🟥 The Questions They Cannot Answer

Nov 1

3 min read

They admit the harm. They deny the harmed.

When someone is injured at work, the social contract is simple:

Employers fund the system through compulsory premiums.
Workers give up their right to sue under normal negligence law. ( few injured workers understand this).
The State promises recovery in return.

In NSW, that promise is now in doubt and the government cannot answer the only questions that matter.

Because when you strip away dashboards, reforms and talking points, seven unanswered questions remain.

How many injured workers actually recover?

Where is the independently verified data especially for psychological injury? If recovery cannot be measured, how can it be claimed?

How many people die by suicide during or after a claim?

If it isn’t tracked, then no one is accountable. A system that doesn’t count the dead cannot call itself safe.

How many treatment delays exceed clinical safety timeframes?

A back injury can become a lifelong disability. A trauma response can become a psychiatric disorder. Delay isn’t “process.” Delay is harm.

How many claims worsen because of the system itself?

A sprained back becomes depression. Workplace trauma becomes PTSD. The system that exists to “manage” injury is often the source of secondary injury.

How accurate is the algorithm deciding who gets care?

If a worker is incorrectly flagged as “low risk” on Day 1, who is responsible for the damage five years later?

Why are psychological claims still the longest, most brutal, and least successful?

No one disputes the pattern:

longest duration
lowest return-to-work rate
highest rate of secondary harm

And yet the government’s solution is not better care but raising the eligibility threshold from 15 % to 31 % impairment so fewer people qualify at all.

This is not reform.It is removal.

Who represents injured workers with binding authority?

There is a union representative on icare’s board but that seat represents unions, not the lived experience of the harmed.

No one elected by injured workers has a vote over how the system treats them. That is representation in name only.

🔺 A Quiet Example of Integrity and a Loud Example of the Problem

A story in today’s Sydney Morning Herald highlights exactly how power is structured in this system.

To their credit, Unions NSW have recused their Secretary, Mark Morey, from the icare board to avoid any perception of conflict.That is what principled leadership looks like in a system that is meant to be built on public trust.

Meanwhile, the head of Business NSW still holds a $100,000 paid seat on the same board in a statutory scheme funded entirely by compulsory employer premiums, and governed by legislation workers cannot opt out of.

This is no about blame. It is about system architecture: structure.

It reveals the imbalance at the heart of the system that generationally continues unchecked:

Employer bodies are represented

Unions have demonstrated ethical restraint

Injured workers the people the scheme exists for have no independent seat, no vote, no voice. Why not?

That is not oversight. That is structural exclusion.

The contradiction at the heart of the system

Workers’ compensation is not optional. As an injured person requiring medical care for workplace injuries, you can’t opt out, shop around, or sue freely. You can walk away but then you lose income, treatment, and often your chance at recovery.

Which leads to the only conclusion possible:

Workers gave up their right to sue in exchange for a State-guaranteed path to recovery. The government took the money, the control and the data so it must prove one thing: that it heals the people it harms.

Right now, it cannot.