The Parallel Crisis: While I Was Fighting for My Working Life, I Was Trying to Save My Home - July 2022

25–29 July 2022

There was never just one crisis.

That’s something that can disappear when a story like mine is reduced to a workplace WHS issue, a workers compensation claim, an insurance matter, a regulatory complaint or a legal proceeding. Each part gets placed into its own administrative box.

But I didn’t live inside separate boxes.

While I was trying to deal with what had happened to me at work, the workers compensation system, the insurer, lawyers and regulators, I was simultaneously trying to manage the financial consequences that had spilled into the rest of my life.

By late July 2022, that parallel crisis had reached my property.

I was selling my Melbourne investment property while purchasing my home in Sydney. What should have been an ordinary property transaction had become another exercise in trying to hold together the financial pieces of a life already under enormous pressure.

And once again, I found myself coordinating professionals, chasing answers, trying to understand systems outside my expertise and trying to prevent further financial loss.

——

25 July 2022 — trying to bring settlement forward

On 25 July 2022, my Victorian solicitors were communicating with the solicitors handling the NSW purchase.

The Melbourne property was scheduled to settle on 8 August 2022, but I was asking whether settlement could happen much earlier — on Friday, 29 July 2022.

My solicitor wrote:

“our mutual client has requested our office for settlement to take place this Friday, 29 July 2022.”

There was also the problem of coordinating the Victorian sale with the NSW purchase through PEXA. My Victorian solicitors sent a PEXA invitation and asked the NSW solicitors to link the workspaces so that the financial funds could be transferred.

This wasn’t impatience on my part.

Every delay had a financial consequence.

——

26 July 2022 — another problem to solve

By 26 July 2022, another complication had emerged.

My Victorian solicitor advised that the two firms were unable to conduct a linked PEXA settlement because of the interstate jurisdiction issue and suggested that the Victorian sale settle first, followed by the NSW purchase.

At the same time, my home loan consultant had been told that a security swap could allow the transactions to settle simultaneously.

The bank’s solicitor referred the issue to its settlements lead and lender credit team for further review. The file was also progressing through a Quality Assurance review process.

This is what the parallel crisis looked like in practice.

Emails. Phone calls. Lawyers in different states. A lender. A mortgage-processing legal agent. PEXA workspaces. A security substitution. Settlement dates. Deposits. Interest.

And me in the middle of it.

I wasn’t a conveyancer. I wasn’t a banker. I wasn’t a property lawyer.

I was somebody already carrying an extraordinary burden who now had to understand enough of all of this to keep the transaction moving.

All while having been made very sick by a nationally registered, publicly funded university employer, its APRA regulated specialised insurer, Catholic Church Insurance, total regulatory failure and my elected MP, Chris Minns, and his government in office, not caring about a serious systemic state issue that his Kogarah electorate constituent first brought to the attention of his office on 15 October 2021. 

SafeWork NSW and SIRA NSW are STILL a colossal failure under the Minns government. 

And I bore the entire cost of the Minns government’s “failures”. Chris Minns “failed” a Kogarah electorate constituent. He is my family’s elected representative, who was voted in to serve and represent us. The Minns government has cost me well over $1.2 million, ongoing. There’s more coming on that part of my story.

The records don’t lie! 

——

27 July 2022 — “I called … this morning to understand what the confusion is as this isn’t my expertise”

By the morning of 27 July 2022, I wrote to the solicitors.

I explained what I understood about the security substitution and asked the Victorian and NSW solicitors to join the new PEXA workspace created by the bank.

Then I said:

“The sooner settlement takes place, the better. I would prefer not to leave it until 8 August 2022 now that the Melbourne property has sold.”

The Melbourne property had sold.

This was no longer an abstract discussion about finances. An asset I had built and owned was being converted into the means of keeping everything else together.

And then I wrote something that captures the entire reason I call this the parallel crisis:

“I’ve had so much going on with resolving the other serious issue (that’s caused this workaround mess as a snowball effect).”

That’s exactly what it was.

A snowball effect.

The original crisis hadn’t remained contained within my workplace. Its consequences had spread into my income, my savings, my legal costs, my property and the financial decisions I was being forced to make.

I was incurring interest while everybody tried to coordinate.

In an email that same morning, my home loan consultant confirmed that the Victorian settlement was then scheduled for 8 August 2022 and the NSW settlement for 10 August 2022. He explained that the bank’s solicitors had confirmed simultaneous settlement could occur through a security swap provided all parties could settle through PEXA.

Most importantly, he expressly recorded why the matter needed to move:

“Vicki is incurring daily interest.”

While the professionals worked through jurisdiction, workspaces, lender requirements and settlement processes, the financial metre continued running.

Every day mattered.

——

“Forgive my need for clarification”

I was carefully trying to navigate something that had become overwhelmingly complicated.

I was apologising for asking questions about transactions involving my own property and my own money.

The bank’s solicitor explained that the matter was with its Quality Assurance review sign-off team and that, once approved, the solicitors would be told the matter was ready to book. Only then could an earlier settlement date potentially be arranged.

I forwarded that update to my agent:

“I’ll know tomorrow. The hold up is bureaucracy.”

That sentence could almost have been the subtitle for this entire period of my life.

——

The Melbourne property was being liquidated to keep my life moving

Administrative language like deposit monies, trust account, settlement purposes, funds cleared, can make the transaction sound almost bloodless.

It wasn’t.

Behind those words was an asset.

Behind that asset were years of work, saving and investment.

And behind its sale was a much bigger story about what happens when a person’s income and financial stability are illegally destabilised and they have to start using accumulated assets to absorb the consequences.

This wasn’t money appearing from nowhere.

It was my own financial security being rearranged to survive a crisis I should never have been placed in.

I want those who govern ACU, CCI, SIRA NSW and SafeWork NSW, along with my elected representative Chris Minns and his ministers Jihad Dib and Sophie Cotsis, to become fully aware of this. 

——

29 July 2022 — finally, a date

Two days later, on 29 July 2022, I could finally had a date. I informed the real estate agent:

“I can finally give you a concrete and confirmed date of settlement.”

That date was:

Wednesday, 10 August 2022.

It sounds like such a small administrative victory.

A date.

But by then, certainty itself had become a form of relief.

——

This is what financial harm looks like while it is happening

Financial harm is often reconstructed years later as a spreadsheet.

A figure.

A damages calculation.

A line in a chronology.

But that’s not how it’s lived.

It’s lived through mornings spent ringing people.

It’s lived through emails saying, I just want to make sure I understand.

It’s lived through daily interest while processes continue.

It’s lived through selling an investment property when it never needed to be sold if compliance had been enforced on both employer and insurer by the regulators.

It’s lived through coordinating the sale of one property, the purchase of another and the transfer of lending security while simultaneously trying to survive a separate institutional crisis.

The workplace and workers compensation crisis wasn’t happening in isolation from the rest of my life.

It was consuming the rest of my life.

By July 2022, I wasn’t only fighting to have what had happened to me recognised and addressed.

I was trying to stop the consequences from taking everything else with them.

And I was still doing the work myself.

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 499-506.