SIRA NSW - When the Systemic Harm Reached My Superannuation

By July 2022, the consequences were no longer confined to my employment, my income, my health, or even my ability to keep a roof over my head.

They were beginning to seep into my superannuation and long-term investment strategy.

A self-managed super fund isn’t simply money sitting in an account. It represents years of work, contributions, planning and investment decisions intended to provide financial security in retirement. Decisions are made years in advance. Deposits are paid. Capital is allocated. Assets form part of an investment strategy.

I had one of those plans underway.

On 20 July 2022, a conveyancing firm contacted me regarding settlement of a property in Western Australia. They were preparing the settlement documentation and asking for the information necessary to progress the purchase.

This wasn’t some hypothetical investment I was thinking about making one day.

It was underway.

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24 July 2022: The Snowball Reaches My SMSF

Four days later, on 24 July 2022, I forwarded that correspondence to a friend supporting me and wrote:

“What about this? I’m meant to buy this outright in my superannuation. I used that money to save my home. Am I going to forfeit another $30,000 deposit?”

That contemporaneous email captures the financial position far better than hindsight ever could.

I was meant to buy the property outright through my superannuation.

Instead, money allocated to that investment had been diverted because I was trying to save my home.

And now I was facing the possibility of losing another $30,000 deposit.

This is what a snowball effect actually looks like.

• One financial consequence creates another.
• Loss of income affects cash flow.
• Cash-flow pressure affects the ability to meet ordinary expenses.
• That pressure forces money to be redirected.
• Redirecting money interferes with an investment strategy.
• An interrupted investment strategy jeopardises a property transaction.
• A jeopardised transaction puts a deposit at risk.

And the consequences then extend forward again — into assets that were intended to produce returns and ultimately support retirement.

The original harm doesn’t remain where it started. It compounds.

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This Was My Retirement Money

There’s something particularly disturbing about reaching the point where your superannuation strategy becomes collateral damage.

I have worked since 2001 for my nationally registered, publicly funded university employer. I had built my career, accumulated employment entitlements and planned financially for my future.

Yet by July 2022, I was using money intended for an SMSF investment to protect my home.

That wasn’t an investment decision.

It was financial survival.

The documentary record shows that I understood what was happening while it was happening. On 24 July 2022, I wasn’t calculating a loss years later and trying to reconstruct how it occurred. I was asking in real time:

“Am I going to forfeit another $30,000 deposit?”

Even the word “another” matters.

Because none of this was occurring in isolation.

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From Buying Outright to Needing Finance

The consequences continued.

On 9 August 2022, I responded to the conveyancer and explained that I had just settled on the purchase of the home I lived in and that my attention now had to turn back to the WA property.

Then, on 5 October 2022, I wrote something that shows how dramatically my financial position had changed:

“Initially I didn’t need a broker to finance and finalise the purchase, but due to unforeseen life challenges, I now do.”

That’s an extraordinary change in circumstances in less than three months.

The original plan was to purchase the property outright within my superannuation.

By October, I needed a finance broker to try to complete it.

That’s not merely an inconvenience.

It’s evidence of the deterioration of my financial capacity.

It illustrates why financial harm cannot always be measured simply by looking at a missing fortnightly payment or one isolated expense.

The consequences spread.

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The Cost Is Also the Future That Money Was Supposed to Build

There’s another dimension to financial loss that’s easily overlooked.

If money earmarked for an investment has to be redirected elsewhere, the potential harm isn’t necessarily limited to the amount withdrawn or the deposit that may be forfeited.

There may also be the lost opportunity associated with the investment itself: potential capital growth, rental income, compounding returns and the effect on the broader SMSF investment strategy.

Those losses have to be calculated carefully and evidenced rather than assumed.

But the underlying point is important:

money diverted from a long-term investment strategy doesn’t simply disappear from one column of a spreadsheet. It can alter the trajectory of the portfolio itself.

And this was my superannuation.

My retirement.

My future financial security.

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How Far Is One Worker Expected to Absorb the Consequences?

By this point, I was trying to navigate the consequences arising from my experience with my employer, its specialised workers compensation insurer and the systems that were supposed to protect workers from precisely this kind of cascading harm.

I was one person.

Yet I was having to fight on multiple fronts while simultaneously trying to protect the assets I had spent decades building.

My contemporaneous frustration on 24 July 2022 was unmistakable. After asking whether I was about to lose another $30,000, I wrote:

“How can someone have so much evidence of deceit, fraud, failure, incompetence and an outright disregard of multiple laws…”

Those were my words at the time, of what I was experiencing while trying desperately to get someone to listen and intervene.

And meanwhile, the financial snowball kept rolling.

• Employment.
• Income.
• Leave.
• Home.
• Savings.
• Investments.
• Superannuation.

By July 2022, this was no longer only about what was happening to me at work.

It was reaching into assets accumulated from decades of work and into an investment strategy designed to protect a future that should never have been placed at risk in the first place.

And that’s one of the most important things about cumulative financial harm:

you cannot understand it by examining each consequence in isolation.

You have to follow the snowball.

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 525-527.