“much of the grief that has occurred over the past five-and-a-half years could have been avoided.” - The Hon Robert McDougall

I wasn’t going to write another post this week for paid subscribers, but t…

Read more

Before re…

Read more

Behind the political messaging sits a far more confronting possibility: a workers compensation system so consumed by complexity, remediation and institutional survival that its ability to hear and protect businesses and their injured began to break down.

It has taken me a long time to digest what was sitting inside the 21 archive boxes I reviewed in the Parliamentary Reading Room.

I have read the documents.
Then read them again.

To see this level of confusion, fragmentation and institutional chaos written down on paper actually makes me feel sick at times, because I know some of the businesses and their injured whose lives were permanently damaged while all of this was unfolding behind the scenes.

And I am conscious that for people reading this cold, some of what follows may be difficult to absorb.

But the people of NSW have a right to know.

What increasingly emerges from these documents is not simply the story of isolated mistakes or individual failures.

It is the picture of a workers compensation system that may have become so structurally fragmented, operationally burdened and internally consumed by remediation, governance redesign and institutional survival that its ability to coherently protect businesses and their injured began to break down.

I do not pretend to have answers after reading this material.

I honestly do not know where NSW goes from here, how trust is rebuilt, or how businesses and their injured begin making sense of the human consequences that appear to sit underneath years of political messaging and reform announcements.

What I do know is this:

Hiding the scale of what occurred inside this system is not the answer. The system must brief the public. Thoroughly.

A system nobody fully understood

WorkCover was dismantled and replaced with multiple organisations:
icare,
SIRA,
SafeWork,
the Nominal Insurer,
Treasury Managed Fund structures,
multiple legislative frameworks,
multiple reporting lines,
multiple accountability arrangements.

The reform was supposed to improve transparency and accountability.

But years later, in documents I have reviewed, Treasury itself would privately describe the structure as:

“one of the most complex of all NSW Government entities.”

Treasury also acknowledged that the structure created situations where it became:

“unclear who is accountable for the NI.”

That is an extraordinary admission.

Because this was not some minor administrative arrangement quietly operating in the background.

This was the system responsible for supporting businesses and their injured across NSW.

Most people assumed they were dealing with a normal government agency.

Treasury itself later acknowledged they were not.

Under the original structure:

• icare executives were accountable to the icare Board,

• icare maintained a direct relationship with the Treasurer,

• and Treasury itself formally had “no role” under the legislation.

At the same time, the public understandably continued to see the Nominal Insurer as fundamentally part of government.

That disconnect matters because ordinary people were never navigating this system as governance experts.

They were navigating it while injured, financially stressed, psychologically deteriorating or trying to keep businesses afloat.

What many experienced instead was a kind of institutional disorientation in which responsibility appeared to move endlessly between agencies, insurers, regulators and dispute bodies while nobody seemed able to take ownership of the whole picture.

For businesses and their injured, it often felt like being trapped inside a maze.

While the public was being reassured

One of the most confronting aspects of the documents is the scale of the work already underway behind the scenes while the public was still hearing assurances that reform was progressing.

The volume of remediation programs, governance reviews, technology rebuilding, legislative restructuring, operational redesign and risk management activity is enormous.

Treasury and agency documents repeatedly refer to:

• governance redesign,

• structural repair,

• operational risk,

• remediation activity,

• technology instability,

• and underperformance.

One Treasury brief acknowledged:

“Proactive remediation of all 50,000 potentially affected claims would take an unacceptable length of time.”

Another stated:

“A team of forty staff working full time would take around five years to review all claims.”

Another described parts of the infrastructure as:

“legacy custom-built systems which are at or beyond end of supported life, hosted on ageing and fragile infrastructure.”

Read together, the documents suggest something far larger than isolated mistakes.

They suggest a system that may have become so structurally complicated and operationally burdened that it was struggling to stabilise itself while still being expected to safely manage hundreds of thousands of businesses and their injured moving through it.

That does not erase the harm.

If anything, it makes the situation more serious.

Because if the structure itself became too complex to govern coherently, then the people inside it were carrying the consequences of that instability in real time.

The language that stays with you

Some of the most confronting material I have reviewed during all of this is not emotional at all.

It is administrative

Contained inside meeting notes and internal records are phrases that are difficult to forget once read.

References to:

“Park 4,000 long-tail injured workers.”

A statement that it was:

“Not possible to extend EML budget in order to ‘save them all.”

