Notice After Notice — Part 11: To the Kogarah Electorate Office. Again - April 2022

19 April 2022

By April 2022, I had already sent countless emails pleading for intervention, safety, accountability and support. I had contacted regulators, unions, insurers, SafeWork NSW, SIRA NSW, legal representatives, university executives, and my local electorate office. I kept trying because I genuinely believed that if the right people finally understood the seriousness of what was happening, someone would step in before everything collapsed completely.

Instead, I found myself writing yet another email to the Kogarah electorate office. Again.  

This was a worker in crisis trying to survive what had become systemic institutional failure.

In this email, I wrote to my local MP, now Premier, Chris Minns, and his electorate officer, Cheryl Han. I also included a now-retired professor from my university community, someone my family had known and respected for many years. He was genuinely concerned by how distressed I had become. His response was a lifeline of humanity at a time when I felt abandoned by almost every institution I had turned to for help. While others responded with silence, indifference or procedural deflection, he responded with kindness. I remain deeply grateful for that. He embodied the mission and identity the university professes to uphold — one grounded in compassion, dignity and care for others — values that had been painfully absent from my experience for far too long.

I explained that I understood how busy the electorate office was during an election period, but I also explained something else: that people had stopped listening to me long before this point.

When institutions stop listening to someone reporting harm, danger, legal breaches and psychological deterioration, the consequences become catastrophic.

I wrote:

“Not listening is the greatest disrespect to the dignity of the human person.”  

That sentence mattered greatly to me, because the university constantly spoke publicly about dignity, ethics, mission and community. Yet behind the scenes, I was experiencing the complete opposite.

By this stage, I was no longer speaking only about psychological harm. I was speaking openly about financial devastation and survival. I explained that if I lost my home because of unlawful conduct and failures within the workers compensation system, I would not survive it.  

I also wrote about my family, that they had become collateral damage, being dragged into something they never asked to be part of. (None of us did. What I had asked for was a psychosocially safe work environment). I described the humiliation, privacy violations, intimidation and distress that spread beyond me and into the people I loved most.  

One of the deepest wounds was what this institutional abuse did to us. We had already lost my father to suicide years earlier.

Grief had already existed in our family.

This process intensified it.

What I kept trying to explain to people was that this was never just about a compensation dispute. It was about human beings. It was about the consequences of institutional power being exercised without humanity, accountability or safeguards.

I also made something else very clear in this email — something that remains critically important now.

It was never the responsibility of TAL to carry the burden that belonged under the statutory workers compensation scheme.  

The responsibility sat with Catholic Church Insurance and the workers compensation system that was supposed to regulate and enforce compliance.

I repeatedly tried to explain this to regulators.

I repeatedly tried to explain that my legally binding Injury Management Plan had not been implemented by insurer and employer. 

I repeatedly tried to explain that there had been failures in return-to-work obligations, failures in communication with treating practitioners, failures in support, failures in coordination, and failures in basic compliance obligations.

And yet, instead of enforcement, I experienced silence.

Or worse — procedural deflection.

By this stage, I was openly describing what the environment around me felt like:

“the creepy feeling of incivility, hostility and mobbing”  

When every door you knock on is shut, especially the doors of organisations whose role is to protect workers and enforce the law, something happens psychologically to a person.

You stop feeling like a citizen.

You stop feeling protected by the system.

You start feeling disposable.

Perhaps the most heartbreaking section of this email was where I wrote about what I believed was the only thing that could save my life above everything:

“The answer is reinstatement and continuity as though [this] never happened.”  

Restoration.

I wanted my life back.

I wanted my career back.

I wanted the safety, dignity and continuity that should never have been taken from me in the first place.

I also acknowledged someone who had treated me professionally and ethically during the early stages of my claim — the initial case manager from Catholic Church Insurance. I wrote that her professionalism likely saved my life before she was removed as my case manager and never replaced.  

This story has always been about accountability where accountability was required.

And by 19 April 2022, I was still begging people to intervene before the damage became irreversible.

At the end of the email, I listed the legislation I believed had been violated, including workers compensation legislation, work health and safety legislation, anti-discrimination laws, privacy laws and fraud provisions.  

