There comes a point where you realise something devastating: the people running this system aren’t actually caring — they’re acting as though they care. Injured workers feel it. Families feel it. Anyone navigating the NSW workers’ compensation maze feels it. The empathy is scripted. The compassion is performed. And the harm is real. This blog essay is about the widening gap between the words they say and the lives they destroy.

There is a strange absurdity unfolding inside the NSW workers’ compensation system. While injured workers spiral into crisis — losing income, treatment, housing, careers, and sometimes even their lives — the people running the system are busy doing something else entirely.

They’re doing empathy training.

Yes. Empathy training.

Senior executives, team leaders and case managers sit in conference rooms learning how to look empathetic. They practice softening their tone. They learn to tilt their heads at the right angle. They rehearse lines like:

Some even sign their emails with “take care.”

And then — in the very same email chain decline treatment or worse still provide perfunctory helpline numbers to sidestep responsibility or the known failures of the system they administer. Some responses to complaints are so cold it could freeze bone.

This is the theatre. The performance. The pantomime.

Because the system itself? It is merciless.

It is actuarial, algorithmic, impersonal. A machine that calculates risk and cost, not human suffering. A structure designed to protect budgets, not bodies. (Side note - they don't keep accurate data on suicides we are told or do they?) A place where the most dangerous phrase an injured person can hear is:

“Your claim remains under review.”

Welcome to the world of The Great Pretenders.

1. Empathy as Performance — Not Practice

The problem isn’t that staff don’t know what empathy sounds like. They’ve been trained in it. They’ve been certified in it. They’ve completed mandatory modules titled:

• Trauma-Informed Communication

• Understanding Psychological Distress

• Empathy in Claims Management

But here’s the hypocrisy:

You can train someone to mimic the facial expression of concern, but you cannot train someone to override a system or an algorithm that is structurally indifferent.

The empathy stops where the spreadsheet starts.

Even the warmest tone cannot soften a letter that says:

• “We have determined you do not meet the criteria for support.”

• “Your benefits will cease in seven days.”

• “We cannot approve this treatment at this time.”

Empathy is not a tone of voice.It is an outcome.

And there is no outcome in this system that reflects care or takes responsibility for the chaos of its structure.

2. Where Empathy Goes to Die

Inside NSW workers’ compensation, an injured worker is not a person. They are:

• a file number

• a cost pressure

• a liability

• a risk

• a threat to scheme sustainability

• a percentage of whole-person impairment

The deeper your psychological injury, the more likely you are to be scrutinised, minimised, or disbelieved.

The more distressed you are, the more your distress becomes “non-work related.”

The more you deteriorate inside the system, the more the system insists it is not to blame.

Where does empathy go in all this?

Nowhere.

There is no field in the database called pain.No drop-down menu labelled despair. No KPI for not making things worse.

The system cannot record empathy because the system does not reward empathy.

3. Revolving Door Leadership, Revolving Door Failure

Behind the scenes, the same leaders move from one agency to another in an endless rotation:

icare → SIRASIRA → TreasuryTreasury → CSPCSP → icare

And around it goes.

Recycled leadership. Recycled ideas. Recycled failures.

They bring the same worldview, the same actuarial mindset, the same structural blindness to harm — just with new business cards and a slightly updated title.

This isn’t leadership.It’s choreography.

And injured people?They are the ones left lying on the floor while the dancers change partners.

4. The QBE Audit: The Latest Performance of Accountability

SIRA’s recent audit of QBE reads exactly like what it is:an attempt to appear vigilant without confronting the truth.

It details:

• gaps in wage reimbursements

• poor handover notes

• missing plans

• delayed notifications

• data inconsistencies

All real issues. All harmful.

But what’s missing is monumental:

No assessment of harm. No measurement of deterioration. No acknowledgment of human consequences.

An audit that counts documentation failures but does not count broken lives is not oversight.

It is a performance of oversight.

5. The Cruel Joke: Empathy Workshops in a System Built on Actuarial Logic

The system teaches empathy in the morning and delivers psychological harm by afternoon.

It promises compassion and delivers compliance.

It speaks the language of humanity and operates the mathematics of denial.

Some of the coldest decision-makers in this system sign off their emails with:

“Take care.”

But nobody does.

Not in the way that matters. Not in the outcomes that shape a person’s future.

Empathy cannot flourish inside a system allergic to human need.

6. The Leader We’re Still Waiting For

And so here we are —watching reforms, audits, strategies, and media releases swirl while the injured continue to fall through the cracks.

Because until we find the person who is willing to rattle politicians, to look a Minister in the eye and say:

Until we find the leader who doesn’t take nonsense from insurers, who refuses to be soothed by stakeholder spin, who sees through the glossy annual reports and meaningless supervision plans —

until we find the leader who will speak for the harmed, not the powerful, not the comfortable, not the revolving-door insiders —but the injured, the broken, the unheard —

nothing is going to change.

Not one reform. Not one audit. Not one reshuffled executive. Not one empathy workshop.

Systems do not heal themselves. People heal systems.

But only when someone with a spine, a conscience, and a heartbeat is trusted to lead.

That person has not been appointed yet. They are not sitting in a corner office. They will not emerge from the House of Great Pretenders.

They are the one who will say, with absolute clarity:

Enough. And mean it.

Until then, the system will continue exactly as it is:

performing empathy, delivering harm, and calling that balance. Oh and 'process'.