The Review Economy: When Transparency Becomes a Shield

How a system that was meant to protect has become one of the most reviewed — and least reformed institutions in modern government.

Reviews Without Repair

If there’s one thing the NSW workers’ compensation system doesn’t lack, it’s reviews. Dozens of them, parliamentary inquiries, actuarial audits, independent reviews, Treasury investigations, and ministerial “resets.”

And yet, here we are. More reports. More reviews. More harm. More changes - to do what? Lead to another inquiry instead of admitting it needs to be completely rebuilt.

Even the child-protection system, condemned by the Auditor-General this year as inefficient, ineffective and unsustainable, has fallen into the same cycle, endless reviews, minimal reform, exhausted staff. But unlike the workers’ compensation bureaucracy, many of the people inside that system aren’t the problem they are the casualties of it. At least as far as Workers' Compensation is concerned.

When child-protection caseworkers, counsellors, and frontline staff burn out from witnessing trauma without the power or resources to prevent it, many end up in the workers’ compensation system themselves where the cycle of harm continues. A system that injures those who protect the vulnerable, then injures them again when they seek help, isn’t just broken. It’s self-perpetuating.

Most people inside these systems are trying to do good work but they’re trapped in architectures that no longer serve the public. Nothing in their job description said they had to harm people just to keep employment.

When government systems are reviewed more often than they are reformed, the cycle becomes self-sustaining. Review replaces accountability. Bureaucracy replaces care.

And those left inside whether injured workers or overworked caseworkers carry the trauma the system itself refuses to see.

Across Frontlines

Whether it’s an injured nurse, a burnt-out child-protection worker, or a first responder whose trauma is quietly filed under leave, the pattern is the same. We build systems that demand compassion, then punish those who show it.

And, don't forget those inside the workers' compensation operating system itself, who are tasked with implementing draconian government 'reforms'. Can you imagine going to work everyday under those circumstances?

These are not separate crises, they’re connected failures of care. And until we fix the structures that keep turning good people into collateral damage, no number of reviews will ever be enough.

The Data That Disappears

Governments like to say they have the data. But in truth, the data may be corrupt, biased, or just plain missing.

We may never know the full number, the deaths tracked, the suicides referenced, the claimants who vanish from the records. The old WorkCover systems were never built to hold truth; they were built to hold numbers. Actuaries drive this system. Realise that.

When icare migrated those systems into its $140 million Guidewire platform in 2020, it buried what little visibility was left. Data pipelines broke. Claims disappeared. Whole histories of injury and despair vanished into digital silence.

Governments still talk about “sustainability” while their own records cannot sustain a full human story. They commission reviews, promise modernisation, and then hide behind corrupted data to defend inaction.

That’s not governance.That’s erasure — performed in spreadsheets.

The Most Reviewed Failure in Modern Government

Despite the data dysfunction, this is arguably the most reviewed system in modern Australian government. Since 2015, the NSW workers’ compensation and icare framework has faced independent inquiries, parliamentary investigations, Treasury reviews, Auditor-General reports, probity reviews, and actuarial audits. Each has promised transparency. None has restored trust. Nothing really changes and the harm continues.

No other system has endured such scrutiny while producing so little reform. Even the child-protection system, despite its own horrific failings, hasn’t been subjected to as many post-crisis reviews as workers’ compensation, though many argue it should. The difference is this: in child protection, frontline staff are still fighting to care.

In workers’ compensation, the system itself has become a marketplace for pain.

The Review Economy

Every time a crisis erupts, the first instinct is to announce a review. It sounds responsible. It looks like action. But in the machinery of government, a review is rarely about truth — it’s about time.

Time to calm the headlines. Time to reassure Treasury. Time to let outrage fade before the next scandal hits.

The NSW workers’ compensation system has become a masterclass in this choreography. Each inquiry — from the Dore Review to the SIRA Special Inquiry led by senior counsel Alan Robertson SC has been framed as transparency.

But even Robertson’s report revealed the limits of that transparency. He noted, again and again, the difficulty of obtaining key documents. Some participants later described feeling “misled” about the process itself, a reflection of just how tightly managed the flow of information had become.

In truth, when an inquiry struggles to access the very evidence it was commissioned to examine, that’s not oversight. That’s containment.

This is the review economy, a bureaucratic ecosystem where transparency itself becomes a currency. Governments spend it to buy legitimacy. Agencies trade it for survival. And while they debate metrics and cost-benefit ratios, the real cost is borne by the people the system was meant to protect.

It’s not just about injury data. It’s about who controls the narrative. Treasury wants numbers that balance. Ministers want optics that reassure. Regulators want distance from failure. And so “transparency” becomes selective — what is measured, reported, and funded is what serves the political ledger, not the public good.

Meanwhile, the same data that could expose human harm is lost in transition, from WorkCover to icare, from one IT platform to another. The 2020 icare Guidewire fiasco didn’t just crash a database; it fractured accountability. If you can’t see the pattern of harm, you can’t be held responsible for it.

That’s the quiet genius of the review economy: it looks like democracy at work, while keeping the public permanently one step removed from the truth.

Treasury’s Moral Conflict

Treasury calls it sustainability. But sustainability of what?

Not of human wellbeing — of fiscal appearance. The numbers must hold, even if people break.

The entire logic of the system is backwards. Instead of measuring the wellbeing of those harmed at work, it measures the financial exposure of those responsible for the harm. Instead of rewarding recovery, it rewards cost-containment.

It’s a moral conflict hidden inside fiscal language. The same officials who preach responsibility to taxpayers ignore the moral debt owed to those taxpayers when they are injured at work.

And while Treasury insists they must make the budget sustainable and insurers' reap the benefits, someone somewhere drafts condolence letters for ministers, letters acknowledging the suicides of those who didn’t survive the review economy.

Reclaiming Accountability

If endless reviews cannot fix a broken system, then the only solution left is truth — unfiltered, unredacted, and unspun.

Accountability means more than transparency; it means ownership of harm. It means admitting that governance built on denial cannot heal the people it injures. It means shifting the purpose of data, from defending budgets to defending lives.

It means our politicians doing much better and refusing to sell out and cause human harm.

The time for review is over. The time for repair has come.

Because every system built to protect people but instead profits from their suffering belongs to another era, one we swore we had left behind. Did we?