đź“‚ The Briefcase That Unlocked a National Scandal
In October 1993, I provided Robert Nason—accompanied by his secretary, Ms Hurley—with documentation indicating that the Ericsson-manufactured testing equipment used by Telstra in specific terrain locations across Australia was not compatible.
I first received this information on 3 June 1993, after two Telstra senior technicians from the Victoria Metro Network inadvertently left an unlocked briefcase at my premises in Cape Bridgewater. Inside were details of several complex Telstra Difficult Network Faults (DNF) customers, including myself.
I copied the contents and sent them to AUSTEL (now called ACMA). I also met with AUSTEL representatives in Melbourne twice over the following two weeks, as some of the attached documents couldn’t be transmitted through my older-style roll-paper fax machine.
Rather than leaking the material to the media for a fleeting headline, I chose to alert the government. This decision led Senator Richard Alston, then Shadow Minister for Communications, to write several papers on the matter. The Hon. David Hawker MP also referenced the Ericsson equipment’s failures in his electorate of Wannon, where my Cape Bridgewater Holiday Camp was located.
On 25 February 1994, Senator Alston addressed the Senate, citing the severity of the Ericsson problem and naming me as the individual who, according to Telstra technicians, had rightly exposed the issue as it worsened.
🧾 Arbitration: Suppressed Evidence and Compromised Testing
Despite Robert Nason’s draft findings in the Coopers & Lybrand COT report, which stated that the Ericsson equipment was obsolete and needed replacement, Telstra continued to use it throughout the COT arbitrations.
On 7 and 8 April 1994, four of the nine COT Cases, including mine, raised concerns about the faulty Ericsson testing equipment with Robin Davey (Chairman) and John MacMahon (General Manager) of AUSTEL. We were assured that this equipment would not be used during the Service Verification Testing (SVT) of our service lines in arbitration and mediation.
However, on 11 October and 16 November 1994, AUSTEL wrote to Telstra condemning the SVT testing conducted at my premises in September 1994 as grossly deficient. I did not see these letters until seven years after my arbitration—one year past the statute of limitations. Had I received them in time, I could have appealed the arbitrator’s findings, which falsely stated my business was no longer experiencing faults after July 1994.
Worse still, on 2 February 1995, I alerted AUSTEL that Telstra had covered their SVT testing with a statutory declaration signed by the same Peter ——— whom AUSTEL had previously criticised in their October and November letters.
This was the same Peter ——— referenced in the Senate Hansard dated 24 June 1997, which revealed he had advised a Telstra whistleblower that I—and four other COT Cases—had to be stopped at all costs.
He also instructed AUSTEL during my arbitration to consult Telstra before releasing technical information to the COT Cases. On 6 April 1995, he refused to conduct further arbitration tests at my camp, despite being reminded of their purpose: to test my Ericsson telephone service.
Lane Telecommunications, the arbitration consultants present that day, also declined to test the service. The arbitrator later acknowledged that Lane had reviewed at least 4,000 of my claim documents—80% of which were Ericsson-related. Yet I have never received these documents back, despite clause 6 of the arbitration agreement requiring their return within six weeks of the decision (11 May 1995 in my case).
Ericsson later purchased Lane Telecommunications Pty Ltd during the COT arbitrations. Let me be clear: Ericsson acquired Lane despite Lane’s sworn oath not to disclose any arbitration material to outside parties. Once purchased, all COT Cases’ private business and technical data became Ericsson’s property.
🔄 From 1993 to 2025: The Echoes of a Whistleblower’s Warning
ACMA was the respondent in both my Freedom of Information and government document requests, heard by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal between February and October 2008, and again from October 2010 to May 2011.
I was seeking Ericsson-related documentation that Telstra had retained—information that, after Ericsson acquired Lane, was reportedly used to assist Telstra’s arbitration defence against the COT Cases. We had alleged that Ericsson’s telephone exchange equipment was responsible for widespread call dropouts and outages.
To this day, I have yet to receive the requested Ericsson data from ACMA.
On 3 October 2008, senior AAT member Mr G D Friedman considered these AAT hearings and, on 3 October 2008, stated to me in open court, in full view of two government ACMA lawyers.
“Let me just say, I don’t consider you, personally, to be frivolous or vexatious – far from it.
“I suppose all that remains for me to say, Mr Smith, is that you obviously are very tenacious and persistent in pursuing the – not this matter before me, but the whole – the whole question of what you see as a grave injustice, and I can only applaud people who have persistence and the determination to see things through when they believe it’s important enough.”
In 2025, both electronic media and various newspapers reported that Optus is now blaming Ericsson for the same outages and call dropouts that we COT Cases first exposed, beginning with the briefcase left open at my Cape Bridgewater premises on June 3, 1993.
