SIRA NSW - The Regulator Already Knew the System Was Failing - August 2022

By August 2022, I was asking a much bigger question:

What happens when the regulator responsible for overseeing a system publicly acknowledges that the system is failing — yet an injured worker experiencing that failure still cannot get meaningful regulatory intervention?

——

SIRA Was Already Talking About a Failing Return-to-Work System

By this time, the NSW State Insurance Regulatory Authority — SIRA — had publicly acknowledged serious deterioration in return-to-work outcomes across the NSW workers compensation scheme.

Its own publication, Turning around poor return to work performance, stated:

“Return to work rates – a key performance measure for the scheme – have continued to decline since 2015, with more workers off work today than ever before.”

Then SIRA Chief Executive Adam Dent described the core purpose of the scheme in equally clear terms:

“The core role of the workers compensation scheme is to help people recover and return to work.”

Read that again. And again. It’s what I’ve been trying to do THIS ENTIRE TIME. 

While publicly stating the above, SIRA NSW, along with SafeWork NSW, had become barriers to my right to return and recover in my job! 

SIRA’s own figures showed just how badly performance had deteriorated.

Between 2015–16 and 2020–21, the four-week return-to-work rate fell from 77% to 65%. The stay-at-work rate fell from 45% to 34%, while the working rate fell from 87% to 77%.

SIRA itself described this as a pattern occurring across the system. There’s an obvious no-brainier here. Do I have to repeat the ‘F’ word? Systemic FRAGMENTATION? 

To me, these were not merely statistics.

I was one of the human beings behind them, having to put up the fight of my life to assert my right to recover at work. I had to fight against the corporate misconduct not only of a larger employer, but the specialised insurer for Catholic Church institutions too. On top of that was SIRA NSW’s regulatory failure. 

I spent years having to fight back this regulator and its poor governance practices too. 

——

People Are Not Data

When I saw SIRA publicly announcing its plan to improve return-to-work performance, I responded on LinkedIn.

I wrote:

“People are not data, statistics or merely numbers.”

I asked where the enforcement was when breaches were actually reported.

I asked:

“Where are the procedures of enforcement and compliance of worker’s compensation regulations when a reported violation is made?”

And I challenged the way success was being measured:

“Success is measured in action, people’s experiences of recovery in their jobs, and documented support mechanisms and compliance.”

That distinction was fundamental.

A regulator can publish strategies.

It can announce initiatives.

It can establish working groups, collect data, commission research and publish performance measures.

But none of that tells us what happens when an individual injured worker says: the system is failing me now.

What happens when the worker reports the non-compliance?

What happens when the worker identifies the people and organisations involved?

What happens when that worker is trying to recover in their job, while the very system supposedly designed to facilitate recovery appears incapable of protecting that pathway?

That was why I finished my LinkedIn post by asking something that remains important:

“What is SIRA going to do for restitution and reparation toward those that have already suffered in a failed process and system? What about people who have already been victims of systemic failure?”

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SIRA’s Own Action Plan Made the Disconnect Harder to Understand

What made my experience particularly difficult to reconcile was what SIRA itself said it intended to do.

Its ten-point action plan included reviewing insurers’ return-to-work practices, including their injury-management programs, files, systems and controls.

SIRA said it would publish insurers’ return-to-work performance to improve transparency and hold insurers accountable.

It announced a dedicated return-to-work inspectorate which, where necessary, would use enforcement action.

It specifically recognised the difficulties experienced by people with psychological injuries, funding research through the Black Dog Institute into barriers to recovery and successful return to work.

It even proposed proactively identifying workers at risk of delayed return to work and contacting them early in the claims process.

On paper, much of this sounded like precisely the kind of regulatory intervention I had been desperately seeking.*

That was the contradiction.

I wasn’t an abstract future worker who might someday be identified by predictive modelling.

I was already there.

I was already reporting what had gone catastrophically wrong.

And I was already asking the regulator to act.

*Not long after, this published page on SIRA was removed. Why did SIRA remove this page? Why, years later, is SIRA becoming a greater failure in the RTW outcomes than ever before? That discovery of “page not found” is coming up later in my lived experience as I write it, on my own platform. This blog. 

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17 August 2022 — I Raised Another Serious Concern

On 17 August 2022, I emailed SIRA again.

