I Asked My Local MP, Chris Minns, to Listen: The Records from October 2021 to October 2022

 “The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born.” – Warren Bennis

The two documents reflected on in this post preserve part of the written record of my repeated attempts to obtain help from my local NSW member of Parliament, Chris Minns, the Member for Kogarah and then Leader of the Opposition.

I wasn’t approaching his office over a minor disagreement. I was reporting what were serious failures within the NSW workers compensation and work health and safety systems. I was asking for help to obtain safety, accountability, implementation of my Injury Management Plan and a return to my substantive work.

I wanted to recover safely in my work, with my workplace rights and accrued entitlements protected.

The records show that my approaches were not confined to one email. They continued over many months while my psychological and financial circumstances deteriorated.

——

15 October 2021: “Does anyone truly care?”

The chronology begins on 15 October 2021, when I emailed the Kogarah electorate office after trying unsuccessfully to obtain meaningful assistance from the agencies responsible for regulating workers compensation and workplace safety.

I wrote:

“I have to ask you honestly. Does anyone truly care? Have I any value, in return for everything I’ve contributed to our society and to those I worked with or supported in teaching, learning and research?”

I asked whether public commitments to mentally healthy workplaces and effective government regulation were genuine. I also asked the office of Mr Minns to review the evidence and meet with me.

My email explained that the principal document provided to me under workers compensation arrangements was an Injury Management Plan dated 25 June 2020. This plan had not been implemented, with no cooperation from employer and insurer to do so. 

I wrote:

“Once you’ve reviewed the evidence, please consider calling me for a meeting to discuss. But please don’t delay for too long. I need to go back to my work.”

I finished with the words:

“Please listen because nobody has so far.”

That was not political theatre. It was a direct request from a constituent seeking help.

——

November 2021: my requests became increasingly urgent

By 9 November 2021, I was describing the profound effect that the continuing situation was having on me:

“No one has been there for me, being the one time I needed support, and I don’t know if I’ll survive the torture and victimisation much longer if someone doesn’t end it.”

Between 11 and 16 November 2021, I sent further communications to the Kogarah office. I explained that I had approached state agencies, the union, lawyers, police and the court system, yet I was still left unprotected.

I wrote:

“I’m still being victimised and no one is making it stop.”

I identified the practical outcomes I was seeking:

“I want my workers compensation entitlements that were withheld provided and to return to my job. I want my long service leave and annual leave and so much personal leave taken while they victimised and threatened me, to be recredited.”

I also made clear that I wasn’t  prepared to accept a narrative that erased my long record of capable service:

“I’ve worked in my job for twenty years and now I’m suffering discrimination.”

The request to my MP’s office was direct:

“I need to return to my job safely asap. SIRA is not doing their job. Can I get support from my local MP with this?”

Between 22 and 28 November 2021, I continued asking for help:

“Please help me before it’s too late.”

I again stated what I needed:

“I need my job and implementation of the injury management plan asap.”

These were written warnings that my position was becoming increasingly dangerous—psychologically, physically and financially.

——

December 2021 to February 2022: the correspondence continued

From 1 to 10 December 2021, I copied the Kogarah electorate office into further correspondence in which I tried to hold SIRA and SafeWork NSW accountable.

Between 11 and 23 December 2021, I continued writing because the financial consequences were becoming more severe. My home was at risk.

The correspondence continued throughout January and February 2022. By then, I was exhausted and traumatised. My objective had nevertheless remained consistent: implementation of the Injury Management Plan, restoration of the entitlements that had been depleted or withheld, regulatory accountability and a safe return to my substantive role.

This wasn’t a person changing her demands from one day to the next. 

It was a worker repeatedly asking for the same fundamental protections.

——

March and April 2022: public commitments and private inaction

During March 2022, I became increasingly distressed by what I saw as a stark gap between public political messaging and my experience as a constituent.

Mr Minns was publicly presenting himself as someone who listened to workers and cared about safe workplaces. Yet I still hadn’t had the meeting I had repeatedly requested, nor received any meaningful account of what action had been taken in response to the extensive material I had provided.

In April 2022, I continued sending emails to the electorate office and to university governance.

I wasn’t asking my local MP to determine a legal dispute personally. I was asking him to examine evidence concerning the conduct of NSW regulators, raise those matters through the proper parliamentary and ministerial channels, and help a constituent reach the bodies capable of taking action.

——

9 May 2022: the human consequences of not being heard

On 9 May 2022, I attended the Kogarah electorate office after learning that Mr Minns had met with the University’s Vice-Chancellor.

I wasn’t given a transparent account of whether my situation, my workplace rights or the failures I had reported had been discussed.

I was told by Cheryl Han, an electorate-office staff member:

“I don’t think they’re going to give you your job back.”

That statement terrified and humiliated me. My job and 20 years of accrued entitlements and benefits never passed on under workers compensation regulations (ie. Fraud) should NEVER have been stolen as the most immoral and horrific adverse action to begin with! 

Not to mention that wasn’t the purpose of a local MP’s office. I went there for help regarding the failures of two state regulators - SafeWork NSW and SIRA NSW! That’s within the remit of the office of an elected representative! 

I had sought a safe return, implementation of the Injury Management Plan and compliance with the obligations applying to my employer, insurer and the relevant regulators.

After leaving the Kogarah electorate office, I sat in my car outside in the rain. I was alone, overwhelmed and frightened about losing my home and the effect this would have on my family.

The second document records how close I came to not surviving that moment. I include this because it demonstrates the foreseeable human consequences when a traumatised constituent repeatedly asks for help and experiences only silence, delay or dismissive messages.

