NEWS Compo bid from ABC fails

A FORMER ABC Darwin technician whose “brain was fried” by the public broadcaster has had his latest compensation bid rejected more than two decades after he left the organisation.

The Administrative Appeals Tribunal first ordered government insurer Comcare to pay Raymond John Renouf compensation for anxiety and depression suffered as a result of his employment at the ABC in 2001. At the time, tribunal member Susan Kenny found while “there was no actual victimisation of the applicant by management at the ABC”, “persons with depression commonly develop paranoid ideas” which could have been exacerbated by “adverse management attitudes”.

In the late 2000s, Mr Renouf left Australia and “moved between Spain, Egypt and Morocco”, where he told his psychiatrist “his house was robbed 12 times, locals were terrorising him, dead dogs were put in his water supply and that he had been beaten by the local police”. Over the next few years, Mr Renouf’s relationship with Comcare broke down and in 2017 he told them he couldn’t complete a periodic review due to an “inability I have to fill out forms”, the AAT heard.

“I have a ‘brain freeze/shut down’ with any ‘forms’ I am confronted with,” he wrote.

“My brain was fried by the ABC and then the continued harassment from Comcare.”

Comcare eventually cut Mr Renouf’s payments 20 years after he left the ABC as he was “away from the stress and the environment that caused your injury”. But Mr Renouf’s Maroochydore psychiatrist, Petros Markou, backed his claim, saying despite “leaving the country in order to get as far away from the perpetrators as possible”, “the effects of his trauma follow him everywhere”, the AAT heard.

“He constantly thinks about what occurred to him and every day he is living a life that has been forced upon him by the ABC,” he wrote.

But in siding with Comcare in May, the AAT’s John Sosso preferred the evidence of Queensland University Associate Professor Frank Varghese, who concluded the notion Mr Renouf had PTSD from his time in Darwin was “preposterous” and was more likely attributable to the events in Morocco.

Prof Varghese found Mr Renouf tended to have a “conspiratorial (view) of others in the world” and “also a sense of entitlement”.