This time, my subject line was:

“Complaint and SIRA’s legal duty of care.”

The complaint concerned SIRA approved IME practitioner Deepinder Miller, who was listed in the material I captured from SIRA’s website as a permanent impairment assessor.

My language was furious because by this point what had happened to me wasn’t an isolated experience.

I asked SIRA:

“What are you going to do about Deepinder Miller?”

And:

“When will this regulator start to enforce the law on all stakeholders in the scheme, which is SIRA’s core responsibility. Where’s the transparency.”

I ended:

“The public deserve honest answers.”

The material I sent to SIRA included screenshots of numerous publicly posted reviews about Deepinder Miller stretching across years.

Those reviews are third-party personal accounts and I’m not the one who can independently verify them.

That distinction matters, but so does another one:

I wasn’t sending them to SIRA as proof of guilt. I was asking why a regulator responsible for approving assessors wasn’t investigating whether a pattern of complaints raised a regulatory concern.

The reviews I had collected described allegations including distress following assessments, dismissive or aggressive interactions, inaccurate reporting, concerns about independence, misdiagnosis and experiences that reviewers said had aggravated their psychological distress.

One review dated 31 August 2021, for example, described a workers compensation assessment as traumatic and alleged that it compounded the reviewer’s psychological injury.

Another review described an assessment undertaken for WorkCover and concluded simply:

“Don’t Trust Her”.

Other reviews reproduced in the material dated back years, from 2015.

Again, these were allegations from reviewers, not adjudicated findings.

But that was precisely why I believed a regulator existed.

Not to accept internet reviews unquestioningly.

To ask questions.

To identify patterns.

To investigate appropriately.

And, where warranted, to regulate.

See also:

http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/01/a-doctor-who-commits-fraud-2019.html;

http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/01/medical-malpractice-unprofessional.html

http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/08/proof-of-medical-fraud-october-2020.html

——

18 August 2022 — SIRA Responded

SIRA replied the following afternoon.

On 18 August 2022, a Senior Customer Support Officer acknowledged my complaint and wrote:

“I have forwarded your concerns to SIRA’s specialist team responsible for the approval of permanent impairment assessors for their information.”

SIRA then encouraged me to make a complaint to the Health Care Complaints Commission.

That sentence — “for their information” — stayed with me, because I wasn’t merely providing interesting information.

I was asking the regulator responsible for the workers compensation system what it was going to do with information concerning an assessor it approved.

I had already been through regulatory pathways.

I was exhausted by being passed from organisation to organisation.

Later that same day, I replied bluntly:

“I’m not wasting time with the HCCC.”

That response captures where I was psychologically by August 2022.

It wasn’t polished.

It wasn’t diplomatic.

It was the voice of somebody who felt that every attempt to obtain intervention resulted in another referral, another agency, another process and another burden placed back upon the injured person.

——

The Regulatory Merry-Go-Round

This is one of the most damaging features of fragmented regulatory systems.

An injured person identifies a problem.

One organisation says it belongs to another.

The next organisation deals only with one narrow aspect.

Another says it cannot determine an individual matter.

Another provides information.

Another recommends another complaint pathway.

And somewhere inside that maze, the original question disappears:

Who is actually responsible for stopping the harm?

That was what I needed answered.

I wasn’t looking for another brochure.

I wasn’t looking for another telephone number.

I wasn’t looking for another complaint form.

I wanted somebody with statutory authority to examine what was happening and determine whether the rules governing the workers compensation scheme were actually being followed.

——

The Human Being Behind the Return-to-Work Statistic

It’s deeply confronting to read a regulator’s acknowledgement that delayed return to work has serious consequences, while living those consequences yourself.

SIRA NSW: 

• acknowledged deteriorating outcomes.
• acknowledged the particular challenges surrounding psychological injury.
• promised transparency.
• promised greater accountability.
• promised scrutiny of insurers.
• promised a return-to-work inspectorate.
• promised enforcement where necessary.

Meanwhile, I was desperately trying to get back to the workplace and life I’ve known.

This is why statistics can never be the whole story.

Behind every percentage point is somebody’s employment.

Their income.

Their professional identity.

Their home.

Their financial security.

Their relationships.

Their health.

Their future.

And sometimes, behind that statistic is somebody repeatedly writing to the very regulator publishing the statistic and asking:

Will somebody please enforce the system that is supposed to help me safely recover and return to my work?

