Is this why, after three decades, I am still fighting for the justice I have never received? If my account were false, if the events I have described were inventions rather than documented facts, then the individuals I have named, including Dr Hughes’s wife whose name was used to legitimise the allegation, and Pinnock and Rundell whose fabrications deepened the damage, would have every legal reason to sue me for defamation. Yet they have not. For thirty years, despite the seriousness of the claims and the reputational stakes involved, none of them has taken action.

And that raises an even darker possibility: what if Dr Hughes’s wife never knew her name was being used to support this lie? What if she was never told that her supposed “statement” was being circulated to smear me and shield others? If that is the case, then her silence is not complicity; it is evidence that her identity may have been exploited to construct a falsehood she never authorised. And if she did know, and allowed it to stand, then the deception is even more profound.

The Larger Horror — Legal Processes Compromised Nationwide

How many arbitrations, legal cases, and government processes have been compromised by this interception system? How many documents were screened, copied, and analysed by the opposing side before reaching their intended destination?

The advantage gained by knowing the other side’s weaknesses is immeasurable. And it happened here, in Australia.

 

 

Fighting on Four Fronts — A Government’s Betrayal of Its Own Citizens

Many within the Establishment acknowledged that it was unconstitutional to force the COT Cases into an arbitration process with Telstra while the Australian Federal Police (AFP) were still investigating Telstra for alleged phone and fax hacking of the COT Cases’ businesses. It was also recognised as unworkable. Yet the government allowed it to proceed, knowingly and deliberately, and that decision stands as a brutal betrayal of its own citizens.

The COT Cases were forced to endure three simultaneous investigations into Telstra’s alleged unlawful conduct, all running at the same time:

1. The arbitration, overseen by an arbitrator who relied on Telstra‑controlled technical consultants.

2. The AFP investigation, examining Telstra’s unauthorised interception of telephone calls and arbitration‑related faxes.

3. The Commonwealth Ombudsman’s investigation, running from January 1994 to March 1999, into Telstra’s destruction and tampering of FOI documents illegally requested by the COT Cases.

This situation —three overlapping investigations into the same respondent, all imposed on small‑business owners already crippled by Telstra’s defective telephone service—is unheard of in any other Western democracy.

While the COT Cases struggled to keep their small businesses alive, they were expected to:

• prepare three separate complex submissions

• respond to three separate investigative bodies

• maintain telephone‑dependent businesses

• while using a telephone service that AUSTEL (now ACMA) had already declared grossly defective

This was not merely unreasonable. It was grossly undemocratic.

And while these three investigations were underway, the arbitration process allowed the arbitration’s technical consultants, Lane Telecommunications Pty Ltd, who were assigned to investigate the failing Ericsson telephone‑exchange equipment, the suspected cause of the COT Cases losing so many incoming calls, to be purchased by Ericsson during the very period Lane was investigating Ericsson.

This meant:

• the main arbitration witness was purchased by the main arbitration suspect

• Ericsson gained ownership of all arbitration‑related technical information

• that information was protected by a confidentiality agreement

• and that agreement prevented third‑party access to the very evidence Ericsson now controlled

This was not a procedural flaw. It was a structural collapse, engineered, sanctioned, and allowed to continue.

How could the Australian Government permit this? How could it allow the respondent in a national arbitration process to purchase the very company responsible for investigating its conduct? How could it allow the AFP, the arbitrator, and the Commonwealth Ombudsman to run concurrent investigations into the same alleged misconduct while small‑business owners were forced to comply with all three?

And how many other arbitration processes around the globe have been subjected to this type of conduct, including electronic eavesdropping and hacking into confidential documentation, which still occurs today during legitimate Australian arbitrations?

This was not mismanagement. It was not oversight. It was a brutal betrayal, a government knowingly placing its citizens in an impossible, unconstitutional, and fundamentally corrupted process, and allowing that injustice to run its full course.

To this day, I have never received the critical reports on Ericsson’s exchange equipment that my trusted technical consultant, George Close, meticulously compiled. These documents were fundamental to my case, and their disappearance constitutes a clear violation of the arbitration rules, which require that all submitted materials be returned to the claimant within 6 weeks of the arbitrator’s award

QUESTIONS ON NOTICE:

On 15 February 1994, during my settlement /arbitration process, Senator Richard Alston (Shadow Minister for Communications) put many questions to the Senate Estimates Committee, On Notice, to be answered by Telstra. These are the questions most pertinent to the COT claimants (see Main Evidence File No/29 QUESTIONS ON NOTICE):

1. Could you guarantee that no Parliamentarians who have had dealings with ‘COT’ members have had their phone conversations bugged or taped by Telstra?
2. Who authorised this taping of ‘COT’ members’ phone conversations and how many and which Telstra employees were involved in either making the voice recordings, transcribing the recordings or analysing the tapes?
3. On what basis is Telstra denying copies of tapes to those customers which it has admitted to taping?
4. (A) How many customers has Telstra recorded as having had their phone conversations taped without knowledge or consent since 1990? (B) Of these, how many were customers who had compensation claims, including ex Telecom employees, against Telecom?
5. Why did Telecom breach its own privacy guide-lines and how will it ensure that the revised guidelines will not be open to similar breaches or abuses?
6. Could you explain why a large amount of documents accessed by customers under FOI have a large amount of information deleted, including the names of Telecom employees who wrote and received memos and documents?
7. How many customers who have alleged that Telecom has tapped or bugged their phones without their consent or knowledge are the Australian Federal Police currently investigating?

The response to Question 5 (see Main Evidence File No/29) notes, “…These matters are currently being investigated by the AFP and AUSTEL, and by Telecom;"

It would be inappropriate for Telecom to make any further comments at this stage about possible breaches of the Telecommunications (Interception) Act while the matter is before the Federal Police. However, the Minister will be making a full statement in the near future on action taken to date to remedy apparent procedural problems within Telecom”.

Please note that neither the referred minister nor the arbitrator, Dr Gordon Hughes, has addressed the actions taken to remedy the apparent procedural issues in Telstra’s claim, as mentioned in Question 5 On Notice. They deemed it inappropriate to comment on the phone interception problems within Telstra. This is particularly concerning given that I have spent over $300,000 in arbitration fees attempting to resolve these procedural issues.

John Pinnock’s letter of 10 January 1996, in response to my request for these arbitration records, states:

• “I refer to your letter of 31 December 1996 in which you seek to access to various correspondence held by the TIO concerning the Fast Track Arbitration Procedure. … “I do not propose to provide you with copies of any documents held by this office.” (See Open Letter File No 57-C)

Was the real reason Pinnock refused to provide me with copies of my own arbitration file, including my Ericsson arbitration file, which I have never seen, driven by his own self‑interest? Was Pinnock afraid that if I handed those documents to Laurie James, the President of the Institute of Arbitrators Australia, any investigation James conducted might expose that Lane was never independent of Telstra at all? That Lane, the so‑called “independent” arbitration consultant, had already been quietly absorbed by Ericsson, Telstra’s main telecommunications equipment supplier, during the very arbitration in which Ericsson’s faulty equipment was under scrutiny?

I reiterate: I have never seen my Ericsson arbitration file since George Close, my technical consultant, submitted it.

The threats that came from individuals too frightened to reveal their identities were not fantasies. They were real, deliberate, and executed with chilling precision.

I drove five hours from my Cape Bridgewater Holiday Camp to the CPEU head office, the union rooms, to meet an assistant CPEU union official I will call Peter. My background as a delegate for the Melbourne Waterfront Maritime Cooks and honorary secretary of the Maritime Cooks Association gave me just enough leverage to secure that meeting.

In that room, we reached a handshake agreement. I put on the table the names of two Telstra technicians who had bugged my phones. These men were directly involved in feeding information about my business to a third party. Through them, Telstra's internal security could harvest the names and phone numbers of my contacts. I later provided this information to the Australian Federal Police, and parts of it appear in the AFP transcripts that follow.

One of the arbitrator’s failures must be understood in its simplest, starkest form: he had the authority to seek support from the Supreme Court, and he chose not to. He did nothing. Because he refused to act, I was forced to act on my own. By my own volition, without protection, without assistance, and without a single government official willing to intervene. I took the matter to the union.

A year later, I found myself poring over a trove of Freedom of Information (FOI) documents concerning a telephone exchange in Melbourne. Intriguingly, this exchange had become a critical link for my business in Cape Bridgewater, located five hours away. The exchange, which served my business acquaintance, Peter, had become my Melbourne telephone booking agent. Peter, who lived and worked from his shop premises, faced significant challenges trying to manage both his business and the labyrinth of data he was sorting through from Telstra under FOI regulations.

Despite months of struggle, there was a glimmer of improvement; my telephone bookings had risen by thirty per cent. While this increment was modest, it was certainly a step in the right direction compared to the frustrating silence of no incoming reservations. However, the FOI documents recently released proved of little aid to either Peter or me. They did, however, reveal a troubling trend: Telstra employees stationed at that exchange faced a higher-than-normal health risk, casting a shadow over the situation.

These documents eventually found their way into the Union rooms in Collingwood, where they were met with gratitude and concern.

The irony of this whole situation is striking. The claims arising from the COT Cases were aimed not at the hardworking employees on the front lines, but rather at the middle management and board members who had systematically exploited the government-owned corporation’s resources. For years, they engaged in practices that siphoned money from the organisation, manipulating overtime rates, inflating hotel accommodation expenses, and concocting false accounts for technicians dispatched to telephone exchanges on weekends for repairs that should have been done during the week. This entrenched mentality of slowing down work on weekdays, where technicians were often unable to address as many customer issues as they were capable of solving, resulted in technicians and their associates earning exorbitant wages for weekend labour, earning three times as much.

The toxic culture we encountered not only stifled our progress but also ensnared us in a brutal and convoluted dilemma. This predicament forced the COT Cases into the daunting process of arbitration, subjecting us to thirty long years of hardship and struggle. According to the official SENATE official Hansard – Parliament of Australia, specifically pages 5163 to 5619, vast sums of money were improperly extracted from government coffers. In fact, numerous senators later revealed that the amount of public funds misappropriated could reach billions. Within this troubling landscape, the COT Cases emerged as a pivotal force, striving to unveil the depths of corporate misconduct. Meanwhile, Dr Gordon Hughes and John Pinnock, through a web of deceit, perpetuated lies that obscured the system's ineffectiveness, ensuring the root of the problem remained hidden from public scrutiny.

 

PLEASE NOTE: 

As you immerse yourself in my story, I ask you to recognise how difficult it is to recount it exactly as it unfolded. As you scroll down this homepage, you will notice that I have sometimes used the same or similar image, but each click reveals a different text, another layer of the COT story.

You will also encounter passages that appear familiar, yet if you keep reading, you will see they expose separate acts of misconduct, deception, or outright wrongdoing by the arbitrator, the administrators, the arbitration consultants, and the defendants, Telstra, all working in concert to minimise Telstra’s liability to the COT Cases.

https://www.promoteyourstory.com.au

The 34 numbered exhibits listed below each contain hundreds of individual documents, creating a vast reservoir of information.

You won’t need to return to the 34 block files listed below; they are automatically linked to the part of the narrative you are reading. Scroll to the designated exhibit number, and the evidence is there. This method also allows you to view any of the 100 additional exhibit files in that collection, containing a further 300 to 400 exhibits. It is designed to make it easier and faster for you to decide whether my story is true or false.

