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 boardrooms, reports, and public inquiries behind and went directly to the people living inside the system, those whose lives have been reduced to case numbers and cost projections.
We travelled from Sydney to Mount Kembla, Eden, Canberra, Dubbo, Lithgow, Wallerawang, Portland, Parkes, Cobar, Mudgee, Wee Waa, Lismore, Brisbane, Bribie Island, the Gold Coast, Melbourne, and Adelaide. We sat with nurses, social workers, retail workers, lawyers, and first responders, along with doctors, psychologists, rehab providers, and case workers. We listened to what it means to navigate a system built to manage injury, not humanity.
What We Found
Everywhere we went, people spoke about horizontal violence, the bitterness, blame, and breakdowns that happen when people trapped in the same failing system turn on each other instead of the cause.People desperate to escape insurer behaviour that never seems to improve.Trauma passed down the line, from claimant to clinician, from worker to worker.
“When systems can’t heal, people turn their pain sideways. We saw it everywhere.”
The mental health anguish this system inflicts on its victims is staggering. Conceived in the late 1800s, workers’ compensation was once a visionary idea, social insurance to protect those who built nations. But the concept has never truly been innovated, only reformed — over and over, generation after generation. Endless reforms. Endless harm.
We talk endlessly about the mental health crisis Australia is facing, yet this system has never been able to acknowledge its own role in that crisis — despite the suicides, despite the evidence, despite the pleas for change.
The Deeper Risk
Because unless we stop and rethink how we train AI and policy on yesterday’s data — data built on decades of harm, bias, and bad design we risk building Artifical Intelligence that repeats human cruelty at scale anf with velocity.
They are training AI on yesterday’s data of abuse.That’s the risk.
Behind the Lens
In the early days, our camera work was basic. But as we travelled, listened, and learned, our skill and our purpose grew.
Amid it all, we had to face the trauma of others and our own. Bearing witness is never easy. It nearly broke us. It caused more upset than it is possible to describe.
And yes we endured the gossip, the whispering, the warnings of “don’t work with them.”All we have done is tell the story of what workers’ compensation looks like in 2025.
But to do so we had to go back to the beginning - how did this start in the first place.
The Hope
We don’t claim to have the answers. But we do offer insights to help perhaps in ways people haven’t considered before.
We hope you find Shattered thought-provoking, and that you recognise the work so many people across Australia are now doing to stop the harm and replace the system with something that truly works.
Serfdom ended centuries ago.So too should this version of workers’ compensation.