——

I Wasn’t Asking for a New Policy. I Was Asking for the Existing System to Work.

That’s perhaps the clearest way I can describe August 2022.

1. SIRA was announcing plans to turn around poor return-to-work performance. I was living the consequences of that poor performance.
2. SIRA was talking about insurer accountability. I was asking for accountability.
3. SIRA was talking about compliance. I was asking for compliance.
4. SIRA was talking about transparency. I was asking for transparency.
5. SIRA was talking about psychological injury and barriers to return to work. I was trying to tell them what those barriers looked like from inside the system.

And when I raised another serious concern about an assessor within that system, I received confirmation that my concerns had been forwarded to the relevant specialist team “for their information.”

That wasn’t enough for me.

Information without meaningful scrutiny changes nothing.

Data without human context changes nothing.

Strategies without enforcement change nothing.

And a workers compensation system cannot call itself successful simply because it measures how many injured workers fail to return.

It has to ask why they didn’t (or couldn’t) return.

It has to examine what insurers, employers, assessors and other participants actually did.

It has to respond (and not a fob off response), when workers report possible breaches.

And where failures are established, accountability cannot only be about preventing the next case.

There also has to be a conversation about the people who have already paid the price.

That was what I communicated in August 2022.

And it remains the question:

What happens to the people who were already harmed while the system was failing?

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 440 & 442. 

Once We Repaired Things - Part 12 - A Place I Felt Safe

With Father’s Day today, I’ve been thinking about fathers.

My father. Grief. Loss. And the strange ways in which, when you’re carrying more pain than you know what to do with, you search for some point of human connection.

By this stage, I was trying to find whatever pathway I could to reach Paul through empathy, reasoning and understanding.

I was carrying too much. 

I was carrying everything that was happening to me professionally and institutionally, the fear about my future, the financial consequences, the years of trying to make people listen, and the extraordinary burden of having to advocate for myself when I had no one standing beside me.

But there was another pain alongside all of that.

There was the fear that I was going to be left alone for the rest of my life with something deeply unresolved. That there would be no compassion, no understanding, no acknowledgement of what had actually happened or what I had been trying to say. No remorse for the hurt that had been caused.

There are records for what happened to me institutionally. There are laws. There are obligations. There are dates, emails, documents and evidence. However exhausting that fight has been, I can point to something tangible and say: This happened.

Human relationships are different.

There’s no regulator for a suffering heart. There’s no statutory process that can compel another human being to listen to you, understand you or show you compassion.

And, for me, that made this part of what I was living through extraordinarily difficult.

When somebody won’t hear you, you start searching for another way to be understood. You reason. You explain. You appeal to empathy. You search for something you have in common. You keep looking for the pathway that might finally allow the other person to understand what you’re trying to say.

We had both lost our fathers.

Perhaps somewhere in my grief and hopelessness I thought that shared experience might provide a bridge. Perhaps it might allow us to understand one another as human beings.

I was trying to find some way through something that was crushing me.

And strangely, unexpectedly, one of those attempts led me somewhere else.

It led me to a parish.

I don’t want to identify the parish, because this isn’t a story about denominations, institutions or historical divisions within Christianity. Nor do I want something deeply personal to me reduced to gossip, or (heaven forbid) scandal, when there’s no scandal to be had.

This is about faith.

My faith is separate from the hypocrisy I have witnessed in institutions that profess Christian values while behaving in ways that, in my experience, have been completely contrary to them.

I can’t pretend otherwise simply because an institution calls itself Catholic or Greek Orthodox.

I can’t go somewhere and feel that, by remaining silent about conduct I believe is wrong, I’m betraying my own conscience.

And I can’t worship somewhere I’ve been made to feel unsafe.

A church shouldn’t be another place of fear.

It should be a place of peace.

Of prayer.

Of mercy.

Of compassion.

Of healing.

Of non-judgement.

It’s the house of the Lord. We’re all supposed to be welcome there.

And in this parish, I felt safe.

The parish priest was a humble and wise man. There was something about his humility, his wisdom and the way he treated people that reminded me very much of my own father.

There was mutual respect.

There was no performance. No superiority. No judgement.

Just humanity.

He has since retired, but I will always remember what that meant to me during a period of my life when I was struggling to find anywhere that felt safe.