Please continue to read absentjustice.com for the full archive and supporting documentation.
The Briefcase
Ericsson AXE faulty telephone exchange equipment (1)
Telstra senior management finally visited my business, a five-hour drive from Melbourne. Within five minutes of saying hello, In knew, I knew I was in for another round of untruths.
I should have known better. It was just another case of 'No fault found.' We spent some considerable time 'dancing around' a summary of my phone problems. Their best advice for me was to continue doing exactly what I had been doing since 1989, which was keeping a record of all my phone faults. I could have wept. Finally, they left.
A little while later, in my office, I found that Aladdin had left behind his treasures: the Briefcase Saga was about to unfold.
Aladdin
The briefcase was not locked, and I opened it to find out it belonged to Mr Macintosh. There was no phone number, so I was obliged to wait for business hours the next day to track him down. But what was in the briefcase was a file titled ‘SMITH, CAPE BRIDGEWATER’. After five gruelling years fighting the evasive monolith of Telstra, being told various lies along the way, here was possibly the truth, from an inside perspective.
The first thing that rang a bell was a document that revealed Telstra knew the RVA fault they recorded in March 1992 had actually lasted for at least eight months, not the three weeks that was the basis of their settlement payout. Dated 24/7/92, and with my phone number in the top right corner, the document referred to my complaint that people ringing me get an RVA ‘service disconnected’ message with the ‘latest report’ dated 22/7/92 from Station Pier in Melbourne and a ‘similar fault reported’ on 17/03/92. The final sentence reads:
‘Network investigation should have been brought in as fault has gone on for 8 months.’
I copied this and some other documents from the file on my fax machine, and faxed copies to Graham Schorer. The next morning I telephoned the local Telstra office, and someone came out and picked the briefcase up.
The information in this document, dated 24 July 1992, was proof that senior Telstra management had deceived and misled me during negotiations with me, and it also showed that their guarantees that my phone system was up to network standard were made in full knowledge that it was nowhere near ‘up to standard’.
Not only was Telstra’s area general manager fully aware at the time of my settlement on 11 December 1992 that she was providing me with incorrect information which influenced my judgement of the situation, placing me at a commercial disadvantage, but the General Manager, Commercial Victoria/Tasmania was also aware of this deception.
The use of misleading and deceptive conduct such as this in a commercial settlement such as mine contravenes Section 52 of the Australian Trade Practices Act. Yet this deception has never been officially addressed by any regulatory body. To get ahead of my story here, even the arbitrator who handed down his award on my case in May 1995 failed to question Telstra’s unethical behaviour.
I took this new information to Austel, and on 9 June 1993, Austel’s John MacMahon wrote to Telstra regarding my continuing phone faults after the settlement, and the content of the briefcase documents:
Further he claims that the Telecom documents contain network investigation findings which are distinctly different from the advice which Telecom has given to the customers concerned.
In summary, these allegations, if true, would suggest that in the context of the settlement Mr Smith was provided with a misleading description of the situation as the basis for making his decision. They would also suggest that the other complainants identified in the folders have knowingly been provided with inaccurate information.
I ask for your urgent comment on these allegations. You are asked to immediately provide AUSTEL with a copy of all the documentation which was apparently inadvertently left at Mr Smith’s premises for its inspection. This, together with your comment, will enable me to arrive at an appropriate recommendation for AUSTEL’s consideration of any action it should take.
As to Mr Smith’s claimed continuing service difficulties, please provide a statement as to whether Telecom believes that Mr Smith has been provided with a telephone service of normal network standard since the settlement. If not, you are asked to detail the problems which Telecom knows to exist, indicate how far beyond network standards they are and identify the cause/causes of these problems.
In light of Mr Smith’s claims of continuing service difficulties, I will be seeking to determine with you a mechanism which will allow an objective measurement of any such difficulties to be made.
I can only presume that Telstra did not comply with the request ‘to immediately provide AUSTEL with a copy of all the documentation which was apparently inadvertently left at Mr Smith’s premises,’ for on 3 August 1993, Austel’s General Manager, Consumer Affairs wrote to Telstra requesting a copy of all the documents in this briefcase that had not already been forwarded to Austel. The following Telstra internal document, dated 23 August 1993 and labelled as ‘folio R09830’ with the subject listed as ‘The Briefcase’, is alarming to say the least. This document, which had been copied to Telstra’s Corporate Secretary, notes:
“Subsequently it was realised that the other papers could be significant and these were faxed to but appear not to have been supplied to Austel at this point.
"The loose papers on retrofit could be sensitive and copies of all papers have been sent to Ross Marshall
I sent off several Statutory Declarations to Austel explaining what I had seen in the briefcase.