AS-CAV Exhibit 1 to 47 – AS-CAV Exhibit 48-A to 91 – AS-CAV Exhibit 92 to 127 – AS-CAV Exhibit 128 to 180 – AS-CAV Exhibit 181 to 233 – AS CAV Exhibit 234 to 281 – AS-CAV Exhibit 282 to 323 – AS-CAV Exhibit 324-a to 420 – AS-CAV Exhibit 421 to 469 – AS-CAV Exhibit 470 to 486 – AS-CAV Exhibit 488-a to 494-e – AS-CAV Exhibits 495 to 541 – AS-CAV Exhibits 542-a to 588 – AS-CAV Exhibits 589 to 647 – AS-CAV Exhibits 648-a to 700 – AS-CAV Exhibit 765-A to 789 – AS-CAV Exhibit 790 to 818 – AS-CAV Exhibit 819 to 843 – AS-CAV 923 to 946 – AS-CAV Exhibit 1150 to 1169 – AS-CAV 1103 to 1132 – AS-CAV Exhibit 1002 to 1019 – AS-CAV Exhibit 996 to 1001 – GS-CAV Exhibit 1 to 88 – GS-CAV Exhibit 89 to 154-b GS-CAV Exhibit 155 to 215 – GS-CAV Exhibit 216 to 257 – GS-CAV Exhibit 258 to 323 – GS-CAV Exhibit 410-a to 447 – GS-CAV Exhibit 448 to 458 – GS-CAV Exhibit 459 to 489 – GS-CAV Exhibit 490 to 521 – GS-CAV 522 to 580 – GS-CAV Exhibit 581 to 609

By examining a few of the exhibits in the Quick Links above, as well as the numbered exhibits that follow the whistleblower cartoon, readers will confront the harsh realities whistleblowers in our country face. These reports highlight the devastating losses endured by those who choose to speak out, revealing the personal sacrifices and severe repercussions that often accompany the courageous act of telling the truth. This exploration sheds light on what is taken from these individuals and the profound damage inflicted on their lives for standing firm in the values they were taught during childhood. It also uncovers a troubling environment where many adhere to a stark code: a battle for survival, in which one must either fight back or be crushed

 

So arbitration seemed the only solution.

5 October 1993:  The draft of the COT Fast Track Settlement Proposal (FTSP) from AUSTEL’s Robin Davey states, at point 40:-

“Finally, if the attached letter (Attachment ‘D’) dated 7 July 1993 from Freehill, Hollingdale & Page to one of the COT Cases’ solicitors is indicative of the way that Freehill, Hollingdale & Page have approached the COT Cases in the past, I would be more than a little concerned if they were to have a continuing role.” (GS-CAV Exhibit 89 to 154(b) - See GS-CAV 110)

11 October, 1993:  Telstra internal email H36291 confirms Telstra’s knowledge of the 1800 network billing problems Peter Zeagers to Nigel Beaman:-

“I am receiving a disturbing number of reports of instances where the 1800 prefix ‘does not work’ in the network.” (AS-CAV Exhibit 92 to 127 - See AS-CAV 122-D)

14 October, 1993: This internal Telstra email FOI folio R03331 discusses how to minimise the problems experienced by the COT claimants. It states:-

“We need to focus Austel’s attention as much as possible on the current rather than the past level of service delivered to Cot Cases. …”

“My view is that Telecom’s response to this issue should reflect the advice from Denise McBurnie, Freehill, Hollingdale & Page, Solicitors.” (GS-CAV Exhibit 89 to 154(b) - See GS-CAV 111)

It is clear from the above letters of 14th and 19th October 1993 that Telstra had no intention of listening to Robin Davey’s concerns about Freehills having a continuing role in the COT case issues.

Even though I had shown the government prior to arbitration that Telstra was installing poor-quality infrastructure in the Cape Bridgewater network and that the government regulator was allowing Telstra to test their own customers' complaints, even those who were to enter arbitration, no one bothered to investigate.

I have brought up the Ericsson AXE telephone exchange faults documents (see below) because, during a meeting with Hon. David Hawker, we discussed the impact of the AXE equipment installed in the telephone exchanges in his electorate, which seemed to be negatively affecting many businesses. I offered to continue supplying Mr Hawker MP with FOI documents received from Telstra, which would then be passed on to the Shadow Minister for Communications, Senator Richard Alston. I followed up by sending him (False Witness Statement File No 3-A), which he forwarded to Senator Alston. This document was subsequently raised in the Senate "On Notice" on 24 February 1994

THE COT CASES — TREACHERY IN BROAD DAYLIGHT

The COT Cases continued to expose a chilling landscape of betrayal, not bureaucratic bungling, not administrative confusion, but deliberate, engineered treachery. Twelve ordinary Australians walked into what they believed was a fair arbitration process, only to discover they had stepped into a rigged mechanism designed to protect Telstra at any cost. These people were not wealthy litigants. They were small business owners fighting for survival, forced to pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into arbitration fees simply to prove what Telstra already knew: it had failed to honour its contractual obligations.

Under the agreement brokered by AUSTEL, now ACMA, Telstra and the arbitration officials assured the government that if the COT Cases funded their own arbitrations, no final ruling would be issued until every fault crippling their businesses had been fixed. This ended up being a lie.

Telstra never met that obligation. The faults continued for a further eleven years after my arbitration was completed. The evidence was overwhelming. Yet the arbitrator sided with Telstra, declaring, with breathtaking audacity, that the faults had been repaired. Nothing had changed. Nothing had been fixed. And the people who trusted the process were left stunned, betrayed, and financially gutted.

 

Corruption is contagious and does not respect sectoral boundaries. 

 

I want to underscore the treachery that has dramatically altered our lives, brought about by the duplicitous actions of Warwick Smith and John Pinnock. Their manipulation of the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman office was a calculated move to conceal their misconduct, as irrefutably documented in “(TIO Evidence File No 3-A)” and elaborated in “(The first remedy pursued).” This orchestrated deceit stripped the COT Cases of the justice we were rightfully promised and set a dangerous precedent.

 

 

The ongoing telephone and fax‑hacking faults, the very faults that had to be fixed under the agreed‑upon arbitration process, were not rectified. These were the ongoing telephone and fax hacking problems that forced the COT Cases to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in professional arbitration fees simply to level the playing field with their competitors. Yet in my case, the arbitrator, Dr Gordon Hughes, refused to allow his own technical consultants, DMR Inc (Canada) and Lane, the extra weeks they advised him were required to investigate these persistent billing and service failures → (Exhibit 45-c - File No/45-A).

I reiterate, the ongoing phone and fax hacking problems that were contractually required to be resolved were not resolved, as the following exhibits show; refer to Chapter 4 The New Owners Tell Their Story  and Chapter 5 Immoral - Hypocritical Conduct.

The architects of this deception remain in positions of power, sustaining a cover‑up that leaves individuals like me to bear the consequences. During a critical oral interview at the Commonwealth Ombudsman’s Office in September 1994, AUSTEL, then the government’s communications authority, now ACMA, representatives Bruce Matthews and John McMahon confirmed that a draft report had been prepared in March 1994 and handed to Telstra at that time → (). In doing so, they directly assisted Telstra’s defence in the arbitration.

What I did not know then, and would not learn until November 23, 2007, twelve years after my arbitration had concluded, was that AUSTEL had provided Telstra with this damaging report in March 1994. This document validated my claims, yet it was deliberately withheld from me; see points 2 to 212.

While reading this website, you will confront a truth so brutal it stays with you long after the final page: for thirty years, crimes against Australian citizens were not simply ignored; they were buried, protected, and shielded by a system steeped in corruption and deceit. Multiple government agencies confirmed the claims were true, yet the truth was smothered to protect the powerful. What you will see is not a failure of process, but a deliberate betrayal of justice.

Instead of presenting this crucial evidence at arbitration, the government allowed the arbitrator to rely on a sanitised version of the 1994/95 findings. By giving Telstra exclusive access to the original report before the arbitration agreement was even signed, the government armed the defendants with information that enabled them to conceal documents and prevent discovery from exposing the favourable findings AUSTEL/ACMA had made on my behalf.

If this blatant disregard for regulatory obligations is not a breach of the government’s duty to me as an Australian citizen, then what would be?

Remarkably, AUSTEL/ACMA allowed me to sign my arbitration agreement on April 21, 1994. As a result, I endured a thirteen‑month process costing more than $300,000 in professional fees, forced to prove claims the government had already established.

Before any true story concerning government corruption is fully believed in a Western system that pretends to operate under the rule of law, the corruption exposed here on absentjustice.com stands as proof of something far more sinister: a government‑sanctioned betrayal engineered to protect a government‑owned Telstra and to crush a single Australian citizen who dared to challenge it. The rot began with an arbitrator who was neither qualified nor graded, yet was permitted, even encouraged, to preside over multiple arbitrations simultaneously. This occurred despite similar British Telecom arbitrations using properly graded arbitrators, one per case, because technical complexity demanded competence, not convenience.

 

 

Throughout my COT Case experience, I have continuously placed my trust in the Major Fraud Group of Victoria Police and, to a lesser extent, the Australian Federal Police. This allegiance stemmed from my decision to collaborate with these institutions rather than oppose them. I found both organisations, along with the Commonwealth Ombudsman’s office, to be genuinely concerned about the troubling revelations I had uncovered. Unfortunately, they lacked the jurisdiction to act jointly and to pursue answers about how an arbitrator, along with two Telecommunications Industry Ombudsmen, first Warwick Smith and later John Pinnock, could suppress a multitude of falsehoods about me and then slash the documented losses my business suffered.

Government records show this deception occurred, reducing the assessed impact of my telephone faults by up to 300 per cent, effectively minimising Telstra’s liability to me as my service provider. This concealment, buried inside the confidentiality agreement tied to my arbitration, allowed those untruths to stand unchallenged for thirty years.

See AUSTEL’s Adverse Findings at point 209 which states: 

“Cape Bridgewater Holiday Camp has a history of service difficulties dating back to 1988. Although most of the documentation dates from 1991 it is apparent that the camp has had ongoing service difficulties for the past six years which has impacted on its business operations causing losses and erosion of customer base.”

In telling my story, I felt compelled to untangle the web of deceit woven by Hughes, Smith, Pinnock, and John Rundell, the project manager overseeing the arbitration. A linear representation of events would have diluted the gravity of my narrative. Instead, I opted to present my experiences in distinct stages—both here and in my book, 'The Arbitraitor'—to highlight the threats, deception, and gross misconduct exhibited by these four individuals, ensuring their actions do not become obscured by any single event.

 

They acted together, not just to shield Hughes, but also to protect Warwick Smith and the corrupt machinations that allowed Telstra’s lawyers, Freehill Hollingdale & Page (now Herbert Smith Freehills Melbourne), to draft the very agreement that ensnared me. This was executed in direct betrayal of public promises made to government bodies, the Canberra Press Club, AUSTEL, and the 120,000 COT-type complainants, pledges of an independent agreement aimed at safeguarding Australians against Telstra’s abuses. Those promises were nothing but deceitful lies, and we, the COT Cases, were left to suffocate on them for decades.