But underneath all the legislation, all the legal terminology, all the policies and all the procedures, the message itself was painfully simple.

Please listen.

Please act.

Please stop this before I lose everything.

And still, the notices continued…

…And so did the institutionalised wage theft…

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Document 308.

The Return-to-Work Coordinator: They Walk Away, and We’re Left With the Damage - April 2022

What happens when people who are directly involved in serious failures simply move on, while the injured worker remains trapped with the consequences?

There is something deeply disturbing about discovering that the people who were directly responsible for implementing a worker’s recovery simply disappear once the damage has been done.

In my case, the person identified on the Injury Management Plan as the employer’s return-to-work coordinator was responsible for coordinating communication between me, my nominated treating doctor, and allied health professional.

Yet that coordination never occurred.

The return-to-work coordinator became effectively unreachable. Phone calls went unanswered. Messages and emails disappeared into silence. I was never provided with the consent forms required to facilitate communication with my treating practitioners. No return-to-work plan was developed with my involvement. No rehabilitation provider was engaged. No meaningful collaboration took place. No trauma-informed support existed.

But somehow, despite all of that, my private information still managed to travel…

…not to my treating team…

…not to support my recovery…

…but into the hands of the very people whose conduct had already caused me harm.

The systems that were supposed to facilitate communication with my treating professionals appeared unwilling to do so. Yet information seemed capable of moving in other directions entirely. For an injured worker trying to understand what was happening, it created a profound sense of vulnerability, confusion, and distrust.

What troubles me most is that none of this occurred in isolation. The return-to-work coordinator was not acting within a vacuum. The senior executive overseeing employment relations and SAFETY at the university was, in fact, the primary source of the workplace stressors that led to my workers compensation claim. Yet the same individual continued to exercise influence over processes that were supposedly designed to support my recovery.

It was the return-to-work coordinator’s manager — the National Manager of Employment Relations and SAFETY — whose conduct formed a central part of my claim, continuing to direct and oversee actions within a statutory scheme that should have existed to protect an injured worker, not expose them to further harm.

As I reflected on these events, I was reminded of an article by workplace researcher Dr David Yamada titled “When Superficial Civility Supports Workplace Abusers and Their Enablers.” 

The article explores how organisations can sometimes prioritise appearances, politeness, and procedural formality over genuine accountability, allowing harmful conduct to continue beneath a veneer of professionalism. The concept resonated deeply with my experience, where communications often appeared courteous on the surface (especially to the SafeWork NSW inspector who then shockingly said to me “I’m not here to play he said she said”), while substantive concerns about safety, recovery, and worker welfare remained unaddressed.

When Superficial Civility Supports Workplace Abusers and Their Enablers:

https://newworkplace.wordpress.com/2014/06/11/when-superficial-civility-supports-workplace-abusers-and-their-enablers/

Going back to my story, from early 2021, after the damage was done, the return-to-work coordinator disappeared from the university.

Years later, my family discovered, through publicly available information, that she had moved into a work health and safety position within a NSW government agency. According to publicly available employment information, she commenced employment with the NSW Environment Protection Authority in early 2021.  

What makes this particularly difficult to process is that she was not the only person who appeared to move on without accountability.

An insurer representative directly involved in my matter, the person I had tried to get answers from, including who would be the replacement case manager, also suspiciously left and later suspiciously re-appeared in a role elsewhere within the NSW public sector.

One moved into Transport for NSW. (See https://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/03/sira-nsw-and-illusion-of-regulation.html?m=1) 

The other moved into the NSW Environment Protection Authority as a work health and safety manager.

Meanwhile, I remained where I had always been.

Still trying to recover.

Still trying to understand what had happened.

Still trying to obtain the return to work support and statutory entitlements that should have existed from the beginning.

The worker remained behind.

The financial damage remained behind.

The psychological injury remained behind.

The unanswered questions remained behind.

From my perspective, that is where public trust begins to erode.

People understand that employees change jobs. That is normal. What they struggle to understand is how serious concerns can be raised, extensive documentation can exist, significant harm can occur, and yet the people involved simply continue progressing into new and often more senior positions without any visible examination of what happened previously.