On 27 August 1993, Telstra’s Corporate Secretary, Jim Holmes, wrote to me about the contents of the briefcase:
Although there is nothing in these documents to cause Telstra any concern in respect of your case, the documents remain Telstra’s property and therefore are confidential to us … I would appreciate it if you could return any documents from the briefcase still in your possession as soon as possible.
How blithely he omitted any reference to vital evidence which was withheld from me during their negotiations with me regarding compensation.
It is essential to review the witness statements from August 8 and 10, 2006.
The Monster Behind the Curtain: Telstra’s Grip on Justice
In 1999, the Victoria Police Major Fraud Group, through their barrister Mr. Neil Jepson, requested I supply all evidence proving Telstra had used three falsified reports to support its arbitration claims against the Casualties of Telstra (COT) Cases. I did more than that—I provided two additional reports the police were unaware of, each one a thread in the web of deception Telstra had spun to conceal the true state of the Cape Bridgewater telecommunications network.
After I submitted the contents of Telstra’s Falsified BCI Report (see Telstra's Falsified BCI Report to Mr. Jepson, the Major Fraud Group asked me to assist in compiling evidence for their investigation. Over three separate visits to their St. Kilda Road offices, I spent two full days each time helping Victoria Police understand the significance of these flawed reports—documents Telstra used to mislead the arbitrator and his advisors into believing the network was sound.
But it wasn’t. AUSTEL, the government communications regulator, had already investigated the Cape Bridgewater and Portland exchanges during the Fast Track Settlement Proposal process, which later evolved into the arbitration process. Their findings, documented AUSTEL’s Adverse Findings, revealed a network riddled with faults. Yet Telstra’s arbitration defence unit concealed these findings, just as they had with the BCI report.
In 2006, — File 517 AS-CAV Exhibits 495 to 541 is a Witness Statement dated 10 August 2006 (provided to the Department of Communications, Information, Technology and the Arts (DCITA) sworn out by Des Direen, ex-Telstra Senior Protective Officer who had become a Principal Investigator. Mr Direen bravely revealed that in 1999–2000, after leaving Telstra, he assisted the Major Fraud Group, particularly Detective Sergeant Rod Kueris, in investigating COT fraud allegations. I was seconded to that investigation as an advisor, guiding the police through the maze of five known fraudulent reports that Telstra had used to convince the arbitrator that all faults had been resolved—when Telstra and its lawyers knew otherwise.
Mr Direen’s statement, especially points 12 to 18, is chilling. He observed firsthand that the phones at Detective Kueris’s home were “possibly interfered with.” Within weeks, it became clear that Kueris was under immense distress. I raise this not lightly, but because during that same investigation, I faxed critical documents to Mr Jepson’s office—documents exposing the falsified Bell Canada International report. Had I not immediately contacted Mr Jepson, we would never have known the faxes were intercepted and never reached the Major Fraud Group’s machine.
This wasn’t just obstruction. It was intimidation. It was power wielded to silence truth.
I reference File 766 and its companion witness statement because they prove a harrowing truth: even a police officer, when confronting Telstra, was left floundering. Just as we were. The arbitrator and administrator of the COT arbitrations were afraid to abandon the process—not because it was just, but because Telstra’s influence over Australia’s legal system was too significant.
I am using the following witness two witness statements File 766 - AS-CAV Exhibit 765-A to 789), because they prove a police officer, when dealing with the Telstra Corporation, was left floundering as were the COT Cases when they were forced into arbitration with the same monster who the arbitrator and administrator of the COT arbitrations were afeared to abandon the COT arbitrations because of the power and influence Telstra has over the legal system in Australia. Please read the following two witness statements.
"I can recall that during the period 2000/2001, I had arranged to meet Detective Sergeant Rod KURIS from the Victoria Police Major Fraud Squad at the foyer of Casselden Place, 2 Lonsdale Street, Melbourne. At the time, I was assisting Rod with the investigation into alleged illegal activities against the COT Cases.
Rod then stated that he wanted me to follow him to the left side of the foyer. When we did this he then directed my attention to a male person seated on a sofa opposite our seat. He then told me that the person had been following him around the city all morning. At this stage Rod was becoming visibly upset and I had to calm him down.Rod kept on saying that he couldn't believe in what was happening to him. I had to again calm him down".
Points 21 and 22 in Mr Direen’s statement also record how, while he was a Telstra employee, he had cause to investigate “… suspected illegal interference to telephone lines at the Portland exchange,” but when he “… made inquiries by telephone back to Melbourne (he) was told not to get involved and that another area of Telstra was handling it” and that “... the Cape Bridgewater complainant was a part of the COT cases” (my Cape Bridgewater Holiday Camp) business.