On October 5, 1993, Robin Davey, Chairman of the government Communications Authority, made it startlingly clear in his letter, point 40, Prologue Evidence File No/2, that Freehill Hollingdale & Page would have no further role in COT Matters. That was the supposed guarantee, yet there stood Warwick Smith and Gordon Hughes, shameless and undeterred, wielding Freehill’s drafted agreement as the foundation of our arbitrations while Telstra employed them as their defence counsel. They did this with glaring indifference, fully aware of the deception at play. And when the COT Cases protested against being subjected to Freehill’s services as Telstra’s arbitration counsel, despite the guaranteed safeguards, Hughes and Smith dismissed our complaints with chilling coldness: Telstra could use whomever they chose.

Then came the moment that still burns: on 12 May 1995, thirteen months into my arbitration and just one day after delivering my award, Dr Hughes finally condemned the Telstra‑drafted arbitration agreement he had used against me. He called it unworthy of the proceedings. But by then, he had already weaponised that defective agreement. He had already used it to compress my time, restrict my rights, and tilt the entire process in Telstra’s favour, all while advising the first Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, the very official responsible for administering my arbitration.

His 12 May 1995 letter admits:

“the time frames set in the original Arbitration Agreement were, with the benefit of hindsight, optimistic;

“in particular; we did not allow sufficient time in the Arbitration Agreement for inevitable delays associated with the production of documents, obtaining further particulars and the preparation of technical reports; …

“In summary, it is my view that if the process is to remain credible, it is necessary to contemplate a time frame for completion which is longer than presently contained in the Arbitration Agreement.”  (Open Letter File No 55-A)

The hypocrisy is obscene. Hughes condemned the agreement only after using it to damage my case. He admitted its flaws only when the harm was irreversible, when the trap had already snapped shut.

James had agreed to investigate the unethical conduct that had infected my arbitration. Had he done so, he would have uncovered everything, every lie, every manipulation, every concealed conflict. But before that investigation could begin, the letters were crafted: treacherous, calculated acts of character assassination, written by John Pinnock, the TIO himself, and copied directly to Hughes. These were not administrative documents. They were weapons. They were the opening shots in a smear campaign designed to discredit me, silence me, and ensure that no investigation into the corruption of my arbitration would ever be allowed to breathe.

If a graded, accredited international arbitrator is reading this section of my website, or anyone who knows such a person and is willing to offer a legal opinion, I am seeking clear guidance on the matter outlined under the heading ex parte, which has remained unresolved for thirty years.

The Australian Government endorsed my arbitration as a fair and proper process. If that endorsement meant anything, then those responsible may still have a moral obligation to explain why a covert meeting was held without any representative from the four of us known as the COT Cases. The attached material shows that clauses 4 and 5 were removed from the transcripts of that secret meeting. Those missing clauses are critical, because the record shows that Telstra’s defence team and their legal counsel were allowed to discuss our arbitration issues directly with the arbitrator while we were not represented.

I am seeking an informed, professional opinion on whether the conduct surrounding that meeting breached accepted arbitration standards and ethical requirements. I have a benefactor willing to pay a reasonable fee for such advice, and any discussion can be arranged through my Absent Justice Contact page

Also, during the same press conference, Senator Len Harris asked many other questions, including why the owner of a business such as the holiday camp at Cape Bridgewater should be forced to sell it simply because Telstra had still been unable to fix the ongoing telephone problems. These were the same faults Senator Richard Alston had investigated in 1992, ten years earlier, and concluded were affecting Mr Smith’s holiday camp. Yet Mr Smith was still raising the telephone problems in 2001, seven years after the arbitration process had failed to rectify them.

Senator Harris became emotional after I supplied him with the in‑camera (secret) Senate Hansard reports dated 6 and 8 July 1998. These records confirmed that the Senate Chair had written their first letter to me in August 2001, threatening that I would be held in contempt of the Senate for releasing the very documents I had now shown Senator Harris. Those same records showed the Senate knew that assisting only the five litmus‑test COT Cases, by funding their technical consultants to value the previously withheld FOI documents, while refusing to assist the remaining sixteen COT Cases, would be an injustice. Yet they went ahead with that grossly discriminatory decision.

Being charged with contempt of the Senate can carry a two‑year jail term, so I have withheld this evidence for thirty years.

 

 

Senate Evidence File No 12

 

Having been smeared as a man of low character by both Dr Gordon Hughes (the arbitrator) and John Pinnock, the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, I have lived under that permanent stain for more than thirty years. That smear allowed Senator Alan Eggleston, Chair of the Senate Committee, to threaten me in 2001 and again in 2004, with almost no backlash from onlookers. Had a similar threat been made to another Australian citizen — one not already discredited — that citizen might have stood a good chance of exposing the gross discriminatory conduct inflicted on us in sixteen COT Cases.

Senator Eggleston warned me that if I publicly disclosed the in‑camera Hansard reports showing the Senate had grossly discriminated against sixteen of the twenty‑one COT Cases, I would be held in contempt of the Senate. Contempt of the Senate carries a two‑year jail term.

Australia's corrupt political system is exposed by two citizens from opposing parties who share the same moral values as everyday Australians, the small men and women in the streets. These individuals are Senator Len Harris and Senator Barnaby Joyce.

 

The Mugging We Didn’t See Coming — Done in a Boardroom

 

The COT arbitrations were exactly what the keywords suggest: corruption, bribery, thuggery, theft, intimidation, coercion, deceit, sabotage, interference, wickedness, treachery, obstruction. There is no shorter or cleaner way to describe what Australia dared to call “arbitration.” It was a black hole; once you signed on the dotted line, you were swallowed whole. The arbitrator’s gag clauses locked you down, silenced your family, and protected the very people you were forced to fight. And in Australia, an arbitrator’s decision is untouchable. No court can overturn it. No justice can reach it. A system built to win by destroying you.

Harsh words indeed, but as you read on, you will see the truth unfold. When you hover your mouse or cursor over each image, that simple action reveals another story hidden behind the picture, and within that story are further exhibits and evidence files, each one proving that what you are reading is true. Every image opens a new chapter. Every chapter contains documents that confirm the previous. Nothing is claimed without proof; every claim is backed by an exhibit.

And as you continue scrolling down the absentjustice.com homepage, you will learn the names, the organisations, the officials, and the corporate players responsible for the crimes committed against hundreds, even thousands, of Australian citizens who relied on a phone service to run their businesses, only to discover that service worked part of the time, failed the rest, and destroyed livelihoods while the system looked the other way.

By the time you reach the bottom of the page, you will know exactly who did what, when they did it, and how they got away with it — until now.

Australia’s arbitration system came at me with Mafia‑style gangster talk disguised as procedure, an extortion routine dressed up as justice. A crooked lawyer oozed sleaze while an accountant with a switchblade energy carved up the evidence. Bribery and corruption sat in the room like silent partners, running the show from the shadows. Every move felt scripted by people who treated due process like a racket and complainants like targets. What passed for arbitration was nothing more than a stitched‑up operation designed to break anyone who pushed back.

For years, I have tirelessly reached out to a multitude of organisations, sixteen government agencies, private ombudsmen, the Major Fraud Group, Victoria Police, and the Australian Federal Police. Every one of them received the same evidence, the same documents, the same irrefutable trail now laid bare on absentjustice.com. In any Western nation that claims to honour the rule of law, this evidence would have detonated like a charge under the arbitration system. It would have forced a public reckoning, a denunciation of the arbitrator who presided over my case, the administrator who enabled the cover‑up, and the arbitration consultants who operated outside every legal boundary they were sworn to uphold.

But in Australia, the response was silence, a silence so deliberate it reeks of protection, collusion, and rot. Not one agency investigated. Not one offered findings for or against my claims. They simply turned their backs, as if the corruption was too large, too embedded, too dangerous to touch.

That is how treachery survives: not through brilliance, but through institutions that refuse to look.

Dr Gordon Hughes, Warwick Smith, and the dishonest officials of the Liberal government permitted Telstra's lawyers to draft the COT arbitration agreement (the rules). They assured the government, COT Cases, and the Canberra Press Gallery in Parliament that it had been prepared independently of Telstra.

The Brotherhood – The Mafia‑style grip over government‑owned Telstra

 

 

On 23 March 1999, after most of the COT arbitrations had been finalised and business lives had been ruined due to hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to fight Telstra and a very crooked arbitrator, the Australian Financial Review. Review reported on the conclusion of the Senate Estimates Committee hearing into why Telstra withheld so many documents from the COT cases: 

“A Senate working party delivered a damning report into the COT dispute. The report focused on the difficulties encountered by COT members as they sought to obtain documents from Telstra. The report found Telstra had deliberately withheld important network documents and/or provided them too late and forced members to proceed with arbitration without the necessary information,” Senator Eggleston said. “They have defied the Senate working party. Their conduct is to act as a law unto themselves.”  

Only the COT cases with political connections, as brought to light by Senator Len Harris of One Nation, received financial benefits stemming from the investigation referenced by Senator Eggleston. This is particularly noteworthy because all twenty-one COT Cases endured similar hardships and outcomes to those of the five COT Cases awarded a substantial $18 million in punitive damages. Additionally, these five cases gained access to over 150,000 Freedom of Information (FOI) documents, a critical trove of information that could shed light on their circumstances. However, as of 2026, these same FOI documents are still being withheld from the remaining sixteen COT Cases, which continue to seek justice and resolution → An Injustice to the remaining 16 Australian citizens.

In what has become my final avenue for redress, I now swear under oath that the following account is the complete and unembellished truth. The arbitrator in my case secretly provided Telstra with all of my submitted claim documents up to 15 June 1994. This was not a mistake; it was a breach so blatant it tore the spine out of the arbitration agreement itself. Point 2.21, clause 7 made the rules clear: once I signed the agreement on 21 April 1994, Telstra had four weeks to submit its defence. Four weeks, not five months.

But the process was deliberately delayed. I had supplied the Australian Federal Police with arbitration documents because the government and the AFP ordered me to assist their investigation into Telstra’s interception of my telephone conversations dating back to September 1992, including arbitration faxes. Instead of halting the process when the Senate exposed Telstra’s withholding of documents, Dr Hughes refused to bring Telstra into compliance with the law. He kept delaying Telstra’s final defence until government solicitors were forced to intervene and compel Telstra to obey the FOI Act, a delay of five months.

I first requested my arbitration documents in December 1993. The Commonwealth Ombudsman was still searching for them in October 1995, and continued investigating until October 1997. None of this appears in the arbitrator’s award dated 11 May 1995. Dr Hughes ignored the government. He ignored the Commonwealth Ombudsman. He ignored Senator Ron Boswell’s demands in the Senate on 29 November 1994 for Telstra’s Legal Directorate, Mr Krasnostine, to explain why Telstra was still withholding my documents because I was assisting the AFP.

It can only be guessed that Dr Hughes, in his role as arbitrator, handed my claim documents to Telstra’s defence officer, Paul Rumble, on 15 June 1994 because I refused to submit a final claim until the AFP completed their investigation into Telstra’s interception of my calls and faxes. I was later asked to give evidence of this in the Senate on 21 May 1995. The AFP still has not handed down their findings from investigations ordered by the Minister for Communications in February 1994.