These are not the words businesses and their injured believed sat behind a recovery system.

They are the language of systems under pressure.
Systems trying to manage exposure, cost and operational survival.

The icare Foundation questions

Which also brings me to another deeply uncomfortable part of this story: the emergence of the icare Foundation itself.

The icare Foundation has since ceased operating.

Once you begin understanding that icare originally operated with no clearly defined statutory organisational purpose while simultaneously sitting inside a highly unusual governance structure, the Foundation starts to raise a very different set of questions.

Because while businesses and their injured were moving through an increasingly unstable compensation system, parallel structures also appear to have emerged around “innovation”, wellbeing, social impact and alternative recovery approaches.

At first glance, some of those ideas may have sounded compassionate.

But the documents suggest there were also serious concerns underneath.

In October 2020, SIRA formally wrote to icare advising it was investigating complaints regarding rehabilitation services allegedly being declined because similar services were instead being provided through programs funded by the icare Foundation.

The letter goes further.

SIRA expressly raised concerns that programs funded through the icare Foundation:

“may result in outcomes inconsistent with the intent of the workers compensation legislation”

and that rehabilitation services may have been provided by:

“non-approved practitioners.”

Most significantly, SIRA stated it wanted to ensure workers were:

“not exposed to novel treatment funded by icare Foundation.”

That is extraordinarily serious language for a regulator to use.

Because rehabilitation provider frameworks exist for a reason. They are safeguards designed to protect businesses and their injured inside a regulated compensation environment.

The documents also raise broader questions about how innovation, wellbeing and research activities connected to the icare Foundation were governed, evaluated and supervised within the wider compensation system.

Because once programs begin operating alongside or outside established rehabilitation pathways, questions naturally arise regarding:

• clinical oversight,

• evidence standards,

• informed participation,

• regulatory approval,

• outcome measurement,

• and accountability if interventions do not operate as intended.

These are not abstract governance questions.

They sit directly at the intersection of public trust, health interventions and the obligations owed to businesses and their injured inside a compulsory statutory compensation scheme.

And yet for most people moving through the system during this period, it is unlikely they would have fully understood where the boundaries sat between regulated rehabilitation, innovation programs, peer support initiatives and broader wellbeing activities funded or supported through adjacent structures.

That uncertainty matters.

Because if the institutions themselves were still trying to work through governance, provider arrangements and regulatory boundaries behind the scenes, then many businesses and their injured may have been moving through systems they themselves could not possibly have properly understood.

And once people become disoriented inside systems responsible for health, recovery and livelihoods, trust can deteriorate very quickly.

One of the organisations caught inside that confusion was Craig’s Table, a community-based peer support and wellbeing organisation founded by Rosemary McKenzie Ferguson.

Rosemary was not a corporate operator or institutional insider.

She was a long-standing grassroots figure within the injured worker community who had spent decades supporting injured people and their families, often long before “peer support” became fashionable language inside policy systems.

She was also active in the establishment of the National Injured Workers Memorial in Canberra and the Deceased Workers Memorial Forest in Adelaide, South Australia — a dedicated public memorial space honouring workers who have lost their lives or suffered injury, illness or suicide connected to work.

Yet from the period surrounding the 2020 Four Corners program through to today, her reputation appears to have been repeatedly damaged by implication, innuendo and association arising from Craig’s Table’s involvement with the icare Foundation. There is no indication in the documents I have reviewed that Rosemary was informed SIRA was investigating aspects of the icare Foundation at the time. Why do I raise that - because it may of helped Rosemary manage the fallout that was directed to her personally across social media if she had been told.

The reputational consequences appear to have been substantial.

What now makes this deeply troubling when viewed against the broader documents is that Rosemary herself had reportedly already been raising concerns directly with icare, including concerns relating to the absence of a provider number and uncertainty about how the organisation was expected to operate within the system.

I have seen documents suggesting those concerns were never properly answered.

Instead, what appears to have unfolded was a prolonged period in which SIRA and icare themselves were attempting to work through unresolved governance and regulatory concerns while organisations and individuals operating inside that uncertainty were left exposed publicly.

That changes the picture considerably.

Because if community organisations were effectively operating inside a blurred and poorly defined space created by the system itself, then the reputational consequences become profoundly unfair.

And this is where the issue becomes much larger than one organisation or one individual.

Questions about whether businesses and their injured were exposed to poorly governed, ambiguously regulated or insufficiently supervised treatment pathways cannot simply disappear quietly into institutional memory.

