It's a familiar but still compelling story; Canberra public servant who says they were bullied out of their job, battling for years through courts and tribunals to win the workers' compensation they say they are owed.
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Federal workplace insurer Comcare fights the case, sometimes all the way to the High Court, desperate to avoid a legal precedent opening the door for more claims and more payments
Another episode of the long-running show came to a head this week in the case of Sharon Lim, the former ACMA public servant and her six-year legal struggle for workers' compensation for mental injuries she says she suffered as a result of bullying.
But all this courtroom drama was supposed to end with reforms to the Safety Rehabilitation and Compensation Act promised first by Labor and then the Coalition?
Twice in recent years, the High Court has been called upon to decide "landmark" Comcare cases and the Lim matter too might be heading for the nation's highest court.
It's a tricky legal point, but it could mean some of the thousands of public servants and military personnel whose claims have been refused since 2005 might have scope to resuscitate their cases.
It could be Comcare's worst nightmare come true, after working so hard to get itself back into a position of financial viability.
But it wasn't supposed to be like this.
When Allan Hawke and Peter Hanks made 147 recommendations in 2013, to effectively rewrite the Safety Rehabilitation and Compensation Act, the former mandarin and senior barrister were trying to drag the 1980s legislation into the modern world.
The Hawke-Hanks reforms, supported at the time by the soon-to-be-defeated Labor government, would have helped psychologically injured workers straight into treatment, back to work and away from the "passive" receipt of compensation payments while sitting at home for months or years, a state that is often as damaging as the original injury itself.
In fairness to Comcare, it does not want to operate a compensation scheme that writes weekly cheques and dispenses drugs to people languishing on their couches, but too often the agency's legislative framework conspires with circumstances to deliver such an outcome.
The agency has worked wonders, with very little help from the legislative process, to improve its financial position, not least by forcing public service departments to take financial responsibility for their performance in preventing injuries and getting their workers well again.
But claimants' lawyers complain that the scheme has been dragged back into the black using a hard-ball approach to injured workers and tough legal tactics on those who appeal.
Comcare has a responsibility to taxpayers to try to balance its books but an adversarial approach, which would not be needed if sensible reforms could have been enacted, can make bad situations worse.
Things have been quiet on the reform front for too long.
It is rumoured that a bill could return to Parliament in 2017 and to end the courtroom drama, it is time to revisit the Hawke-Hanks reform package.