Dr Hughes delivered his findings on 11 May 1995, knowing my arbitration submission was never complete.

Please see below just one example of what you will uncover if you keep reading this story, a story that exposes how Australian lawyers like Dr Gordon Hughes operated inside a system built to protect itself, not the truth. When these issues came into play, Hughes was not an experienced, graded lawyer; yet he was entrusted with an arbitration process that carried national consequences. What followed shows how government bureaucrats with vested interests kept the wider public in the dark, concealing that, in Australia, arbitration confidentiality clauses have been used for years to bury misconduct, shield wrongdoing, and protect powerful institutions.

 

 

This is corruption dressed as procedure. Treachery disguised as “process.” Arbitrators were rewarded not necessarily with money, but with honours, titles, and career advancement, provided they used the arbitration agreement to shut down investigations into unlawful conduct by government‑owned corporations like Telstra. Telstra committed acts of gross misconduct against me and many of the COT Cases. Lives were destroyed. Careers were crushed. And the system that should have protected us instead protected itself.

This is the truth, brutal, corrupt, and still buried beneath Australia’s arbitration secrecy.

When Paul Rumble discovered that I had faxed several FOI documents to the AFP, the mood shifted instantly. The corporation that had been quietly manoeuvring behind the scenes suddenly bared its teeth. That was when dog number one- there were two of them, both trained in intimidation- erupted in anger. He stood over Dr Hughes, demanding that Hughes hand over Telstra documents he had no legal right to under the arbitration agreement. It exposed the true balance of power: Telstra commanded, and Hughes obeyed.

The retaliation came swiftly. Hughes submitted my arbitration claim five months early, pushing it forward prematurely and stripping me of the time I needed to gather evidence. It wasn’t an administrative mistake. It wasn’t a misunderstanding. It was gross misconduct, a deliberate act that disadvantaged me and set the course for everything that followed. That single decision left me standing where I am today, still fighting a battle that should never have been necessary

The criminal conduct that unfolded in those early months was enough to frighten any weak‑kneed arbitrator. And instead of standing up to Telstra, they joined them. My story shows this clearly. The arbitrators were not neutral. They were not independent. They were not guardians of fairness. They were men who saw the size of the corporation they were meant to judge and chose the safer path: silence, complicity, and surrender.

And that is how the arbitration began: under threat, under manipulation, under the weight of lies, deceit and treachery that had already seeped into every corner of the process long before the first arbitration agreement was signed.

This act of treachery not only impeded my ability to present my case but also destroyed any chance I had of proving that the telephone faults adversely affecting my service were still crippling my business operations. I resort to swearing under oath because, in the face of overwhelming adversity, desperation is my only remaining hope for being believed.

I urge everyone who reads this narrative to understand the following: Although I was raised in the Christian faith, I have not actively practised it since I was 14 years old, and I am now 82. While my beliefs may differ from yours, I do not claim that my path is the only true one. Nonetheless, it is the faith I grew up with, and I have tried to adhere to its teachings throughout my life.

Around this time, Telstra’s arbitration psychologist, Ian Joblin, interviewed me. I recounted my startling discoveries in Telstra’s FOI documents: they had covertly recorded my conversations with former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser about my time in Communist China, then stealthily erased those details from the memo before its release. Joblin's face twisted with immediate concern; his promise to document my disclosures in his final findings, stating unequivocally that it mattered, hung in the air like a fragile thread.

However, when the witness statement finally came to light in the arbitration, everything was treacherously wrong. Joblin’s signature was conspicuously absent. Instead, the only signature on the document belonged to Maurice Wayne Condon of Freehill Hollingdale & Page, Telstra’s own arbitration legal firm. Joblin’s name was still printed on the statement, but the vital proof of his endorsement was stripped away (there was no signature). The comments he assured me would be included, concerning Telstra’s deletion of my discussions with Fraser and the psychological agony of witnessing my private conversations erased from FOI documents, had been purged. Sanitized. Excised with the calculated precision of a surgeon’s scalpel.

This was no clerical oversight nor an innocent mistake. It was a deliberate act of manipulation—a coldly orchestrated scheme of corruption aimed at burying the evidence and shielding Telstra from exposure. The APT transcripts of Telstra’s interviews revealed the same malevolence: redactions, missing signatures, falsified statements, and gaping holes where truths should have resided. A vile trail of tampering ran like a poisoned vein through the arbitration.

The threats were real; the interference was real; and the document tampering was real. Moreover, the silence from those who held the duty to safeguard the process- the arbitrator, the administrator, and the government bodies overseeing the process- was not merely negligent; it was complicit. Their silence didn’t just enable the corruption; it shielded it like a cloak of darkness.

What I can state is this: the AFP officer told me the AFP had sufficient evidence to charge certain Telstra employees with the unauthorised interception of my telecommunications. Enough to lay charges. Enough to expose criminal conduct inside a government‑owned corporation.

And that left me in an impossible position.

How could I enter arbitration and submit a claim when the AFP officer warned me, explicitly, that I must not disclose to anyone what the AFP had advised me? How could I fight Telstra openly when the very agency investigating Telstra’s criminal behaviour told me to stay silent?

That silence was not protection. It was a trap, one engineered by a system that knew exactly how to cripple my case before it even began.

When the complainant sought refuge in an international legal organisation, the silence was instantaneous and absolute. The evidence was placed before them, forensic, documented, undeniable. They did not respond. They did not inquire. They did not acknowledge the catastrophic truth: the arbitrator continued presiding even after discovering that the arbitration agreement had been covertly altered to sabotage the claimant. He proceeded anyway, enforcing rules so corrupted they should have been incinerated.

He treated structural breaches as clerical inconveniences.

The administrator knew the rules were compromised. He granted other claimants thirteen additional months to address the defects. The complainant received nothing, forced to navigate a labyrinth designed to collapse beneath him.

The treachery deepened into something colder.

For seven years, a crucial letter, one that would have enabled an appeal, was buried. Hidden. Interred like a corpse in an unmarked grave. Even the international fraternity refused to intervene, treating corruption as a cultural nuance rather than a professional crime.

Most would have broken. Instead, the complainant carried every affidavit, every forensic scrap, every shard of evidence to yet another institution. A former High Court judge agreed to examine the case. His involvement should have detonated the silence. Instead, it revealed the final truth: the system was not malfunctioning. It was functioning exactly as designed, a fortress of self‑interest, guarded by titles, networks, and a culture of immunity.

The “eleventh remedy” is not a remedy at all. It is an autopsy report, a dissection of a profession that claims impartiality while operating like a cartel.

The technical report at the centre of the dispute, incomplete, unsigned, and submitted as final, became the emblem of the corruption. Years later, when the evidence proving its incompleteness was placed before the professional body, the silence that followed was not negligence. It was doctrine.

This was not justice. It was a system feeding on its own victims.

The secret report from AUSTEL (now known as ACMA), dated March 4, 1994 AUSTEL’s Adverse Findings, is once again raised to affirm that my service was indeed connected to an old, historic, outdated Ericsson RAX exchange. Yet, in stark contrast, a public COT Cases Report released by the same organisation to the Australian media and the arbitrator in April 1994 claimed that my service for the initial three and a half years was linked to an ARK exchange (refer to page 2 AUSTEL’s Adverse Findings). Essentially, the government communications authority, AUSTEL, actively supported Telstra’s arbitration defence while knowingly misrepresenting the facts, which ultimately worked to my detriment.

When George Close courageously brought these significant issues to light, Telstra’s defence counsel responded with ridicule, dismissing his qualifications and expertise with mockery. In a disappointing turn of events, the arbitrator, Dr Hughes, rejected our plea for additional time to thoroughly demonstrate the shortcomings of both the Ericsson RAX and the updated AXE exchange. Compounding our frustration, the comprehensive 23-page supplement we submitted alongside our Ericsson RAX and AXE report, serving as our formal rebuttal to Telstra’s defence, was never returned to us, despite the arbitration agreement clearly stipulating that all submissions must be returned upon request.

Even more troubling was Ericsson's acquisition of Lane Telecommunications Pty Ltd, the consultant associated with our arbitrator, for an undisclosed sum. This acquisition had profound implications: the extensive collection of arbitration materials from eight claimants, along with the confidential reports they provided, lost their protected status and came under Ericsson's ownership. The confidentiality agreement signed by all parties became obsolete the moment Lane Telecommunications transferred its assets to Ericsson. Consequently, all rights associated with the COT cases under the arbitration agreement were egregiously violated.

At the core of this issue lies a shocking betrayal: during the COT arbitrations, Ericsson, the very company under investigation for supplying faulty exchange equipment, acquired Lane Telecommunications Pty Ltd. This acquisition encompassed the arbitration consultant tasked with valuing our technical claims. Prior to Ericsson’s takeover, Lane had managed to assess only 11% of my claim documents. The remaining 89% were left unattended and unused. The repercussions of this were dire. Ericsson, a company later identified as engaging in corrupt practices across multiple countries and involved in dealings with violent extremist organisations responsible for egregious harm and human rights violations, was thus permitted to buy the very consultancy responsible for investigating its own equipment failures.

This flawed arbitration system in Australia enabled such practices. Telstra, through its complicity, enabled this situation to unfold, and the government stood by doing nothing.

The Gag Clauses and the Threats

Relying on the gag clauses buried deep inside the confidentiality agreement, Telstra ensured that no transparent investigation could ever touch my claims. Those clauses were their shield, a legal muzzle designed to silence scrutiny even though the arbitration rules themselves allowed Telstra access to the COT Cases’ arbitration equipment. That equipment had already been tampered with before the arbitration began, and again during it. Legal documents had been altered before the confidentiality agreement was even signed. The entire process was contaminated long before any of us realised we were stepping into a room where the truth had already been disfigured.

And then came the threats, not subtle, not implied, but direct. After 3 June 1994, two Telstra executives left behind an unlocked briefcase at my Cape Bridgewater Holiday Camp. Inside that briefcase was material that would later become central to my arbitration, which I had signed on 21 April 1994. It was as if they wanted me to know they were watching, that they could reach into my life whenever they wished, that the arbitration was not a process but a theatre, and they controlled the script.

I want to be clear: I am not belittling any of the other COT Cases when I say their families were frightened. They had every reason to be. Some, not all, but enough, Telstra technicians were raking in millions upon millions of dollars in bogus overtime claims, exploiting deficient network problems that dragged investigations into weekends where triple pay and exclusive hotel accommodation fattened their pay packets. Senior executives enjoyed the same perks. The COT Cases demanded proper phone service and threatened this corrupt ecosystem. Senate Hansard later confirmed what we already knew: millions upon millions had been stolen from the public purse by Telstra rogues who treated the network like a personal cash machine.

As I have shown below, the unethical practices of Freehills Hollingdale & Page were not abstract legal manoeuvres; they were direct threats aimed at me personally. Denise McBurnie of Freehills warned me repeatedly that unless I stopped writing down the names and addresses of my single‑club patrons who were experiencing ongoing problems contacting my business, Telstra would refuse to investigate my complaints. She had been instructed by Telstra’s General Manager of Consumer, Ian Campbell, to shut the door on me entirely.