Particularly when the regulator itself was formally raising concerns about:

• “novel treatment”,

• non-approved practitioners,

• and outcomes potentially inconsistent with workers compensation legislation.

Those are not minor concerns.

They go directly to public trust, patient safety, informed oversight and the integrity of the entire compensation system.

Because once systems begin operating in blurred spaces where nobody appears fully clear about the boundaries, responsibilities or protections involved, vulnerable people can end up carrying risks they never properly understood themselves.

And perhaps one of the hardest parts of all this to sit with is the possibility that while public attention and criticism became focused on individuals like Rosemary, the much larger structural confusion sitting underneath these arrangements may never have been properly explained to the public at all.

The rebuilding that nobody explained

I have to say honestly, after spending weeks reading these documents, I personally found the scale of the work underway inside the system difficult to absorb.

What has largely occurred instead is piecemeal political messaging while enormous structural rebuilding appears to have been occurring behind the scenes.

For years, businesses and their injured have been publicly calling out the system while, behind closed doors, agencies themselves appear to have already understood that large parts of the structure required major repair.

Not simply adjustment.

Repair.

The documents increasingly suggest the system had become so layered, fragmented and operationally difficult that coherent oversight and management were becoming extraordinarily difficult.

And while that rebuilding was occurring, people were still inside the machinery trying to recover, trying to work, trying to run businesses and trying to make sense of decisions that often felt impossible to navigate.

In other words, the system was not simply processing claims while all of this unfolded.

It appears it was simultaneously trying to rebuild itself while people were still living inside it.

The question NSW must now confront

At this point, what appears necessary is not simply another reform package quietly progressing through government.

It is a massive public education process.

One that explains, in plain English:

• what this system became,

• why it became so difficult to govern,

• what is now being rebuilt,

• what risks still exist,

• and what lessons must finally be learned from the human cost already paid by businesses and their injured across NSW.

Because prolonged institutional disorientation destroys trust.

And once trust collapses inside systems responsible for injury, recovery and livelihoods, the consequences spread far beyond individual claims.

The people of NSW deserve a fuller and more honest explanation of what occurred inside this system.

Because once you sit with these documents long enough, it becomes difficult not to feel the weight of what appears to have unfolded inside this system over many years.

Not simply frustration.

Not simply anger.

Something much heavier than that.

Too many businesses and their injured seem to have walked into this system believing it would protect them, only to emerge financially, psychologically and professionally damaged while the institutions themselves were still trying to stabilise and rebuild the machinery around them.

I do not think NSW has fully absorbed what that means yet.

Read Part 2 - For Paid Subscribers Only

Read more

Read more

Over recent weeks I have spent considerable time re-reading a chronology prepared by the workers’ compensation regulator itself, documenting what was known, discussed, escalated and investigated inside the workers’ compensation system over a number of years. The State Insurance Regulatory Authority (SIRA) material was obtained legitimately through parliamentary records and the NSW State Archives process. It is not commentary or advocacy material. It is the regulator’s own internal record and, having now sat with it for some time, I find myself increasingly troubled by what it reveals when the entries are read together rather than as isolated events.

Lives At Risk

It has taken me months to even begin speaking publicly about this material because, quite honestly, I find parts of it deeply confronting. Read as a whole, the chronology points toward the impact we now know the system has had on thousands of lives — injured workers whose recoveries stalled, families pulled into prolonged uncertainty, employers navigating escalating pressures, and communities steadily losing confidence in institutions that were created to provide protection and stability.

What emerges is not the picture of a system moving through one tumultuous period before inquiries and reform restored stability. Read in full, the chronology points instead to years of escalating operational pressure, financial deterioration, regulatory intervention and declining outcomes that impacted thousands of lives moving through the scheme. Injured workers, employers and families were not observing these failures from a distance — they were living inside them while the system struggled to respond effectively to conditions it already appeared to understand were deteriorating.

By 2018 there were already discussions occurring at senior levels regarding under-collection of premiums, deteriorating return-to-work outcomes, operational risks and broader sustainability concerns within the scheme. By 2019 icare was seeking $261 million in government support over four years, ultimately receiving $60 million over two years. At the same time, concerns around data quality and visibility into system performance were also being recorded.

