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The Algorithm That Scaled the Harm

Oct 18

3 min read

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(from Shattered – Episode 1: The System That Forgot)


Pictured: Vasalia Govender from the leading Injured Workers' Advocacy Group - Injured Workers Support Team. Image Credit; Ballina Gee
Pictured: Vasalia Govender from the leading Injured Workers' Advocacy Group - Injured Workers Support Team. Image Credit; Ballina Gee

It has taken over a year of relentless investigation to reach this point.There were times we thought we couldn’t go on. Behind the scenes, there were threats, obstruction, and dirty tactics, a playbook of pressure designed to make us stop asking questions.

We didn’t. But it wasn't easy...


Because this investigation is not about blame. It’s about shining a light on the story that must finally be told, it's complexity and thanking those who had the courage to stay the course. We hope it helps both the public and the sector finally understand the scale of damage this cruelty is causing to workers, employers, and the integrity of the system itself. A system that was never designed for the world we live in now, one we keep trying to reform without ever confronting its original sin: the origins of harm.


It began as a promise: protection for those injured at work, a social compact that once stood for fairness. But as industry modernised, something corrosive happened. The values of care and justice were replaced by the logic of efficiency and control.


By the 1980s, a new experiment began: Australia built a digital engine to manage risk. What started as actuarial innovation quietly became something else, an algorithmic template for managing human suffering. The data didn’t just measure injury; it learned to monetise it.


In theory, the system was meant to make claims fairer and faster.In practice, it automated suspicion. It scaled delay. It multiplied denial. What was once the discretion of a case manager became a function of code — and the harm that once lived in policy manuals began replicating across networks, unchecked.


Today, the descendants of that system make decisions about who is “fit,” who is “credible,” who is “worth rehabilitating.” These decisions are made not in conversation, but through models that can neither see nor care.This is what it means when harm becomes infrastructure — it no longer needs intent to perpetuate itself.


And at the sharpest edge of this digital transformation stand the hidden casualties of ‘progress’. The women who fought for equality in the 1970s and 1980s: teachers, public servants, health professionals, adminstrative staff now find themselves discarded in midlife. Injured, surveilled, and disbelieved, many are pushed into poverty or housing insecurity. Their contribution is invisible; their loss, uncounted.


This is the cruel irony of “modernisation”: it was sold as progress, but it has scaled the very harm it promised to end. Until we name the algorithm for what it is, an instrument of displacement nothing will change. A system built to protect people cannot survive once it starts profiting from their pain.


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Oct 18

3 min read

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