The truth is recorded in black and white. On 5 October 1993, Ronin Davey wrote to Campbell, warning him that the government would be “more than a little concerned” if Freehills continued to be used in the COT matters (see point 40 Prologue Evidence File No/2). That warning was ignored. Freehills stayed in place. The threats continued. And Telstra’s refusal to investigate my complaints became part of a wider pattern, a pattern of lies, deceit and treachery that shaped the entire arbitration process.

This wasn’t negligence. It was orchestration.

The threats became so severe that I travelled 450 kilometres to the CEPU union rooms in Collingwood, a Melbourne suburb, to confront them directly. I told them (I shall call him Peter A) to tell his dogs to back off. Our claims were made to senior management, not to technicians who were terrified their lucrative weekend rorts were about to be exposed. All of this happened before the confidentiality gag clauses were signed on 21 April 1994, before the arbitration even had the chance to pretend to be a legitimate, government-endorsed process.

 

The Hidden Betrayal Behind the Arbitrator

 

 

What the COT Cases never knew when they accepted Dr Gordon Hughes as the independent arbitrator in early 1994 was that Telstra had already used him once before to bury a fault they were desperate to keep hidden. Years earlier, Hughes had quietly helped Telstra conceal telephone infrastructure failures inside the North Melbourne exchange. His own client, Graham Schorer, had been assured by the government that Telstra would disclose all relevant faults. Instead, Telstra fed Hughes information behind closed doors, and Hughes kept those faults from the very man he was meant to represent.

I did not learn this from rumour or speculation. I learned it because Schorer hired me to write his story, and, in truth, to write mine. He wanted a record of what Telstra had done to him long before the COT arbitrations began. He wanted the truth documented. And I found it. I found the evidence Telstra had concealed. I found the proof that Hughes had known about the faults and had kept them from his own client.

But when I showed Schorer what I had uncovered, everything changed. The report he had once promised to take to the Senate, a promise he made openly during a government Administrative Appeals Tribunal hearing, was suddenly too dangerous to expose. He pulled it. He buried it. The transcripts from that hearing suggest I had been hired not simply to write a history, but to gather as much evidence as possible against Hughes and Telstra before the truth became too explosive to release. I had been used, and when the evidence became too heavy, the door closed.

I was dudded twice, once in my own arbitration, and again in the commission Schorer had asked me to write.

Only years later did the final piece fall into place. Schorer had been warned, long before the arbitrations began, that Hughes had faxing problems between his Melbourne and Sydney offices. It mattered because Hughes’ Sydney office was working for Telstra clients at the very same time his Melbourne office was receiving COT arbitration documents. The material sent from Melbourne to Sydney never returned. It vanished into the wrong office, the wrong hands, the wrong loyalties.

And Schorer knew this. He knew Hughes had already concealed Telstra faults once before. He knew Hughes’ Sydney office was entangled with Telstra. He knew our arbitration documents were disappearing into a place where they could be quietly absorbed, quietly neutralised, quietly lost.

But he never warned us.

He let us walk into the arbitration blind, believing we were entering a process built on independence and fairness, when in truth we were entering a structure already compromised by divided loyalties and hidden histories. The blindness cost us everything. What happened in the COT arbitrations was not merely a procedural failure. It was the continuation of a pattern, a pattern of concealment, of quiet deals, of evidence diverted and truth suffocated before it could breathe.

When the IAMA Ethics Committee Came Knocking → The eleventh remedy pursued

For those reading this part of my introduction, it is important to understand the moment when the story widened, when the corruption inside the COT arbitrations stopped being a private suspicion and became something the outside world finally glimpsed. It happened when the Ethics and Professional Affairs Committee of the Institute of Arbitrators and Mediators Australia learned of Dr Hughes’ gross conflict of interest. At the helm of that committee sat former High Court Justice Michael Kirby, a man whose reputation for integrity stood in stark contrast to the shadows gathering around our arbitration.

When Kirby heard that I was writing a manuscript titled "The Arbitrator", he insisted that the IAMA be given first viewing of the evidence I had collected, not only the material that implicated Hughes, but also the evidence pointing to misconduct by lawyers attached to the IAMA itself, including one who had been an ex‑partner of KPMG. Kirby brought in his CEO, Paul Crowley, a man who immediately understood that the story I was uncovering was not a localised failure but structural rot.

Crowley asked to see everything, especially anything that proved the COT Cases’ Melbourne arbitration documents were being faxed to Hughes’ Sydney office. He wanted proof that Hughes had admitted some of those documents had “somehow” been lost in Sydney, never making their way back to Melbourne for assessment by the arbitration consultants. He understood what that meant. Documents meant to be scrutinised independently had vanished into an office that was simultaneously working for Telstra’s commercial clients. Evidence had been diverted, swallowed, and never returned.

I provided Crowley with the statutory declaration from Graham Schorer, the same Schorer who had been Hughes’ client in the North Melbourne telephone exchange matter, and who was also the COT Cases’ spokesperson. In that declaration, Schorer confirmed what Hughes had told him: that arbitration‑related documents had gone missing in Sydney. It was a confession that should have detonated the entire process.

But Schorer never gave that statement to the COT Cases. He withheld it. He protected Hughes, the same man who had once been his Federal Court lawyer, the same man who had concealed Telstra’s faults from him years earlier. The pattern was unmistakable. When Hughes’ past misconduct resurfaced, Schorer shielded him instead of exposing him. The two chapters on my website → Chapter 3 - Conflict of Interest and Chapter 4 - Telstra’s B003 Arbitration Briefing Documents, show exactly how deep that protection ran.

By the time the Ethics Committee stepped in, the damage had already been done. The arbitrations were compromised long before any of us realised it. The documents that should have protected us had been siphoned away. The man we trusted as our spokesperson had withheld critical evidence. And the arbitrator himself had a history of concealing Telstra faults from his own client.

It was only when Kirby and Crowley looked at the material that the truth finally had an audience, not a courtroom, not an arbitration chamber, but a committee that understood what lies, deceit and treachery look like when they are woven into the fabric of a process meant to deliver justice.

The Letter That Should Have Changed Everything

The first of eight damning letters, from John Rundell, the Arbitration Project Manager, was dated 18 April 1995. It was a quiet document, almost modest in appearance, but its contents were explosive. Rundell wrote to the TIO, to the arbitrator, and to the TIO’s own counsel, admitting that forces beyond their “reasonable control” had delayed the technical work. He didn’t name those forces, but anyone who had lived inside the arbitration machinery knew exactly who he meant.

What mattered most was the line he repeated, twice, as if he needed it to be understood: any technical report prepared in draft by Lane Telecommunications would be signed off and issued on DMR Inc. letterhead. It was an admission that the independence of the technical assessment had collapsed. Lane’s work would be disguised as DMR’s work. The truth would be dressed in someone else’s clothes.

That letter should have been sent to all four COT Cases. It should have been placed in our hands the moment it was written. Instead, Dr Gordon Hughes, Warwick Smith, and Peter Bartlett, the three legal minds steering the arbitration, allowed it to be hidden from us. They kept it out of sight, tucked away where it could do no damage to Telstra’s position. By doing so, they directly assisted the “forces at work” Rundell referred to. They helped disrupt the arbitrations of all four COT Cases, not through action but through silence.

If Rundell had sent that letter to us during our designated two-week appeal period, as he or the arbitrator should have, everything would have changed. At least part of our arbitration would have been appealable based on the information revealed in the letter. We could have gone directly to the Federal Government, exposing the manipulation of the technical process while the arbitration was still ongoing. We could have stopped the machinery before it crushed us.

But the letter never reached us. It stayed in the hands of the very people who benefited from its secrecy. And because of that silence, the arbitrations continued down the path they were already travelling, a path shaped by lies, deceit and treachery, a path that turned what should have been a fair process into a cesspool of corruption.

Were these the forces at work that Julian Assange had warned Graham Schorer about in April 1994, and that were set up to destroy the COT Cases, as Graham's statutory declarations that I provided to two Attorneys-General, one Federal and one State, show?

 

Were these the forces at work that Julian Assange warned Graham Schorer about in April 1994, the same forces Schorer later described in statutory declarations I handed to two Attorneys‑General, one Federal and one State? → WikiLeaks exposing the truth. The question hangs there like a blade. Because nothing else explains what happened next.

Why did Dr Hughes’ secretary, Caroline Friend, burst into tears less than five minutes after I faxed her office, a fax my Telstra billing account proves was sent on 23 May 1994? I had asked her to acknowledge receipt, exactly as Superintendent Detective Sergeant Jeff Penrose of the AFP instructed me to do. He wanted both the arbitrator and the TIO to see the evidence: fifty‑six fax header sheets tampered with, altered, corrupted (see Exhibit 76 (AS-CAV Exhibit 48-A to 91) and Exhibit 77 (AS-CAV Exhibit 48-A to 91) which I had already hand-delivered those documents to Hughes and the TIO between 14 and 16 May 1994, at Penrose’s request. And now, the moment I called, Caroline Friend cracked, crying like a child caught in a lie, insisting no fax had arrived, even though Telstra’s own billing showed it had.

The truth was uglier than any of us imagined. Someone inside Telstra had the names and phone numbers of my “Over Forties‑Single Club” patrons. Gordon Stokes, the Telstra Portland technician, was the go‑between, the man Telstra’s Steve Black wrote about to Jeff Penrose in April 1994, claiming my service was only being “voice monitored” when Stokes was on duty. But Stokes wasn’t alone. He was working with someone called “Micky,” accessing both my private and business calls, possibly my faxes too, intercepting them, screening them, before redirecting them on to their intended destination. o My communications were being siphoned through Telstra’s shadows long before they reached their intended destination.

So I ask again: why did Caroline Friend break down? Why did she insist no fax had been received when my journal, and Telstra’s own billing, proved otherwise? The exhibits dated 23 May 1994 show Telstra’s Tony Watson claiming no faxes were sent that day, even though my account shows they were. This is the same Tony Watson whom Darren Lewis, the man who bought my business in December 2001, wrote to the TIO about, stating Watson refused to investigate his ongoing telephone faults because Lewis was in regular contact with me. Nine years after Watson claimed in Telstra’s arbitration defence documents dated 12 December 1994 that no faxes had been sent, documents never provided, my Telstra bill still showed six faxes charged as having been sent.

Darren Lewis wrote several letters to the TIO in 2002, including one naming Tony Watson as the reason his complaints were being ignored. He never received a single explanation. Not one word about Watson. Not one acknowledgement. Nothing → Chapter 4 The New Owners Tell Their Story and Chapter 5 Immoral - Hypocritical Conduct.

On 28 January 2003, a letter from TIO officer Gillian McKenzie to Telstra states:

“Mr & Mrs Lewis claim in their correspondence attached:

That they purchased the Cape Bridgewater Coastal Camp in December 2001, but since that time have experienced a number of issues in relation to their telephone service, many of which remain unresolved.

That a Telstra technician ‘Mr Tony Watson’ is currently assigned to his case, but appears unwilling to discuss the issues with Mr Lewis due to his contact with the previous camp owner, Mr Alan Smith.” (See Home-Page File No/76 and D-Lewis File 1-I)

Was there a more sinister motive involved in Telstra’s technician refusing to help Darren Lewis with the ongoing phone/fax problems that, nine years before, Telstra and the arbitrator assigned to my case failed to investigate transparently? Why was this Telstra technician still holding a grudge against me in 2002/3 because of something my 1994/95 arbitration should have addressed – i.e., the ongoing phone and facsimile problems that this same Telstra technician was now refusing to help Mr Lewis with, nine years later?