It creates a perception that accountability applies differently depending on who holds power and who does not.

Whether I agreed with it or not, my family eventually decided to contact the NSW Environment Protection Authority and inform them of what had occurred during this person’s employment at the university. The EPA correspondence contained allegations concerning failures to fulfil obligations under the Injury Management Plan and concerns regarding privacy and communication failures.  

What happened next was unsettling.

Shortly after those concerns were raised, my family reported receiving calls from a private number. Not once, but twice.

When the calls were answered, the person on the other end allegedly hung up without speaking.

No explanation.

No conversation.

Just silence.

That pattern was disturbingly familiar.

A concerned friend of mine had experienced something similar after interactions involving senior management connected to the university. Viewed in isolation, any one of these incidents might seem insignificant. Viewed together, they contribute to a broader pattern that leaves people feeling watched, unsettled, and unsafe. (See http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/02/when-safety-is-denied-at-threshold-may.html). 

I cannot prove who made those calls.

What I can say is that they occurred, they were reported to me, and they added to an already profound sense of unease, fear and distress. 

What also continues to trouble me is the response I later received from the regulator.

When I formally complained to the NSW State Insurance Regulatory Authority in January 2021, one of the explanations offered was that the return-to-work coordinator was “qualified”. (See http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/01/when-regulators-close-ranks-systemic.html where SIRA NSW stated, on record, that it had liaised with SafeWork NSW and that: the employer’s Return to Work practices were “compliant” with workers compensation legislation, and the Return to Work Coordinator was “appropriately trained and qualified”).

But qualification was never the issue.

A person can be “qualified” and still fail to perform their duties.

A person can hold professional credentials and still engage in conduct that causes serious harm.

Lawyers are qualified.

Doctors are qualified.

Executives are qualified.

Qualifications do not answer the fundamental question.

The question is whether the person actually performed the role they were employed and authorised to perform.

Did anyone independently verify whether the obligations under the Injury Management Plan were fulfilled?

Did anyone verify whether communication occurred with the worker?

Did anyone verify whether communication occurred with the nominated treating doctor?

Did anyone verify whether communication occurred with the psychologist?

Did anyone verify whether the required consent processes occurred?

Did anyone verify whether a return-to-work program was actually implemented?

Or was it simply assumed that because somebody held a qualification, they must have been doing their job?

That response has always troubled me because it appears to confuse competency on paper with accountability in practice.

And perhaps that is the larger question that remains unanswered throughout this entire story.

How did a system designed to support injured workers allow so many failures to occur simultaneously?

And why did the employer allow it to happen?

Because qualifications are not what injured workers rely on.

They rely on actions.

They rely on safeguards.

They rely on people actually doing the jobs they were entrusted to do.

In my case, those safeguards never arrived.

And years later, I am still living with the consequences…

…Including the institutionalised wage that continues to this day…

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Document 303.

——

NOTE: SafeWork NSW would do well to take WHS reports coming from frightened staff in complex organisations like universities, seriously from now on. A life could depend on it. 

There’s no excuse regarding a SafeWork NSW inspector telling a vulnerable employee “I’m not here to play he said she said” and “all they’ll do is show me their policies and I don’t want to ruffle feathers”, then leaving the poor soul in the hands of the very perpetrator to continue engaging in harmful and reckless conduct. 

That attitude from SafeWork NSW has cost me years of my life and almost my life. The conduct of SafeWork NSW has been so serious, I now don’t feel safe directly engaging with the NSW WHS regulator anymore. 

It’s finally been escalated via the proper systemic channels. 

The Ethics of Silence - April 2022

By 2022, I had already spent months pleading for the implementation of a lawful injury management plan, for a safe return-to-work process, for basic protections that should never have required begging in the first place.

When I directly reached out on LinkedIn to the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Ethics, I wrote to him as a long-serving staff member in crisis.

In my message, I wrote about the implementation of the injury management plan being “non-negotiable” because it was both “the law” and “my employee and human right.”  

I wrote about the fear of losing my home because my income and entitlements had been withheld.  

