The Next Robodebt Is Already Here and It’s Happening Inside NSW Workers’ Compensation

Nov 6

4 min read

Why the NSW government is still legislating a system it no longer understands and injured people are paying the price.

Cracked glass with red binary code overlays a man's face. Text: "SYSTEMIC HARM" in bold red. Background features a building facade. Ominous mood.

Australia has already lived through Robodebt. The UK has already lived through the Post Office scandal. Both began with “data issues,” both were dismissed as administrative failures and both ended as human-rights tragedies.

Workers’ compensation is now showing the same pattern of automation, denial, governance failure and system-level harm.

The difference this time? The people being broken by the system are already injured when it happens.

The Government Keeps Legislating While the System Beneath It Keeps Failing

For more than a decade, governments have responded to the workers’ compensation crisis the same way: rewrite sections of the Act, tighten thresholds, announce new “claims models,” promise modernisation.

But we don’t have a legislative problem. We have a system problem.

You cannot reform a system if the infrastructure underneath it is already broken and the government won’t admit it.

Data errors have required mass remediation programs
Claims transitions have resulted in delayed or missing payments
IT systems have failed to route emails, assign case managers, or calculate entitlements correctly
Injured workers have been left without income for weeks or months
Agencies report “corrections” but not the human cost of the failure itself

When your payment doesn’t arrive, it’s not a technical issue. It’s a missed rent notice. It’s a parent wondering how to feed a child. It’s an injured person already fragile pushed further into crisis by the very system designed to protect them.

And when remediation finally comes, it only pays what was owed not what was lost.

There is no compensation for the panic, the eviction threat, the breakdown of a marriage, or the suicide risk triggered by system failure.

Just a spreadsheet correction — and silence.

The Governance Problem No One Wants to Own

Since the dismantling of WorkCover NSW, the system has been fragmented across three agencies:

Function	Agency
Workplace safety & prevention	SafeWork NSW
Scheme regulation & oversight	SIRA (State Insurance Regulatory Authority)
Insurance fund & claims administration	icare (Insurance & Care NSW)

Each controls part of the system. None controls the whole.

If the injury is caused at work → SafeWork.
If the claim is mishandled → icare.
If data is missing, payments delayed, or oversight fails → SIRA.

Three agencies. Three sets of powers. No single point of accountability.

A design that guarantees blame can always be passed sideways.

Automation Has Replaced Humanity and Accountability

Once upon a time you had a case manager you could speak to.

Today?

You get routed through a portal.
Your email is processed through an internal system that replaces real names with placeholders like “Peter P.”
The first “reply” you get is a bot.
Key decisions are made before a human even sees your file.
If the data is wrong, the decision is wrong and there is no human to correct it.

This is not efficiency. It is distance disguised as innovation.

When humans are removed from the frontline of care, the system doesn’t just become less personal —it becomes less accountable.

The Algorithmic Question No Government Has Answered

Shattered traces the origins of Colossus, an Australian-developed injury-valuation system from the late 1980s later sold internationally as part of insurance software suites.

Colossus is not used in NSW workers’ compensation today but it is an early example of how injury valuation was handed to software long before anyone questioned what the software was being trained on.

Today, DXC Technology continues to market Colossus as an optional module in its DXC Assure product. DXC is not a claims agent for icare.

So the point is not “Is Colossus still active?”

The point is this:

If workers’ compensation decisions are now shaped by data, software, and invisible triage systems, what systems are being used, who built them, and what datasets are they learning from?

No government agency has ever produced an audit of the decision logic inside modern claims software.

Not one.

And yet we legislate as if the system is solid.

We’re Not Whistleblowers

We’re not whistleblowers. We just did what someone in government should have done years ago we reviewed the system’s own investigations and followed the human harm hidden in plain sight.

We Didn’t Start Shattered to Expose a Scandal

We didn’t start Shattered to expose a scandal. We started because we thought the people in power simply didn’t know what was happening.

We assumed the harm was invisible. We assumed if we just told the stories, the system would correct itself.

But then we learned:

They do know.

They have known for years.

And instead of fixing the architecture that is generating the harm, they keep trying to patch the fallout, one delayed payment, one “remediation,” one reform cycle at a time.

That is not governance. That is crisis-management disguised as policy.

And while they keep playing with legislation, people are being chewed up by the machine underneath it. Bluntly: people are dying by suicide.

The system is harming people. Isn’t that enough?

No business should be forced to bankroll the consequences of a broken public architecture. No worker should have to collapse before the system responds. And no government should be allowed to claim ignorance when the evidence is sitting in its own data, audits, inquiry transcripts and case files.

This isn’t a story about awareness. It’s a story about refusal.

The Pattern Is Now Impossible to Ignore

Robodebt: automated system, flawed data, government denial, real people harmed.

Post Office/Horizon: faulty software, unquestioned algorithm, innocent workers accused and bankrupted.

Workers’ compensation: failed claims systems, missing or misrouted payments, algorithmic triage, lives collapsing in real time.

Same architecture. Same logic. Same harm.

The only question is whether NSW Parliament will intervene before the Royal Commission — or after.

The Question Government Must Be Forced to Answer

Before one more amendment, threshold change, or “new model,” there is a single question that should be non-negotiable:

Has the government ever conducted a full, independent audit of the IT, data integrity, and algorithmic decision-making systems operating inside workers’ compensation?

If the answer is no then every injured person in that system is already at risk.

And every minister defending it is already on notice.