This is the same Tony Watson who is referred to in Telstra's B004 arbitration defence report (see It is also clear from Front Page Part One File No/1) who states my faxes did not reach the arbitrator's office on 23 May 1994, because the arbitrator's fax lines were busy when I tried to send my faxes. Therefore, there were no faults on the lines. This statement by Tony Watson does not match Telstra's billing records for those six faxes where I was charged for all non-connected faxes (It is also clear from Front Page Part One File No/1). 

How dare Tony Watson threaten Darren Lewis not to speak with me, who then lived next door to the holiday camp and remained there until 2019.  

On 1 September 2004, Darren Lewis wrote to our local MP, David Hawker MP and Speaker of the House of Reprentatives,  stating:

“I must also reiterate my thanks for the pressure you put on Telstra in late 2002 – I believed it was this that finally forced them to re-wire the kiosk at the camp and disconnect the faulty telephone alarm bell which local Telstra employees believed could have been causing some of the problems with incoming calls. Although the incoming calls increased dramatically one the re-wiring had been done, the trauma of the first year we were here has not gone away.” AS-CAV Exhibits 648-a to 700.

Why did Telstra, a government‑owned corporation that was supposed to fix my ongoing telephone problems under the very assurances they gave me, wait until ten months after I had sold my business before they finally carried out a transparent investigation? I paid more than $300,000 for my own arbitration in 1994, believing their promise that the faults would be addressed as part of the process. Instead, Telstra ignored every complaint I raised during the arbitration and for six long years after it ended. Only when the business was gone, when the damage was irreversible, did they suddenly decide to investigate.

If that isn’t corruption, treachery, and discrimination of the worst possible kind, then what is?

So if you, the reader arriving here at absentjustice.com, have reached this part of my story and want to understand how this treacherous saga destroyed the lives of the Lewises and mine, keep reading. The corruption only gets darker from here.

A pattern of lies, deceit and treachery that had already taken root long before 1994, turning the arbitrations into a cesspool of corruption before we even realised we were drowning in it.

Telstra’s primary international telecommunications service provider was entangled with international terrorist networks, organisations responsible for violence, destabilisation, and human suffering, through the same global equipment supplier, Ericsson of Sweden. Across Europe, Asia, and South America, Ericsson’s AXE telephone equipment was being ripped out of exchanges like contaminated tissue because it was defective, unstable, and capable of catastrophic service failures. Other nations treated it as a threat to infrastructure integrity.

Why did the arbitrator turn a blind eye to the sale of Lane Telecommunications Pty Ltd, a company that claimed to act as an independent technical assessor in arbitration, when it was purchased by the Ericsson Corporation? This is particularly troubling, given that Lane was appointed as the main technical consultant in this scandalous arbitration investigation into Ericsson’s AXE telephone exchange equipment, which had been installed in Telstra's exchanges across Australia. The timing of this transaction reeks of collusion and undermines the integrity of the arbitration process. Moreover, I am left in the dark about the fate of my crucial documents for the Ericsson arbitration claim. The arbitration agreement explicitly states these documents should have been returned to me six weeks after my arbitration concluded on May 11, 1995. Where are they, and what is being hidden? This situation cries out for scrutiny, as it appears that a web of treachery, corruption, and deceit is suffocating the truth.

Telstra continued installing this compromised AXE equipment into Australian exchanges, assuring the government that nothing was wrong, when File 10‑B → Evidence File No/10-A to 10-f) demonstrates otherwise. The Ericsson AXE equipment which serviced my business eventually destroyed it; clinically, irrefutably, everything was wrong, and Telstra and the arbitrator knew it. The AXE faults were not theoretical. They were the precise, documented reason the COT Cases were losing their incoming business calls. Telstra knew the cause. Ericsson knew the cause. The government was told nothing.

In a forensic context, this sequence presents as a textbook case of systemic failure concealed beneath a veneer of procedural legitimacy. The pathology is unmistakable: a critical infrastructure component known to be defective was repeatedly implanted into the national telecommunications network, despite documented evidence of its instability. The responsible authorities did not merely overlook the danger; they suppressed it.

The AXE faults functioned like a slow‑acting toxin, infiltrating the operational bloodstream of small Australian businesses, shutting down their incoming lifelines one by one. Telstra’s assurances to government were not misjudgments; they were deliberate obfuscations. Ericsson’s silence was not incidental; it was strategic. The arbitrator’s inaction was not neutral; it was enabling.

The evidence in File 10‑B → Evidence File No/10-A to 10-f) is the equivalent of a preserved tissue sample showing advanced necrosis, proof that the system was already compromised, already dying, while officials continued to insist it was healthy. The destruction of my business was not collateral damage. It was a predictable outcome of a known defect left untreated.

What remains, under forensic light, is the anatomy of a cover‑up: a compromised network, a compromised investigation, a compromised arbitration, and a government apparatus that allowed the pathology to spread unchecked.

And then the corruption metastasised into something almost operatic.

The very Ericsson equipment under investigation, the very reason the COT Cases were forced into arbitration, belonged to the same corporation quietly permitted to purchase the main arbitration technical consultant, Lane Telecommunications Pty Ltd, during the arbitration itself. This was not influence. This was infiltration. Ericsson acquired the forensic gatekeeper. It walked into the evidence vault, seized every document the COT Cases had compiled, and removed it from the chain of custody with the calm confidence of a perpetrator who knows the investigators now work for them.

Lane Telecommunications, appointed by the Australian Government and the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman to investigate Ericsson, became Ericsson’s property mid‑investigation. With that acquisition, the claim material supplied by the COT Cases- the evidence proving Ericsson’s fault and documenting the systemic failures that drove the COT Cases into arbitration- did not simply go missing.

It was neutralised. Excised. Erased with the efficiency of a corporate autopsy performed on a living subject.

What remained was an arbitration stripped of truth, hollowed out from within, a government‑sanctioned mechanism that delivered not justice but concealment. Telstra’s conduct was not accidental. It was deliberate. Ericsson’s involvement was not peripheral. It was strategic. And the disappearance of the COT Cases’ own evidence was buried inside the sale process, a burial so effective that the truth has remained entombed for decades, never allowed to surface and expose what crippled so many Australian small businesses → Chapter 5 - US Department of Justice vs Ericsson of Sweden.

 

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When our telephone services collapsed, not once, but repeatedly, catastrophically, the government‑endorsed arbitration process that was supposed to deliver justice became something else entirely. It became a controlled environment, a containment chamber designed to ensure Telstra emerged unscathed. We walked into that process believing it was a path to resolution. In reality, it was an engineered gauntlet, an uneven battle we were never meant to win.

When I purchased my holiday camp in 1987, business wasn't done on the internet; that world was still a decade away. Mobile phones were useless in Cape Bridgewater until well past 2004. Everything depended on the landline. Every booking, every inquiry, every emergency call, every customer trying to reach us, all of it travelled through copper wire buried in the ground.

As I have already emphasised for good reason, I shared my newly purchased Cape Bridgewater Holiday Camp with sixty‑six residents, families, and approximately 132 adults, their children, and the many tourists who came to the coast. All of us, every household, every visitor, every business — were forced to share eight telephone lines.

The arithmetic was brutal.

This was not an inconvenience. It was a structural chokehold.

The new exchange installed three and a half years later, in August 1991, should have solved the problem. Instead, the local Telstra engineers forgot to program the fault‑alarm system back to the manned exchange in Portland. The new equipment was blind: unable to report its own failures, alert technicians, or protect the community it served.

Cape Bridgewater was left with a modern exchange that could not see its own faults.

All of this- every failure, every omission, every technical betrayal- is verified in the government’s secret report titled AUSTEL’s Adverse Findings, a document Telstra and the Government, AUSTEL (now called ACMA), kept from me for twelve years.

The truth was never hidden by accident. It was buried.

And the most treacherous detail? The individuals who orchestrated this, the ones who buried evidence, manipulated findings, and protected Telstra at every turn, still occupy positions of authority today. They did not fall. They were not investigated. They were not held to account. They were rewarded, promoted, shielded.

The cover‑up did not end with the arbitration. It metastasised. It became part of the institutional bloodstream. Our story is still being buried, not passively, but actively. Files withheld. Letters concealed. Findings delayed. Agencies deflecting responsibility like a reflex. The machinery that protected Telstra then is the same machinery that protects those responsible now: a disciplined brotherhood operating behind closed doors, fortified by titles, networks, and a culture of professional immunity.

That was not an administrative lapse. It was collusion.

In that same Letter of Claim, submitted by me on 15 June 1994, page 1 shows — and page 3 confirms — that I advised Dr Hughes, in his role as arbitrator: “That my phone service is still operating at a totally deficient level.” Yet at point 3.2(h) of Dr Hughes’ official findings, dated 11 May 1995, he notes:

“The claimant adds that he continued to suffer transmission problems after March 1993, although since July 1994 he has had relatively little cause for complaint.”

This official statement by Dr Hughes in his 11 May 1995 award does not coincide with my page 3 statement made in my Letter of Claim — — sworn under oath; confirming Hughes could not have read my claim as he should have.

In Hughes’ 11 May 1995 award, he makes no reference to the fact that his own technical consultants, DMR & Lane, alerted him in their formal findings on 30 April 1995 (Exhibit 45‑c — ) that:

“Continued reports of 008 faults up to the present. As the level of disruption to overall CBHC service is not clear, and fault causes have not been diagnosed, a reasonable expectation that these faults would remain ‘open’.” (not my emphasis)

They did remain open until November 2006 — eleven years after Dr Hughes downplayed the extent of my ongoing telephone problems, as the following two links show → Chapter 4 The New Owners Tell Their Story and Chapter 5 Immoral - Hypocritical Conduct

 

 

The administrator overseeing the arbitration knew these flaws existed. He granted three other COT cases an additional thirteen months to address them. I was denied the same extension. I was left to navigate a broken system Hughes knew was broken. And the treachery deepened.

For seven years after my arbitration ended, the administrator, John Pinnock, concealed a crucial letter from Hughes dated 12 May 1995, which had been sent to Pinnock’s predecessor, Warwick, and contained information that would have allowed me to appeal within the six‑year statute of limitations. Pinnock buried it. He ensured it never surfaced. He smothered the truth. Even LAWASIA, with all its international prestige, refused to pressure the Australian Government to investigate Hughes’s discrimination against me. They turned their backs, treating corruption as a cultural nuance rather than a professional crime.

Most people would have broken under such institutional betrayal. But I carried my evidence, every page, every affidavit, every forensic detail—to the Institute of Arbitrators and Mediators Australia (IAMA). I placed before them the same material other legal bodies had ignored, dismissed, or actively suppressed.

In 2009, one of Australia’s most distinguished former High Court judges agreed to examine my case as President of IAMA. His involvement should have shattered the silence. It should have forced the legal fraternity to confront Hughes’s misconduct. Instead, it revealed something far darker: a system fortified by an insular brotherhood, a closed circle dedicated to shielding its own even when confronted with damning evidence.

