Australia’s hidden workers’ compensation crisis is not a policy failure — it’s a moral one. For more than a century, Australians have believed that if you were injured at work, the system would protect you. That belief wasn’t naïve — it was part of the deal. You gave your labour. The nation guaranteed your safety net. But that promise has been broken — not by accident, not by inefficiency, but by design. And while governments keep the public calm with talk of “keeping premium

This post was prompted by a recent meeting we had with a senior executive inside the workers’ compensation system. In the middle of the discussion, he mentioned, almost casually that he had received death threats from members of the injured worker community. We were shocked, and said so. His response? “It goes with the territory.” No. It doesn’t. Violence is not “part of the job” it is a sign of a system in psychological collapse. We are also aware of reports of customer-faci

If this system was built to help you heal, it would be called Workers’ Recovery. But it isn’t. It’s called Workers’ Compensation in NSW — because it’s not about your health. It’s about money. For other people. Not you. Be warned.

Why the NSW government is still legislating a system it no longer understands and injured people are paying the price. Australia has already lived through Robodebt. The UK has already lived through the Post Office scandal. Both began with “data issues,” both were dismissed as administrative failures and both ended as human-rights tragedies. Workers’ compensation is now showing the same pattern of automation, denial, governance failure and system-level harm. The difference thi

These are not finished edits. There are no graphics. No colour grade. No carefully shaped narrative. And that is exactly why we’re releasing them now. With the NSW Public Accountability & Works Committee report on the Workers’ Compensation Amendment Bill now public, the people of NSW deserve to hear what has been said off-camera by those involved in shaping policy not only what appears in official statements or under parliamentary privilege. These two clips speak for themse

For more than a decade, NSW has not simply struggled to manage its workers’ compensation system it has administered a foreseeable harm event at scale . This is no longer a debate about “reform”, “efficiency”, or “sustainability”. It is long past that. It is now a question of legal, financial and moral liability . And the evidence is no longer technical or abstract. It is structural, documented, and cumulative. 1. The State knew the workers' compensation system was broken

Europe is regulating AI. The US has issued federal AI Executive Orders. The UK has an AI Safety Institute. Canada is building public-sector AI audit and redress frameworks. And NSW? Two major documents released in the past week confirm the State still cannot control the technology already deciding treatment, income and outcomes for injured workers. NSW Auditor-General — Internal Controls & Governance 2025 https:// www.audit.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/Final%20rep

The State that already harmed injured people with unregulated automation now plans to “govern AI” using the loose change in its digital drawer. Last week the NSW Government confirmed the creation of a new Office for AI , a unit that will advise (not regulate) government departments on responsible use of artificial intelligence. But here’s the part not in the press release: The office will receive no special funding. It will be staffed "within existing resources." It will n

The human cost of a “modernisation” project that turned injured people into test data. A workers’ compensation system is only as humane as the technology it runs on. The reform no one audited When WorkCover NSW was abolished in 2015, the government promised a modern, unified, efficient workers’ compensation system powered by a “single claims platform.” That platform now used by icare has consumed hundreds of millions of dollars , failed multiple audit tests, and still cannot

Ten years of icare. Zero scrutiny of the code deciding people’s lives. Automation without oversight is not efficiency — it is risk at scale. When a government agency claims it does not use artificial intelligence in workers’ compensation decisions — while its own industry and technology partners publicly describe the same systems under different names the issue is no longer whether the public is being misled. The issue is whether the State even understands the algorithms or

For more than a decade, every serious investigation into Victoria’s WorkCover system has found the same thing: it’s not just the law or the process that’s broken it’s the behaviour of the agents paid to run it. A System Built on Perverse Incentives Under Victoria’s outsourced model, private insurers, currently Allianz, DXC, EML, and Gallagher Bassett administer claims on behalf of WorkSafe Victoria. In theory, this was meant to deliver efficiency. In practice, it has created

The legal illusion at the heart of workers’ compensation and why most people never discover it until it’s too late. If you can still sue, why are there lawyers on every bus and why does the road they promise never lead to a courtroom? " Because in NSW workers’ compensation, the presence of lawyers does not mean workers still have full legal rights. It means the system funds lawyers to keep people inside the statutory scheme , not to take employers to court. And most injured

When the agency responsible for safety becomes a hazard in its own right For ten years, the NSW Government has said in one way or another the future of workplace safety is prevention, not compensation . But the agency responsible for that prevention — SafeWork NSW is still running its entire enforcement and hazard-tracking system on technology built more than 20 years ago . According to the 2024 NSW Audit Office: “SafeWork NSW has over 20 years of case data in its core system

They admit the harm. They deny the harmed. When someone is injured at work, the social contract is simple: Employers fund the system through compulsory premiums. Workers give up their right to sue under normal negligence law. ( few injured workers understand this). The State promises recovery in return. In NSW, that promise is now in doubt and the government cannot answer the only questions that matter. Because when you strip away dashboards, reforms and talking points, seven

From clay tablets to case law and why the master–servant mindset still shapes recovery after a workplace injury today. We think workers’ compensation began with modern industry. It didn’t. The idea that a worker deserves compensation for harm is as old as civilization itself. Ancient beginnings — price lists for injury Long before factories and insurers, ancient lawmakers set literal prices on human damage. The Code of Hammurabi (c. 1750 BCE) laid out fixed payments for the

The truth behind NSW’s push to raise the psychological-injury threshold 2025: They admit the harm. They just can’t prove recovery. For years, NSW governments have claimed the workers’ compensation system is “improving.” Due to their improvement programs....But when asked the only question that matters — Are people with psychological injuries getting better? — the data goes missing. National evidence says otherwise: psychological-injury claims take the longest to resolve, ha

What Australia Forgot — and What the Psychological Injury Crisis Proves “Half a century after the National Compensation Bill was lost in 1975, Australia is still searching for a fair system.” Fifty years on, Australia nearly built a national workers’ recovery system. Not a patchwork of competing insurers. Not a bureaucratic maze of adversarial assessments. But a unified, compassionate, rehabilitation-first scheme designed to protect every worker, every hour of the day. We wa

What It Was, How It’d Work, and Why It Was Stopped In 1974, the Whitlam Government put a national, no-fault accident compensation scheme before the Australian Parliament. It aimed to replace the messy patchwork of state workers’ compensation and fault-based personal injury systems with a single, universal model rooted in rehabilitation and dignity. The Core Idea Universal, no-fault cover (24/7): Compensation for “every person who at any time or in any place suffers a person

Walk through the ruins of Lithgow’s blast furnace and you can feel the heat that once burned here. You can hear the rhythm of the shift whistle. You can almost see the silhouettes of men who poured their lives into the molten core of a nation being built. These bricks are memory. These rivets are testimony. And right at the centre of that history is one man — Charles Hoskins . The businessman who made steel a national force When G & C Hoskins Ltd took over the Lithgow works i

People deserve recovery — without being punished for being injured at work. A seismic pause in Australia’s insurance system Swiss Re Life & Health Australia Limited, the Australian arm of one of the world’s largest reinsurers has announced it will pause writing new life insurance business in Australia from October 2025 .¹ This is not a routine commercial adjustment. It is a warning from the top of the risk chain: The product architecture of modern insurance is no longer fit