As the chronology progresses, the entries become increasingly difficult to dismiss as ordinary administrative problems. There are references to investigations into claims handling, the use of statutory powers, underpayments to injured workers, ongoing non-compliance matters and, perhaps most confronting of all, a formal warning letter reiterating the requirement to notify the regulator of the deaths of section 39 affected workers.

That particular entry stopped me.

Not because systems never encounter tragedy, but because the existence of such a warning raises obvious questions about what processes existed for identifying, recording and responding to serious harm occurring within the scheme. Read in full, the chronology points toward the impact we now know the system has had on thousands of lives — injured workers whose recoveries stalled, employers caught in escalating pressures, families navigating uncertainty, and communities increasingly losing confidence in institutions that were designed to provide protection and stability.

Endless Reforms & Public Consultations

What troubles me most is not simply that serious issues existed. Large and complex systems inevitably experience periods of strain. It is that the chronology suggests many of these pressures were already known while consultation, reform processes and public messaging about the future of the scheme continued around them. In large institutions process often continues even while underlying conditions are deteriorating, creating a disconnect between how a system is publicly described and how it is actually being experienced by the people moving through it.

That disconnect matters.

It matters to injured workers attempting to recover their health while navigating uncertainty and adversarial processes. It matters to employers funding the scheme through premiums while being assured the system is functioning as intended. And it matters to the broader public, who assume that when serious risks emerge inside systems designed to protect vulnerable people, those risks are not only identified but meaningfully addressed.

When Data Integrity Fails

What has also become increasingly difficult to ignore are the questions surrounding the technology and data systems underpinning the scheme itself.

One Audit Office extract records that the original Capgemini contract for the build and operation of the Nominal Insurer’s core claims platform — Guidewire — covering the period from 1 February 2016 to 31 October 2020, with a disclosed contract value of $91.8 million, had not been properly disclosed under GIPA requirements for years.

That matters because throughout the chronology there are repeated references to operational risk, visibility problems, data quality concerns and the regulator’s limited ability at times to accurately assess system performance. Industry sources now claim the cost of Guidewire implementation has expanded dramatically beyond those original figures and continues to grow.

If that is true, then the public deserves clarity.

Employers funding this scheme deserve clarity.

Injured workers whose lives are shaped by decisions flowing from these systems deserve clarity.

What has the implementation actually cost to date? What is the current state of the data environment underpinning the scheme? How much confidence do government, parliament and the regulator themselves have in the integrity and visibility of the system they are now asking the public to trust through another round of consultation and reform?

These are not abstract technology questions. They go directly to claims management, oversight, premium setting, return-to-work outcomes and the ability to identify harm when things go wrong.

It is now 2026 and NSW is once again in a period of public consultation and reform regarding the workers’ compensation system. SIRA and the State Insurance and Care Governance structures are currently progressing new regulations, guidelines and market instruments flowing from the Workers Compensation Legislation Amendment Act 2025 and the Workers Compensation Legislation Amendment (Reform and Modernisation) Act 2026.

Yet having now read the chronology carefully and repeatedly over time, it is difficult to avoid a more fundamental question:

Were the underlying conditions reflected throughout these documents ever fully confronted and resolved, or has reform continued to move forward while deeper structural problems remained insufficiently addressed?

Because meaningful reform cannot occur in the absence of clarity about the true condition of the system it is attempting to change.

The public deserves that clarity.

Employers deserve that clarity.

Injured workers deserve that clarity.

The Public Deserves An Explanation

Given the current Treasurer, Daniel Mookhey, called for these papers through parliamentary process whilst in opposition, I believe the NSW Government now has a responsibility to openly explain what this chronology shows, what has actually changed since these events occurred, and what confidence the public should have that the underlying issues identified across these years have genuinely been resolved.

That responsibility matters because the chronology does not read as a record of isolated administrative problems that were quickly identified and corrected. Given what has been amplified in recent inquiries it raises serious questions.

Read in full, it points to years of continued operational strain, deteriorating outcomes, regulatory intervention with little result and growing pressure occurring while injured workers, employers and families continued moving through the system.

At some point governments must do more than announce endless reform. They must also account honestly for the condition of the system they are reforming.

We teach people how to give birth.
We teach them how to build careers.
We teach them how to accumulate, achieve, and…

Read more

Read more

Dear Reader,

As the NSW Parliament Public Accou…

Read more

In every corner of Australian life, insurers are bound by law to act in good faith. Health. Travel. Home. Life. If they mislead or mistreat you, the courts and regulators hold them accountable.

Except…

Read more