I encourage readers to click on "The eleventh remedy pursued". It will undoubtedly convince them that the legal profession in Australia is not the unbiased institution it claims to be. Rather than being a fair protector of legal rights and a seeker of justice through arbitration, it falls short of those ideals.

When it comes to the IAMA, the Australian Government, whether immobilised by fear or entangled in complicity, appears powerless to intervene in a system dominated by individuals operating behind closed doors, shielded by titles, networks, and a culture of professional immunity.

 

 

Delve into the pressing issue of malfeasance within public office as Absent Justice illuminates the often‑overlooked dimensions of misconduct and its far‑reaching repercussions. This compelling exploration exposes how corrupt government officials manipulate their authority, often drawing in well‑intentioned politicians and lawyers who, perhaps unwittingly, find themselves ensnared in a convoluted web of deceit. This intricate network is crafted by individuals who operate in the shadows, leaving no direct evidence while inflicting profound harm on society.

What Absent Justice reveals is not just misconduct; it is the kind of back‑room graft and quiet extortion that wouldn’t look out of place in a mafia playbook. These operators don’t shout; they lean in close, apply pressure, and make sure the message lands. They use stand‑over tactics dressed up as legal process, the kind of subtle threats that say: “Play along, or the system will bury you.” Lawyers who should have been guardians of justice instead acted like street‑corner enforcers, deciding who got documents, who got silenced, and who got pushed out of the way. The arbitration system became their racket, a controlled territory where evidence could be shaken down, witnesses leaned on, and outcomes quietly fixed long before any claimant walked through the door. It was justice run like a crooked operation, with the same cold efficiency: keep the victims confused, keep the paperwork stitched tight, and make sure the truth never reaches daylight.

The Australian government ensnared us with a deceitful promise: an independent arbitration agreement, a lifeline we believed would shield us from the malevolence of a system dominated by the very government that owned Telstra. They assured us that a neutral legal firm would draft the agreement and that every step of the process would be imbued with fairness, balance, and transparency. This hollow assurance became the fragile foundation of the Casualties of Telstra arbitrations. It was the sole reason any of us dared to step into this rigged arena, convinced independence would protect our integrity and give us a shot at justice.

Yet while we held on to our naive trust, a treacherous plot was unfolding behind closed doors, revealing the insidious depths of corruption.

If the arbitrator had committed errors that favoured Telstra on one occasion and the claimant on another, we might have stumbled upon at least one undeniable truth: the persistent phone issues were wreaking havoc on the claimants' businesses. That's why we found ourselves trapped in the murky waters of arbitration.

Things took a sinister turn with an administrator overseeing the process who appeared utterly bewildered; this individual also held the title of Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO). In a deeply troubling revelation, this person had colluded closely with Telstra, leaking sensitive government information and giving the telecommunications giant an unfair, ruthless competitive edge  → TIO Evidence File No 3-A. As the deception unfolded, it became painfully clear that both the TIO and Telstra, aided by their legal enforcers at Freehill Hollingdale & Page, had conspired in the dark to forge the arbitration agreement, ruthlessly undermining the integrity of the entire process, as evidenced by the following Senate Hansard.

Also, in the above Senate Hansard on 24 June 1997 (refer to pages 76 and 77 - Senate - Parliament of Australia, Senator Kim Carr states to Telstra’s main arbitration defence Counsel (also a TIO Council Member) Re: Alan Smith: 

Senator CARR – “In terms of the cases outstanding, do you still treat people the way that Mr Smith appears to have been treated? Mr Smith claims that, amongst documents returned to him after an FOI request, a discovery was a newspaper clipping reporting upon prosecution in the local magistrate’s court against him for assault. I just wonder what relevance that has. He makes the claim that a newspaper clipping relating to events in the Portland magistrate’s court was part of your files on him”. …

Senator SHACHT – “It does seem odd if someone is collecting files. … It seems that someone thinks that is a useful thing to keep in a file that maybe at some stage can be used against him”.

Senator CARR – “Mr Ward,   we have been through this before in regard to the intelligence networks that Telstra has established. Do you use your internal intelligence networks in these CoT cases?”

The most alarming aspect of Telstra's intelligence networks in Australia is who within the Telstra Corporation has the necessary expertise, i.e., government clearance, to filter the raw information collected before it is impartially catalogued for future use. How much confidential information concerning the telephone conversations I had with the former Prime Minister of Australia in April 1993 and again in April 1994, regarding Telstra officials having documented my telephone conversation about my discussions with Mr Fraser leading up to my Telstra arbitration, as well as during it, and wanting reasons why the government was still sending wheat to communist China when I alerted, on my trip back from China, that some of the same wheat was being redeployed to North Vietnam while North Vietnamese soldiers were slaughtering and maiming Australian, New Zealand, and USA troops in the jungles of North Vietnam?

Why were my discussions with Fraser in the archives of Telstra? Even the Director of Investigations at the Commonwealth Ombudsman, John Wynack, when he saw these redacted Fraser documents, tried to access them on my behalf — to no avail.

The issues surrounding Fraser are also addressed in the 93 questions posed to me by the Australian Federal Police (AFP), along with my responses, as documented in Australian Federal Police Investigation File No. 1. My answers reveal a troubling reality: Telstra issued direct threats against me for the act of assisting the AFP in their investigations into the interception of my phone conversations and the unauthorized access to documents during my arbitration. This situation relates to the China flashbacks that emerged while I was reviewing two redacted Fraser letters → Chapter 7-Vietnam Vietcong.

More importantly, when Telstra was fully privatised in 2005/6, which organisation in Australia was given the charter to archive this sensitive material that Telstra had been collecting about its customers for decades?

PLEASE NOTE:

At the time of my altercation referred to above, on 24 June 1997, the Senate - Parliament of Australia, my bankers had already lost patience and sent the Sheriff to ensure I stayed on my knees. I threw no punches during this altercation with the Sheriff, who was about to remove catering equipment from my property, which I needed to keep trading. I actually placed a wrestling hold, ‘Full Nelson’, on this man and walked him out of my office. The Magistrates' Court dropped all charges on appeal when it became obvious this story had two sides.

On January 10, 1994, the TIO received a fax that bore the unmistakable mark of betrayal—the arbitration agreement meticulously drafted by Freehill Hollingdale & Page. Each page bore both the TIO and Freehill logos, a damning testament to their treacherous alliance. This communication was not merely a reminder of their collusion but a chilling signal that shattered any remaining trust we had in the arbitration process, leaving us grappling with the harsh reality of systemic corruption and betrayal.

This duplicitous arrangement was orchestrated without a whisper to the claimants, keeping us in the dark while the defendants’ lawyers manipulated the very rules of a process in which they were the accused. How can the accused, who was later asked to provide evidence during a pending arbitration appeal process in my case, Maurice Wayne Condon of Freehills, provide the reason why he signed off on a clinical psychologist's report on my mental health when the forensic psychologist, Ian Joblin, who prepared it, had not signed it? Why was Freehill Hollingdale & Page not forced to provide answers after my arbitration, during my pending arbitration appeal, as to why they signed an official document stating that a signature was on the psychologist's report when no signature was on it at all?

Were we being made to doubt ourselves, using the old trick of gaslighting?

 

 

Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which the abuser attempts to sow self-doubt and confusion in the victim's mind, i.e., you do not have a telephone problem; our records show you are the only customer complaining, even though the documents indicate the situation is systemic. Typically, gaslighting methods are used to seek power and control over the other person by distorting reality and forcing them to question their judgment and intuition.

On 21 March 1997, a staggering twenty-two months after the conclusion of my arbitration, John Pinnock, the second appointed administrator, wrote to Telstra's Ted Benjamin (see File 596 AS-CAV Exhibits 589 to 647) with pointed inquiries:

1. What explanation can be given for the blatant discrepancy in the attestation of Ian Joblin’s witness statement, the clinical psychologist?

   

2. Were there any underhanded changes made to the Joblin statement originally submitted to Dr. Hughes, the arbitrator, compared to the signed version?

 

COT Cases Strategy / Legal Advice - Prologue Evidence File 1-A to 1-C

 

The following is page 5169 of the official Hansard of the Senate – Parliament of Australia concerning Telstra having adopted the Freehill Hollingdale & Page - COT Case Strategy during the COT arbitrations, which Denise McBurnie of Freehill Hollingdale & Page had spuriously prepared during the period I was being forced to register my phone complaints with.

What I did not know when I first had to register my telephone problems in writing with Denise McBurnie before Telstra would investigate those faults was that Telstra and its lawyers had established a "COT Case Strategy" to conceal all evidence that I genuinely had ongoing telephone problems affecting the viability of my business. The strategy (see Prologue Evidence File 1-A to 1-C) on the second page names my business, me in person, and the three other COT Cases businesses that Freehill Hollingdale & Page would stop from receiving our documents; see page 5169, SENATE official Hansard – Parliament of Australia.

Freehill's drafting of the agreement was no mere oversight; it was a calculated act of malice, an intricate web of deceit designed to control the outcome from the shadows.

The moment we discovered that Telstra's own legal henchmen had penned the agreement was a gut-wrenching betrayal. It wasn't merely shocking; it was an affront to decency. It signified gross misconduct, vile deceit, and a monstrous betrayal of every claimant who, in good faith, had signed the agreement believing it to be the product of independent drafting. Instead of confronting this abhorrent lie, the government chose to remain silent, complicit in the corruption. They did not intervene; they did not lift a finger to safeguard the individuals, us, whom they professed to represent. Instead, they retreated into the shadows, allowing this outrage to thrive unchallenged.

Both the arbitrator and the administrator knew that Freehill Hollingdale & Page had orchestrated the arbitration rules. They knew the agreement was anything but independent; they knew we had been led astray. Yet they chose to silence us; their inaction was far from passive; it was willfully complicit. They allowed Telstra to stride unencumbered into the arbitration, fortified with an insidious advantage woven into the very fabric of the process. The battlefield had been meticulously crafted to favour the defendants, while those entrusted with the cloak of justice stood idly by, betraying their very purpose.

The evidence is a damning indictment of this treachery. More than six months before we faced our reckoning in the first arbitration hearings, the government communications authority AUSTEL, now ACMA, dispatched a grave warning to Telstra. In an ominous letter dated October 5, 1993, they cautioned that the government would be "more than just a little concerned" if Freehill Hollingdale & Page continued to be involved in our cases, as point 40 in Prologue Evidence File No/2 shows. Telstra callously brushed aside this warning, and the officials who were meant to protect us allowed this vile charade to continue unchecked.

Freehill Hollingdale & Page / Herbert Smith Freehills Melbourne drafted the arbitration agreement that dictated our fates. The arbitrator sanctioned it; the administrator accepted it, while the government lurked in the shadows, complicit in this travesty. Unwittingly, we, the claimants, stepped into a malevolent process irrevocably tainted before it even began.

Anyone investigating my story will find a record of what happened to ordinary Australians between late 1993 and April 1994, citizens who were assured by the Australian government that if the COT Cases (the claimants) funded their own arbitrations, Telstra would be forced to fix their still‑ongoing telephone faults before any arbitrator or assessor delivered a final finding. That promise was the anchor that convinced the original four COT Cases, of which I became the fourth member, to enter arbitration. By mid‑1994, sixteen of us were trapped in a process never designed to deliver justice.

