All we can do is tell the story. What happens next will not be decided in a parliamentary hearing room, but in living rooms — by mums and dads, brothers and sisters, neighbours and co-workers.

The question is no longer “Does the system need fixing?” but “How long will we allow a safety net that lets people fall through it?”

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Because we’ve seen this before. Robodebt. The Post Office scandal. Decades of reviews, inquiries, and royal commissions that proved the harm — but only public outrage delivered justice. Systems don’t reform themselves. People do.

Addressing complex social failures takes more than reports and roundtables. It takes a community willing to see the full picture: that what happens to injured workers today can happen to any of us tomorrow. Harm doesn’t stay contained. It ripples outward — to families, workplaces, emergency services, local economies, and eventually, national conscience.

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If there is a turning point, it won’t arrive because a minister signs a bill. It will arrive because the public decides this story is no longer “someone else’s tragedy,” but a test of what kind of country we want to be.

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The system won’t fix itself. But history shows something else always can: us.