While there isn’t a single global document titled "The Pitfalls of Unaccredited Arbitrators," peak professional bodies—such as Australia's Resolution Institute (formerly IAMA) and the global Chartered Institute of Arbitrators (Ciarb)—address these structural faults through publications like the Arbitrator's Toolbox and official commercial arbitration guides.
The core issue these texts highlight is that arbitration is a contractually bound, private system with very limited rights of appeal. If you appoint an unaccredited, non-graded individual, you lose the safety net of institutional oversight.
Based on the rules and guidelines published by these professional institutes, the major faults and pitfalls that occur when choosing an unaccredited or non-graded arbitrator include:
1. Inability to Properly Manage "Procedural Slippage"
- The Pitfall: Inexperienced or unaccredited arbitrators frequently lack the authority or "firmness" required to keep a case on track.
- The Fault: According to peak arbitration guides, they are often overly hesitant to enforce timetables or deal decisively with interlocutory issues (like applications for special orders or evidence adjustments). This passivity leads to severe timeline drift and escalating costs, completely wiping out the speed advantage that arbitration is supposed to provide.
2. Flawed Award Writing and Judicial Vulnerability
- The Pitfall: The final decision (the "award") must be legally sound and properly structured to withstand scrutiny.
- The Fault: In institutional frameworks, arbitrators must undergo peer-reviewed grading (e.g., Grade 1 for complex cases, Grade 2 for medium, Grade 3 for small matters) specifically to verify their competence in award writing. An unaccredited arbitrator is highly prone to procedural errors, failing to determine all issues in dispute, or executing flawed legal reasoning. This exposes the final award to being set aside or challenged in court for a breach of natural justice.
3. Mismanaging the Scope of Jurisdiction
- The Pitfall: Arbitrators only have power over what the contract allows them to rule on.
- The Fault: Non-graded individuals often stumble when complex, hybrid legal questions emerge—such as determining who the true parties to the contract are, or navigating multi-party disputes where third parties cannot legally be compelled to join the arbitration. A certified arbitrator knows exactly when a tribunal lacks jurisdiction, whereas an amateur can easily proceed unlawfully, rendering the entire costly process void.
4. Lack of Accountability and Mandatory Up-Skilling
- The Pitfall: Graded arbitrators are tightly regulated by their governing institutions.
- The Fault: Members of bodies like the Resolution Institute are bound by mandatory Continuing Professional Development (CPD) schemes and strict ethical oversight. If a non-accredited arbitrator acts with implicit bias, fails to disclose a conflict of interest, or handles fees unethically, you have no institutional complaints mechanism or recourse to remove them short of launching expensive, uphill litigation in the Supreme Court.
Delve into the unsettling truths surrounding appalling crimes, devious criminals, and the pervasive corruption among politicians and lawyers who wield considerable influence in Australia's legal profession. While this assertion may seem sensational, the underlying issues within the arbitration system play a crucial role in the injustices perpetuated under the Arbitration Act.
Attached below is a sample of the ailing Telstra network in which Telstra's whistleblowing technicians found the courage to expose in their valiant attempt to right the wrongs of their Telstra board of management, who allowed this deterioration of its telecommunications network to be covered up for the period in which my COT story is showing has been the case.
In the ongoing discourse around political and media misinformation about the NBN, one critical issue remains inadequately addressed: Did Australia’s copper network meet the original mandatory government regulatory requirements at the time of Telstra’s privatisation? i.e, "Worst of the worst: Photos of Australia’s copper network | Delimiter.
23 June 2015: Had the arbitrator appointed to assess my arbitration claims correctly investigated ALL of my submitted evidence, it would have validated my claim as an ongoing problem, NOT a past problem, as his final award shows. It is clear from the following link dated > Unions raise doubts over Telstra's copper network; workers using ... that when reading in conjunction with Can We Fix The Can, which was released in March 1994, these copper-wire network faults have existed for more than 24 years.
9 November 2017: Sadly, many Australians in rural Australia can only access a second-rate NBN. This didn’t have to be the case: had the Australian government ensured the arbitration process it endorsed to investigate the COT cases’ claims of ongoing telephone problems been conducted transparently, it could have used our evidence to start fixing the problems we uncovered in 1993/94. This news article https://theconversation.com/the-accc-investigation-into-the-nbn-will-be-useful-but-its-too-little-too-late-87095, again, shows that the COT Cases claims of copperwire ailing network were more than valid.
28 April 2018: This ABC news article dated 28 April 2018 regarding the NBN see >NBN boss blames Government's reliance on copper for slow ... needs to be read in conjunction with my own story going back 20 1988 through to 2025, because had the arbitration lies told under oath by so many Telstra employees had not occurred then the government would have been in a better position to evaluate just how bad the copper-wire Customer Access Network (CAN) was just 7-years ago.
Regrettably, as highlighted on absentjustice.com, many Australians in rural areas rely on an inferior National Broadband Network (NBN). This disheartening reality could have been avoided if the Australian Government had ensured that the arbitration process it endorsed to examine the persistent communication problems raised by the COT cases was conducted with integrity and thoroughness.
In fact, the following three YouTube videos from A Current Affair brilliantly capture the essence of the similar phone complaints our COT group brought forward in 1994. It is astonishing that, twenty-seven years after the COT Cases unveiled these critical issues during a government-sanctioned arbitration process to address them, Australia still grapples with a telecommunications NBN network that falls far short of modern standards.
TO BE CONTINUED
