When the Perpetrator Still Holds the Phone

Shattered sits down with an injured worker and a leading organisational psychologist to unpack a phenomenon few dare to name — horizontal violence inside the workers’ compensation system.

It’s the invisible aggression that flows sideways, not down: colleagues, managers, and system actors turning against the very person who’s already been harmed. What happens when the perpetrator of the original injury is allowed to keep controlling the process that’s meant to repair it? When the same voice that broke you still whispers to the insurer?

In 2025, SafeWork NSW finally broke free from the Department of Customer Service. It was billed as a new era of integrity, a regulator unshackled from the same bureaucracy that oversaw the catastrophe of icare.

But freedom on paper means nothing when the injured are still bleeding inside the system.

The New Law, The Old Cruelty

The new Work Health and Safety Regulation 2025 (NSW) declares that employers must eliminate or minimise psychosocial hazards — bullying, humiliation, and organisational injustice using the hierarchy of controls.

The Fair Work Act 2009 still forbids adverse action against anyone who exercises a workplace right including making a compensation claim.

The State Insurance Regulatory Authority (SIRA) still claims oversight of insurers and employers, and can issue compliance or penalty notices.

And the newly independent SafeWork NSW can now prosecute for breaches of mental-health safety obligations.

All of it sounds like progress. But the truth is brutal: None of these agencies regulate the harm happening inside the recovery system itself.

Inside the Machine

Once a worker is injured, especially with a psychological or cognitive injury they cross an invisible line into another world. A world where the same employer contact who caused the harm can still holds the phone line to the insurer as their day to day 'employer' contact. Where delays, denials, and intimidation can be sanitised as “process,” not recognised as abuse. Where trauma isn’t treated — it’s replicated through paperwork.

There is no mandatory separation between perpetrator and victim. No firewall. No protection. And no regulator willing to step in and say, enough.

This is re-harm — the second injury, delivered by the very machinery built to repair the first. Sadly it can put the injured at risk of suicide.

No one owns it. SafeWork says it’s a “claims matter.” SIRA says it’s an “employer issue.”The Personal Injury Commission can reverse a bad decision, but not the culture that produced it.

No regulator is watching the intersection where cruelty hides.

Re-Harm Is Not an Accident — It’s a Design Flaw

When a system forces a traumatised or cognitively impaired person to ask for protection, that is not rehabilitation. That is a breach of care. When oversight agencies claim “no jurisdiction” over behaviour that causes measurable psychological damage, that is not governance. That is complicity.

Every ignored complaint. Every covert email directing an insurer to cut benefits. Every “return-to-work meeting” that disregards medical advice. Each is a strike of institutional violence — a slow, bureaucratic assault.

And because no single regulator owns this terrain, the perpetrators walk free. Their victims are sent for further psychological assessment...

The Re-Harm Standard: What a Just System Would Do

1. Automatic protection for anyone with serious or cognitive injury — assign an independent advocate or guardian without the worker having to ask.

2. Mandatory duty to prevent re-harm across all insurers and employers — enforceable under the WHS Act.

3. Shared jurisdiction — compel SafeWork and SIRA to act jointly where recovery processes cause harm.

4. Trauma-informed code of conduct written into regulation, with penalties for breach.

5. Public reporting of re-harm incidents and disciplinary outcomes.

6. Reverse the burden of proof — make the employer or insurer demonstrate that their conduct did not cause harm.

Until these principles are law, the system will keep reproducing its own violence — quietly, legally, and without consequence.

The Verdict on a Broken System

We call it a “recovery system.” But if the same people who caused the injury can control the process of repair, it’s not a system of recovery, it’s a cycle of re-harm.

When government agencies know this and do nothing, that’s not administration. That’s state-sanctioned cruelty.

No one with cognitive injury should ever have to ask for mercy. Mercy should be built into the law.