured workers and support their recovery and return to work. That statutory framework had become the central issue.

Sending me back into another legal process did NOTHING to address why those existing statutory protections had failed.

——

So when I read the Fair Work Ombudsman’s response referring me elsewhere, it wasn’t just another administrative letter.

It felt like history repeating itself.

Another agency.

Another referral.

Another process.

 

“Not here. Try somewhere else.” The system was fragmented. The harm was not.

Meanwhile, nobody was asking the fundamental question that had haunted me for years:

If a statutory scheme designed to protect injured workers is not being complied with, who is responsible for ensuring that it is?

Each referral wasn’t simply administrative.

It reopened the trauma.

It reinforced the feeling that no one was willing to take ownership of examining the whole picture.

And while government agencies debated jurisdiction…

…my life continued to collapse.

That’s the part that can easily be missed.

The regulatory process happened in one timeline.

My financial life was collapsing in another.

As I continued writing letters, compiling evidence and searching for someone willing to intervene, I was simultaneously watching the ripple effects spread through my home, my finances, my investments and eventually my superannuation.

Those weren’t separate stories.

They were happening at exactly the same time.

The next instalments will continue that parallel crisis—because while one system referred me elsewhere, the financial consequences of prolonged inaction were becoming impossible to stop.

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 432 & 434.

——

Further reading: 

The Fair Work Ombudsman’s current Compliance and Enforcement Policy sets out its approach to regulatory discretion, investigation and enforcement. Among the factors it now identifies are patterns of behaviour, system-wide non-compliance, significant power imbalances between duty holders and workers, the resources available to affected workers to commence their own proceedings, and: “What would be the impact if the FWO did not act in response to the concern?” 

I’ll return to these principles in the next post of my story, in the context of what has since emerged about systemic non-compliance and governance across Australia’s university sector.

Fair Work Ombudsman (2025). Compliance and Enforcement Policy. [Online]: https://www.fairwork.gov.au/sites/default/files/migration/725/compliance-and-enforcement-policy.pdf