I also met lovely people there. Down-to-earth people. Humble people.

I had somewhere I could walk into and feel that I belonged.

And yet there’s an irony in that too.

Sometimes I would sit in that church surrounded by a community and still feel profoundly alone.

I would look around and think: Where is my family? Where is my husband? Where are my children?

I could belong to a community and still feel the enormous absence of the life I thought I might have had. 

I was sitting among people, but I was sitting alone.

God saw that.

God knew that.

A place where I felt safe, even when I still felt alone.

There were times throughout these years when I quite literally dropped to my knees in prayer because I didn’t know what else to do.

I felt cornered from every direction.

I had tried reasoning. I had tried explaining. I had tried regulators. I had tried institutions. I had tried asking people simply to listen.

There were moments when all I could think was:

Please help me. I don’t know what to do anymore.

Perhaps that’s why St. Jude has crossed my mind so many times — the patron saint traditionally associated with desperate situations and seemingly lost causes.

Because so many of the things I’ve been asking for were never unreasonable.

They only became seemingly hopeless because people repeatedly chose not to act.

Sometimes a “hopeless cause” isn’t inherently hopeless at all.

Sometimes it becomes hopeless because human beings make it so.

Because somebody will not listen.

Because somebody will not intervene.

Because somebody decides it is somebody else’s problem.

Because people who can make a difference choose indifference instead.

There’s something else about how I came to this particular parish that I’ll keep private. It involved something that seemed connected with Paul’s father that I happened to see in a past parish newsletter.

Perhaps God was leading me somewhere I needed to be.

Sometimes I’ve even wondered whether perhaps a father I never knew somehow helped lead me towards a place where I could find a little peace.

Perhaps it was a path from Our Father, not a father. 

I cannot know that.

But I do know where that pathway took me.

It took me into a church where I felt safe.

And perhaps, if Paul reads this, he can take something positive from that.

Something good came from something that otherwise is causing me enormous pain.

I found a parish community.

I found a priest whose humility reminded me of my father.

I found people who were kind to me.

And I found somewhere I could sit in the presence of God when I had nowhere else to put what I was carrying.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to attend Mass for some time.

I’ve become too unwell.

Years of regulatory failure, institutional harm, financial pressure, uncertainty, fighting, pleading and trying to make people understand, eventually take their toll. So does carrying unresolved personal pain alongside all of it.

I can’t carry all of this alone anymore.

I’ve been saying that for years.

There are finally signs that parts of what happened to me are being heard beyond the systems in which I spent years trying to obtain help. I’ve had meetings. I’ve had phone conversations. I’ve provided records. Matters have now reached the Commonwealth sphere.

I hope that means I’ll finally have people with the authority and agency to do what I could never do alone.

Because nobody should have to fight this hard simply to be heard.

And that brings me back to something much larger than my own story.

Indifference is one of the great diseases of our time.

I’ve experienced far too much of it.

The further my situation progressed, the more I encountered — and witnessed — what happens when human beings stop seeing the human being in front of them.

That matters far beyond my circumstances.

It matters when we talk about loneliness.

It matters when we talk about despair.

It matters when we talk about belonging.

And it matters enormously when we talk about suicide prevention.

Australia now has a National Suicide Prevention Office. Suicide prevention is increasingly being discussed as something requiring a whole-of-government and whole-of-society response.

That’s important.

But there’s something I need to say as somebody who has lived through years of pleading with systems and people for help:

What we say and what we do must align.

We cannot talk about suicide prevention while tolerating systems that leave human beings feeling powerless, unheard and abandoned.

We cannot talk about connection while practising indifference.

We cannot talk about compassion while looking away from suffering that’s inconvenient to confront.

And we cannot keep placing responsibility entirely on distressed individuals to somehow become more resilient to environments and systems that are contributing to their despair.

That’s where the next part of my story is going.

Because suicide prevention is very dear to my heart, especially after losing my beautiful dad.

This Father’s Day, though, I’m thinking about two fathers.

One I knew and loved enormously, and another I never knew.

And about a small, unexpected path that somehow led me, in one of the darkest periods of my life, through the doors of a church where I finally felt safe.

Maybe some things don’t need to be completely understood.

Sometimes we simply recognise the small amount of grace that emerged from something terribly painful.

And for that, I’m grateful.