I wrote about the university’s failure to provide a safe work environment and my concerns regarding the conduct of senior staff.  

I wrote about the emotional and psychological toll this had taken on me and my family.  

And I pleaded, again, for someone to finally intervene before more damage was done.

As I’ve already written, he read the message, viewed my profile, then he blocked me on LinkedIn.

That was it.

Just silence.

What made it even harder to process was what was happening publicly at exactly the same time.

While I was privately pleading for help from the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Ethics, his LinkedIn feed was filled with posts about:

• flourishing at work,
• ethics,
• wellbeing,
• diversity,
• culture,
• mental health,
• and what it means to live a “good life.”  

One post discussed whether “flourishing at work” was possible.  

Another spoke about ethics being “an exceedingly practical subject” connected to mental health and “what’s real.”  

Another discussed “ethics and culture” in workplaces.  

I remember staring at those posts in disbelief - viewed via a friend’s LinkedIn account because I had been “blocked” by the DVC of Ethics. 

Privately, I was living the exact opposite of everything being promoted publicly.

There was no flourishing.

There was no psychologically safe workplace.

There was no practical ethics.

There was no meaningful intervention.

And there was certainly no dignity in what was happening to me.

What affected me most was what the blocking represented.

It represented an institution choosing distance over due diligence and respectful engagement.

“Risk management” by not complying with statutory obligations, over humanity.

Image over accountability.

Because by that point, I had repeatedly raised concerns regarding workplace safety, injury management failures, statutory non-compliance, and the withholding of my entitlements.

I was trying to survive financially.

I was trying to preserve my health.

I was trying to save my home.

And instead of meaningful engagement from someone responsible for ethics oversight, I experienced disappearance.

A Final Reflection

As I look back on this period, I often think about a simple question raised in an article titled  “What If We Applied the Golden Rule at Work?”⁠. 

The article explores a principle that most of us learned as children: treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself.

Simple in theory.

Yet the author argues that workplaces frequently drift away from this basic ethical standard. Decisions become driven by power, hierarchy, process, self-interest, or organisational protection rather than empathy, fairness, and respect for the human beings affected by those decisions.

The article asks readers to imagine what workplaces would look like if people genuinely applied the Golden Rule in their daily interactions, particularly when dealing with conflict, disagreement, vulnerability, or power imbalances.

Reading it, I could not help reflecting on my own experience.

Throughout this ordeal, I repeatedly asked for things that I believe most people would want for themselves if they found themselves injured, distressed, and dependent on others acting ethically.

I wanted communication.

I wanted honesty.

I wanted transparency.

I wanted a safe workplace.

I wanted my lawful entitlements respected.

I wanted somebody to listen.

I wanted somebody to care.

And perhaps most importantly, I wanted to be treated as a human being.

When I contacted the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Ethics, I was seeking the very principles that universities, leaders, and ethics programs often promote publicly: dignity, respect, compassion, fairness, and concern for the wellbeing of others.

Instead, after my message was read and my profile viewed, I found myself blocked.

For someone already struggling under the weight of prolonged workplace harm, financial devastation, isolation, and institutional silence, it carried a deep message.

It left me wondering whether the Golden Rule still had a place inside the institutions that teach ethics, speak about human flourishing and dignity, and encourage their students to become leaders of integrity.

If the positions were reversed, if another member of staff had reached out to me in obvious distress, fearing the loss of their home, their livelihood, their health, and their future, I know I could not simply have turned away.

And perhaps that is the question that continues to stay with me:

If we truly applied the Golden Rule at work, how different would this story have been?

That moment also forced me to confront another devastating question:

What does “ethics” actually mean inside institutions when a distressed worker pleading for lawful protections becomes something to block out rather than respond to?

That question still remains…

While the institutionalised wage theft continues…

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Document 302

Reference:

Yamada, D. (2010, 18 October). What if we applied the Golden Rule at work? at 

https://newworkplace.wordpress.com/2010/10/18/what-if-we-applied-the-golden-rule-at-work/ 

Should we apply Practical Ethics or Practical Wisdom to such systemic issues?