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

This weekend past, we travelled to Cobar for the Miners’ Ghost Festival — a gathering that remembers the lives lost in the mines that built this proud community. It’s a weekend held in honour, reflection and resilience. Families come together. Stories are shared. And the past is never forgotten. But today, we learned that Cobar is once again in mourning. Two miners have tragically lost their lives underground. Another has been seriously injured. Right now, details are limited

You can’t tell a story — or find the root cause — from behind a desk. It’s long been known that actuarial data drives how injured workers are treated in Australia’s workers’ compensation systems. Behind every claim sits a postcode. Behind every postcode, a prediction of cost, risk, and recovery. Those numbers were meant to guide decisions. But somewhere along the way, they began to decide who mattered. The Journey To make Shattered , we had to see for ourselves. We left the b

Mount Kembla Remembers Some places hold history in their bones.Mount Kembla is one of them. On 31 July 1902, a coal dust explosion tore through the Mount Kembla mine with violent force, killing 96 men and boys. It remains one of Australia’s worst industrial disasters. An entire community was left grieving: wives without husbands, children without fathers, families shattered in an instant. More than a century later, the air here still feels heavy with the stories of those who

The Injured Workers' Support Team works to help injured workers in Victoria navigate the workers' compensation maze just to get the help that is required to recover, get well and return to work. “There is no uniformity between compensation systems throughout Australia… benefits differ not because of loss or need, but along geographical boundaries.” — Woodhouse, 1974 . Cambridge University Press & Assessment The promise we never kept (nationally) In 1974, Justice Owen Woodhou

The Machine That Valued Human Pain In the 1990s, a computer program called Colossus changed the way insurers valued human injury. Built by Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) later part of DXC Technology it promised consistency in personal-injury settlements. Developed in Australia the software used Artifical Intelliegnce long before all of us had even heard of ChatGPT. Here's How It Worked Claims adjusters entered details about injuries, treatments, recovery time, and ev

Shattered sits down with an injured worker and a leading organisational psychologist to unpack a phenomenon few dare to name — horizontal violence inside the workers’ compensation system. It’s the invisible aggression that flows sideways, not down: colleagues, managers, and system actors turning against the very person who’s already been harmed. What happens when the perpetrator of the original injury is allowed to keep controlling the process that’s meant to repair it? Wh