Power, Silence, and the Price of Reform
A Reckoning with the Hayes Playbook
This edition of The Reckoning Room is a response to Kylie Simpson’s exposé on the 2025 Workers Compensation reforms, and the cost of invisible injuries.
Kylie’s courageous exposé, Inside the Hayes Power Play: How One Union Boss Helped Rewrite Workers Comp in NSW, lays bare what many injured workers and insiders have long suspected:
The 2025 Workers Compensation Legislation Amendment Bill wasn’t just a policy shift, it was a political manoeuvre designed and shaped by powerful hands working behind the scenes.
At the centre of it is Gerard Hayes, Secretary of the Health Services Union (HSU) NSW•ACT•QLD Branch.
A man whose public persona as a workers’ champion obscures a more troubling legacy.
According to Simpson, Hayes didn’t just comment on the Bill. He influenced it.
His behind-the-scenes proposal to raise the Whole Person Impairment (WPI) threshold for psychological injuries from 15% to 31% - incrementally and indexed to CPI - was adopted almost verbatim by the Minns Government.
The result?
Fewer injured workers will ever qualify for meaningful compensation.
Those most affected are the same workers the union claims to protect.
The Silence That Protects Power
Simpson, herself a former HSU Industrial Officer and protected whistleblower, connects the dots between Hayes’ political influence and a long-standing culture of silence and psychological harm within the union he leads.
Under his leadership, at least nine HSU employees, including Simpson, sustained psychological injuries.
None of these were acknowledged in his official submissions to Parliament.
None were mentioned during his appearance before the Standing Committee on Law and Justice.
None factored into a policy that will now make it even harder for workers like them to seek justice.
This is not a coincidence. It’s a playbook.
I’ve seen how it works. I’ve lived it.
Systemic Harm Disguised as Reform
What Kylie describes is not just a policy failure. It’s systemic gaslighting.
Injured workers are being forced to prove their pain to thresholds they will likely never reach. And the very institutions meant to defend them are instead gatekeeping access to care and compensation.
The legislative sleight of hand, where a recommendation is quietly submitted off-camera, then quietly adopted into law, is a tactic as old as institutional power itself. But when it’s deployed by someone with a documented history of presiding over unaddressed psychological harm, the stakes are far too high to ignore.
A Reckoning Is Overdue
This is what betrayal looks like in a professional setting. It’s clean, procedural, and devastatingly effective.
There’s a reason Simpson published this now.
Once legislation passes, and once legal processes begin, whistleblowers are silenced by design - gagged by NDAs, court undertakings, or threats of professional ruin.
The time to speak is now.
And the rest of us must be willing to listen.
Because the truth is: this story isn’t about one union or one policy. It’s about the culture that makes harm invisible, even as it happens in plain sight.
It’s about injured workers watching the same people who failed them in the workplace now shaping the laws that will determine their future.
And it’s about what happens when no one in power is held to account, until someone like Kylie Simpson forces the reckoning into public view.
The Reckoning Room Was Made for This
This platform exists for stories like this, where personal trauma intersects with systemic failure, and where silence has done enough damage.
Simpson’s exposé is a warning, but it’s also a call to action, for:
Full GIPA transparency on WHS failures inside union environments.
Public scrutiny of stakeholder interference in legislative processes.
Solidarity with the injured workers who’ve been erased from this conversation.
We may not be able to stop this Bill from passing. But we can remember who enabled it. And we can make sure this moment doesn’t fade quietly into policy history.
The time for silence has passed.
Read Kylie Simpson’s exposé.