94 per cent of employers say they supported their injured worker. Half that many workers agree

The gap that had never been measured

Six years into a ten-year strategy, Safe Work Australia did something it had not done before: it asked employers the same questions it had long been asking injured workers. The report is direct about the novelty and about what came back. In the Year 6 scorecard, employer results have been introduced for the first time, it says, and those results highlight a large disparity between worker perceptions and employer perceptions of the workers’ compensation process.

Three questions, asked of both sides:

Measures k1, l1 and m1 (employer perspective) against k, l and m (worker perspective), Year 6 scorecard, 2025 National Return to Work Survey. The gap column is our subtraction of the two published figures.

A return to work plan is the least subjective of the three. Either a document exists or it does not, and even there the two sides are nearly 15 points apart. Support after injury is the most subjective, and it is where they diverge most: employers are close to unanimous, workers are split down the middle.

Both numbers can be honestly given. An employer who rang once, kept the job open and believed that was support would answer yes. A worker who found that insufficient would answer no. That is what makes the gap useful rather than merely embarrassing. It says the two parties are not disagreeing about facts so much as about what the word support means in practice, and the party whose recovery depends on the answer is the one saying no.

The stigma measure has not moved in seven years

The August 2026 campaign is not the first. The scorecard records an earlier national awareness campaign under Action Area 2, notes that in 2023 it generated over 3.4 million social media impressions, more than 24,000 views of the stigma web page content, and resulted in over 1,650 resource downloads, and marks its status Complete.

The measure that campaign existed to shift is in the same report. The proportion of workers who were concerned they would be fired if they made a claim went from 22 per cent in 2018 to 23 per cent in 2025. Safe Work Australia draws the conclusion itself, highlighting that reducing workers’ compensation stigma is still a challenge.

Our view, and it is a view rather than a finding: 3.4 million impressions that move a measure by roughly nothing is evidence about the instrument, not about the effort. Fear of being fired for claiming is a belief about what an employer will actually do. The scorecard's own employer chapter suggests workers are reading that behaviour and finding it wanting, at a rate of one in two. A social media series asking employers to foster a good workplace culture is being asked to carry a problem the same document locates somewhere else.

Most of the scorecard is going the wrong way

The Strategy carries fifteen national performance measures. Setting aside one discontinued measure and one whose survey wording changed, thirteen have a baseline and a Year 6 figure that can be compared against the direction the Strategy says it wants. By our count, nine moved away from the target and four moved towards it.

Baseline is the average of the 2016 and 2018 surveys where available, or an average of 2015-16 to 2017-18 claims data for the measures drawn from the National Data Set. Year 6 survey measures use the 2025 survey alone, because of the gap between the 2021 and 2025 waves. Measures marked * carry Safe Work Australia’s own caution that questionnaire changes between 2021 and 2025 affect comparability. The Work Role Functioning measure was discontinued and the workplace accommodations measure had a wording change the report says should be treated with caution, so neither is counted here. The Direction column is ours, comparing each published Year 6 figure with its published baseline against the published target direction.

The report reaches the same place in its own words. Worker experiences, it says, have generally deteriorated. Injured workers are less likely to think the process fair, more likely to report stressful dealings with healthcare providers, less likely to feel supported by an employer and less confident about returning.

What is actually improving

Three of the four improving measures sit with insurers and clinicians rather than with employers. Work-focused healthcare communication rose 8.3 points, which is the largest single gain on the board. Insurer decision times fell from 5.8 weeks to 5.1. The report singles that out as the most significant positive development and adds the qualifier that matters: decision times for mental health condition claims remain more than double the decision time of non-Mental Health condition claims, even after improving faster than any other category.

So the parts of the system that are run by professionals to a process improved. The part that depends on how an individual workplace treats an injured person is where the numbers fell. That is consistent with the perception gap, and it is the more useful reading of this scorecard than any single figure in it.

The people running it are not pretending otherwise

This is not a report being spun. Safe Work Australia Members held a workshop on workers’ compensation in September 2025 and considered the mid-term review, the report says, acknowledging the breadth of action taken while remaining concerned about the mixed results on the Strategy’s progress. The review nonetheless found the Strategy remains fit for purpose.

Both of those can be true. A strategy can be aimed correctly and still be under-powered against what is moving the numbers. With four years left to run, the Year 6 scorecard is the document that says so in the agency’s own voice, and the first one able to point at the gap between what employers believe they are doing and what injured workers say happened.

Spotted an error? Request a correction and we will check it against the source and log the outcome here.