A nation cannot prevent harm if its workers’ compensation system cannot feel it.

Shattered is not about politics — it’s about the families who live with the consequences of a system that has lost its way.

In recent weeks, as workers’ compensation reforms have moved through Parliament, many have asked whether Shattered is a response to the government’s plans to “modernise” the system or to tighten access to psychological injury claims. That question sharpened again yesterday, when the NSW Liberal Party agreed to support the government’s Bill — a deal that will contract entitlements for people with psychological injuries and fundamentally alter how access to care will look in this state.

But Shattered is not a film about this moment, or this legislation, or any party’s position.

It began long before this debate.

It began with a much simpler — and far more confronting — question:

Why is this system so abusive to the very people it was built to help?

That question opened a door. And once inside, it became impossible to look away.

Families do not understand workers’ compensation — until they are forced to

What started as a small investigation became a multi-year examination of a sector that has operated in shadows for too long. Not because people intended harm, but because too few understand what workers’ compensation has become: a vast, complex system that most families never encounter — until someone they love is injured.

By then, the stakes are unbearably high.

Most Australians have no idea:

• how the scheme works,

• why delays occur,

• why psychological injuries attract resistance,

• who actually makes the decisions, or

• why the experience feels so adversarial.

When an injury happens, families don’t enter a health system. They enter a finance system that funds health interventions — and the confusion between the two causes enormous harm.

A scheme anaesthetised by process

For years, people inside the system — workers, families, clinicians, case managers — have described a kind of emotional numbing that has taken hold. A drift away from purpose. A quiet acceptance of harm as a routine by-product.

And it’s true:

When harm becomes normalised, transparency fades.And when transparency fades, accountability falls away with it.

The conversation shifts from recovery to liability, from support to containment, from health to cost.

And that is where people break.

If we want real modernisation, we must start with the truth

It is critically important that we refocus on a scheme that must stop driving the levels of self-harm we are now seeing — patterns that are known inside the system, yet consistently under-reported, and for reasons that deserve serious scrutiny.

These outcomes are not abstract. They are not numbers. They are people. They are families. They are stories of distress, delay, deterioration, and preventable harm.

And they will continue unless we return to the core truth:

Workers’ compensation exists to restore health. The finances support that purpose — not the other way around.

Budgets matter. Actuarial models matter. Stewardship matters.

But employers across this nation do not pay premiums so that workers can be harmed. They pay premiums so workers can be helped.

That distinction must become the foundation of every policy discussion.

“It’s not perfect” is no longer an acceptable phrase. It diminishes the reality of what has been occurring. It erases the lived experience of those we now call a lost generation — people harmed not by their original injury, but by the system that followed.

If prevention is the goal, compassion must be the method

If we want to shift the focus toward prevention, then we also have a duty to build a system grounded in compassion. Because “man down” should mean exactly that — someone is hurt, and the response must be immediate, protective, and humane.

Prevention is not just about reducing claims; it is about restoring a culture where the first instinct is to care, not to question. Anything less will continue to harm the very people the system was created to protect.

Shattered is a call to understanding — not a political intervention

This film is not about legislation. It is not aligned to a party, a faction, or a parliamentary vote.

It is about families. It is about what happens when systems drift. It is about the human cost of opacity, fragmentation, and managerial numbness.

The legislative debate will come and go. But the lives affected by this system endure far beyond the timelines of Parliament.

If Shattered can help families understand what truly happens when someone is injured at work — and help policymakers remember that health must come first — then perhaps the next generation will not be lost.

That is why this film exists.

Not to intervene in the politics of a single moment. But to illuminate what happens when a system forgets what it was created to protect — and who.