——

3 October 2022: questions about parliamentary work

On 3 October 2022, The Australian published an article titled “ALP MPs condemn leader’s work rate.”

The article reported criticism from unnamed Labor MPs about Mr Minns’ parliamentary activity before becoming leader. It stated that, during his first five years in Parliament, he had delivered 172 speeches, compared with 401 by Yasmin Catley and 363 by Jo Haylen. It also reported that he had served on one parliamentary committee during his first two terms and attended 55 per cent of that committee’s meetings.

One former Labor MP was quoted as saying:

“As an MP, he was shocking. He was just biding his time to become leader.”

Another reportedly said:

“He was not across the detail. He didn’t seem to be doing too much.”

The article also included a defence of Mr Minns from another Labor source, who said the criticism shouldn’t be given much credence. (?)

I read the article through the lens of my own documented experience. I had repeatedly asked my local MP to examine detailed evidence concerning SIRA, SafeWork NSW and the WHS / workers compensation system. I had provided a box file of records to his electorate office. Yet I had no evidence that those records had been substantively examined or used to pursue accountability.

——

10 October 2022: World Mental Health Day

On 10 October 2022—World Mental Health Day—I wrote directly to Mr Minns, the Kogarah electorate office and others.

I expressed anger and distress about the failure to respond meaningfully to what I had reported. I also questioned the contrast between public statements about workplace safety and my experience as one of his constituents.

A public statement attributed to Mr Minns said:

“But they all deserve a government that listens to their concerns and takes action.”

My response was:

“As a constituent in your electorate, I banged on the door trying to have you listen for six months.”

Another of his public posts, responding to the Broderick Review, stated:

“We all need to do better and make sure that we’re making every possible effort to make the NSW Parliament a safe workplace.”

Those words expressed an important principle. My question was why the same principle didn’t appear to extend to a constituent reporting serious psychosocial hazards, regulatory failures and escalating risk.

In another public post, Mr Minns stated:

“No one should face what these workers face every day.

No workers compensation. No leave. No access to fair rates and conditions.”

My written response explained that workers compensation protections already existed in law, but my contention was that they hadn’t been implemented or enforced in my case.

I wrote:

“I asked for assistance for compliance to ensure the attached legally binding agreement was implemented. That’s all.”

Whatever view is taken of the distressed language in my emails, that sentence captures the essential request.

——

The acknowledgement I received

The Office of the Leader of the Opposition sent an automated acknowledgement:

“Your email is important to us, please be patient while we address your concerns. You will receive a response in due course, if appropriate.”

The documents contain the acknowledgements. They don’t contain a substantive response from Mr Minns addressing the evidence, the Injury Management Plan, the conduct of the regulators or my requests for assistance.

——

11 October 2022: one request, stated plainly

On 11 October 2022, I wrote again to the electorate office.

I asked whether other constituents were treated as I had been when they visited the office seeking help. I repeated that I required assistance concerning the financial harm and the entitlements that had been withheld.

Again, I reduced the issue to its core:

“I asked for assistance for compliance to ensure the attached legally binding agreement was implemented. That’s all.”

——

14 October 2022: documenting the full pattern

On 14 October 2022, I sent a detailed chronology to Mr Minns, the Kogarah electorate office and The Australian.

The email was titled:

“Evidence of my repeated attempts for Mr. Minns to listen to me as a constituent and what ultimately happened”

It traced my approaches from 15 October 2021, through November and December 2021, January and February 2022, March and April 2022, and the crisis I experienced in May.

By then, this was no longer simply a request for help. It was also a record showing how many times help had been requested.

——

What these records establish

These documents verify something fundamental: I repeatedly asked my local state MP for help. I identified the agencies involved. I described the risks. I supplied documentary evidence. I asked for a meeting. I asked for regulatory accountability. I asked for implementation of the Injury Management Plan and a safe return to the work I had never left.

My distress wasn’t hidden. Neither was the escalating financial danger.

The language in some of my emails was raw because I was writing from inside an unfolding crisis. It should be read in that context. Distressed communication isn’t evidence that the underlying concerns are unworthy of examination. Often, it’s evidence of what prolonged exposure to institutional inaction can do to a person.

——

Listening must mean more than acknowledging receipt

Political leaders frequently say that every person deserves a government that listens.

See this as a prime example: http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-social-media-post-i-saw-on-29-april.html

Listening, however, isn’t an automated acknowledgement. It isn’t accepting a box of documents and leaving the person who supplied them unable to determine whether anyone has examined them. It isn’t making public statements about workplace safety while a constituent reporting workplace harm remains unheard.

Genuine listening requires engagement, transparent communication and appropriate action. It also requires respect. I didn’t feel respected by the office of my local MP for Kogarah, Chris Minns. At all. 

I’ve worked honourably at ACU for approximately two decades. I asked to be kept safe. I asked for my existing Injury Management Plan to be implemented. I asked to return to my substantive work with appropriate safeguards. I asked that the regulators responsible for protecting injured workers be held accountable for their conduct.

Above all, I asked my local representative to listen.

The written record shows how often I asked.*

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 539-540.

*My story has plenty of posts regarding the Kogarah Electorate Office of my local member. Readers can go back to 15 October 2021 onwards. There’s also an entire series titled Notice After Notice. 

All this could have been avoided if there was some integrity, honesty, empathy, work ethic, authentic leadership, common human decency and respect for constituents from my elected representative. 

I learned the hard way about “politics” and why our votes matter come election time. 

⸻

Reference

Maddison, M. (2022, 3 October). “ALP MPs condemn leader’s work rate.” The Australian. Gale OneFile: News.

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.