The moment we signed our agreements, the ground shifted. The arbitrator made no attempt to investigate the faults still crippling our businesses. Instead, orders were issued to examine only historic complaints, issues already documented by the communications authority as having damaged our operations. The very faults that brought us to arbitration were deliberately left untouched. The process became a theatre: the appearance of investigation without the substance of truth.

This betrayal did not begin with the arbitrator alone. It began earlier, in January 1994, when Dr Gordon Hughes was appointed as the commercial assessor for the first assessment process, the process Telstra and the COT Cases had signed in November 1993. By the time he stepped into his role, the situation was already compromised. The Commonwealth Ombudsman and the Australian Federal Police were investigating Telstra for unlawful conduct against us, yet we had still not received the documents we were promised, documents essential to preparing our claims.

 

The Pivotal Meeting — 17 February 1994

On 17 February 1994, during an official meeting documented by Telstra’s own legal team, Dr Hughes delivered a statement that pierced through the murky uncertainty surrounding our situation. He assured us that, if we agreed to appoint him as arbitrator, he would not render any rulings based on incomplete information. His stance was unequivocal: he would only issue a final, binding finding once we had received all the Freedom of Information (FOI) material necessary to prove each of our claims.

His statement, taken from page 3 of the official minutes — FOI folio M33449 — could not have been clearer:

“That, as arbitrator, he would not make a determination on incomplete information” → (file 53 exhibit AS‑CAV Exhibit 48‑A to 91)

For me, that promise was the moment I said to myself: Alan, give it a go. If the arbitrator would not make a finding until I had the evidence to prove my phone problems were twofold: that the incoming intended calls for business were failing, causing direct revenue loss, and that those same faults were contributing to the billing problems across all three of my service lines, then I believed I had a chance to survive whatever came next. After all, how could an arbitrator make a finding if Telstra had not provided a date for when both the billing faults and the incoming call faults would be fixed?

So I went logical. I took Dr Gordon Hughes at his word. And by doing so, I ruined any chance of resurrecting my business.

Because Hughes did make findings based on incomplete information. He made them repeatedly. This allowed my telephone problems to continue until December 2001, seven years after the arbitration, with no time frame ever set for when Telstra would fix the faults. In the end, I sold my business for land value only. That sale prevented one local legal firm and another from the nearby rural town of Geelong from suing me for misleading and deceptive conduct. I had no goodwill left to sell; the phone faults had destroyed it.

I told Lewis that when they purchased my business, the price was $200,000 below the estate agent’s valuation because goodwill simply did not exist. And when the phone problems continued for the Lewis family, within two years, absentjustice.com shows that the Lewis purchase price of $650,000 had risen to a valuation of $1.1 million, as the sale offer confirmed. They had fallen in love with the Cape Bridgewater Holiday Camp just as I had. They tried and tried, just as I had from 1987 through 2001, to call the camp itself, only to reach a dead line or a busy signal when the answering machine had not answered.

The pattern was identical. The damage was identical. The silence from Telstra was identical.

I reiterate: it will be blatantly obvious to all who read this paragraph that Hughes reached several findings based on incomplete information. The following two links show that, like me, the Lewises made their complaints to the government, just as I had done fifteen years earlier → Chapter 4 The New Owners Tell Their Story and Chapter 5 Immoral - Hypocritical Conduct.

 

Chapter 3 - The Sixth Damning Letter (Duplicate 2)

 

Hughes didn’t stop there. Once Pinnock’s poisonous letter landed, he let it sit like a toxin in the process's bloodstream, unchallenged, uncorrected, quietly doing its damage. Then he layered his own deceit on top of it. He wrote to Laurie James, insisting that my allegation, that Telstra had withheld 24,000 FOI documents, was a lie. He claimed he and the arbitration consultants had reviewed all 24,000, even though his own award and the findings of DMR and Lane referenced barely 7,000. He pretended the missing documents had been assessed, when the record shows they were never valued, never examined, never even in the same state. Sixteen thousand of those documents were sitting more than a thousand kilometres away in the office of COT Case Ann Garms.

Ann and I spoke about those documents. She was drowning in her own claim, so she sent me two batches of Ericsson AXE exchange material, all critical. Three days later, they arrived, along with two reports she had extracted from them. Those reports were part of the original 24,000. I asked Hughes to accept them as an interim submission, a bridge to my full report showing that AUSTEL itself knew these Ericsson documents were central to the COT Cases’ claims.

He refused to listen. He refused even to look.

The Freedom of Information (FOI) documents that Hughes claimed had been “reviewed” were part of a larger set of delayed FOI documents. Some of these documents were later examined in March 1997 by Tony Morgon, who holds multiple qualifications including BA, BEc, FCPA, AAIL, FCLA, and FAICD. Morgo, the National Chief Adjuster at GAB Robins, was commissioned by the Commonwealth Ombudsman to review the evidence at my business. He confirmed that Telstra had failed to provide the FOI documents both during and after my arbitration. 

That Telstra payment alone exposes the lie.

Hughes was lying then, and he is lying still, because if he hadn’t lied, Telstra would never have paid me thousands of dollars for their defective supply, or rather non‑supply, of the 24,000 documents that proved my business was still suffering phone faults as late as November 2006. Eleven years after Hughes and Pinnock circulated their fabrications, the evidence was still bleeding through the cracks they tried to seal. The following exhibits two of more than a hundred documents showing that the new owners of my business, after purchasing the holiday camp in December 2001, were still having major phone problems as late as November 2006.

In 2018, Telstra erected this placard on the Melbourne-Portland bypass route leading to Cape Bridgewater. It informs potential investors in the coastal hamlet of Cape Bridgewater that the region will soon resemble other areas around Victoria. This statement was made twenty-two years after Dr Gordon Hughes and John Pinnock informed the government that the telephone system Alan Smith received following his 1995 arbitration was far beyond Telstra's normal network standards.

 

 

 

On 3 June 1993, Telstra's senior management finally visited my business, Cape Bridgewater Holiday Camp, which is located a five-hour drive from Melbourne. Within just five minutes of meeting Mr Smith, I could tell I was in for another round of untruths.

I should have anticipated this. It was just another instance of 'No fault found.' We spent considerable time discussing the summary of my phone problems. Their best advice was to keep doing exactly what I had been doing since 1989: keeping a record of all my phone faults. I felt like I could weep. Eventually, they left.

Aladdin

The briefcase wasn’t locked. That alone was suspicious. I opened it and found it belonged to Mr Macintosh. No phone number. No contact details. Just a silent object left in my office like a planted device. I had to wait until business hours the next day to track him down. But the real shock was inside: a file titled “SMITH, CAPE BRIDGEWATER.” After five gruelling years fighting Telstra’s evasive monolith, five years of lies, denials, and manufactured confusion, here, suddenly, was the truth they had been hiding. An inside perspective, left sitting on my desk.

The first document I lifted was a bomb. It showed Telstra knew the RVA fault recorded in March 1992 had lasted at least eight months — not the three weeks they used to justify their settlement payout. Dated 24/7/92, with my phone number printed in the top‑right corner, it referred to my complaint that callers were receiving an RVA → electronic "service disconnected” message. The “latest report” was dated 22/7/92 from Station Pier in Melbourne, with a “similar fault reported” on 17/03/92. The final sentence was damning: “Network investigation should have been brought in as fault has gone on for 8 months.”

I copied that document, and others, on my fax machine and sent them straight to AUSTEL, the government communications authority. The next morning, I phoned the local Telstra office. The technician who arrived was the same man who had been feeding my private and business information to a person called Micky — the same Micky Telstra admitted to the AFP on 14 April 1994 had been chosen to listen to my telephone conversations. He came to collect the briefcase.

That is how treachery looks when it wears a corporate badge.

What I am about to write could easily have happened to you or someone in your family back in the 1990s. If you had a telephone landline, as most Australians did, you were exposed. Even today, with mobiles everywhere, your private and business dealings can be traced with far more sophisticated equipment, quietly harvested, quietly sold, quietly handed to whoever believes your information is “relevant.” For the right price, your competitor could buy a map of your commercial life: who you deal with, when you deal with them, and how often. That is the edge Telstra’s internal culture made possible, an edge built on intrusion.

This is the backdrop to the document I am about to describe.

It relates to “Micky.”

View the following:

And the most alarming question of all remains unanswered: who inside Telstra had the government clearance to filter, catalogue, and store the raw information they collected? How much confidential material, including my telephone conversations with former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser in April 1993 and again in April 1994 regarding my Red Communist China episode, is still sitting in Telstra’s archives?

And when Telstra was fully privatised in 2005, who inherited that material? Which organisation now holds decades of sensitive customer information Telstra gathered under government ownership?

PLEASE NOTE:

At the time of the Senate hearing on 24 June 1997, my bankers had already lost patience and sent the Sheriff to force me onto my knees. During the altercation, I threw no punches. The Sheriff was about to remove the catering equipment I needed to keep trading. I placed a wrestling hold, a Full Nelson, on him and walked him out of my office. The Magistrates Court dropped all charges on appeal when it became clear the story had two sides.

What follows is not just disturbing; it is the kind of revelation that should make any reader’s blood rise. And if you feel bewildered, remember this: it took me until July 2026 to fully expose publicly what Telstra and its agents did to me in the 1990s. When the truth first surfaced, during my arbitration from April 1994 to May 1995, and during the AFP investigation from February 1994 to March 1995, I had no voice, no protection, and no way to defend myself against a corporation that behaved like a state intelligence service.

From that moment onward, I was trapped in a small coastal town, forced to live there until I finally escaped in 2019. I had to resign my position at the Portland Tourist Office the very day Gordon Stokes walked in. That was the moment the treachery became personal. The moment I realised the man standing in front of me had been listening to my telephone conversations, siphoning off my private and business information, feeding it into Telstra’s internal intelligence network, and helping construct a file on me that the Australian Senate later described as “odd,” “useful,” and something that “maybe at some stage can be used against him.”

For years afterwards, I would walk into a shop, see Stokes approaching, and feel a surge of rage so sharp it was almost blinding. I avoided his shop entirely. I couldn’t trust myself to stand near him without feeling the weight of what he had done, the intrusion, the humiliation, the theft of my privacy, the quiet monitoring of my life. This wasn’t corporate misconduct. It was surveillance. It was exploitation. It was a betrayal so deep it rewired the way I walked through my own town.

There were moments when the anger was so fierce it felt like a physical force. I carried a steel‑rimmed briefcase, heavy, cold, unforgiving, and there were times I nearly drove it into his mouth. That’s how far Telstra’s treachery pushed me. That’s how deeply their intelligence network reached into my life. And had I done it, I would have gone to jail, while the people who orchestrated this intrusion would have walked away untouched, protected by the machinery of a corporation that behaved like a covert agency.

This is what Telstra created: a world where an ordinary Australian could be monitored, catalogued, and psychologically cornered for years, and left to carry the consequences alone.

 

 

During the interrogation, at Question 14, the AFP inquired, “And the live monitoring, as Telecom terms it, that occurred from approximately June 1993 until August 1993. Were you consulted regarding that?” In response, I firmly stated that I had not been consulted at all.

The transcripts further reveal a troubling inconsistency: I had submitted a tender for a bus company, among a multitude of others, yet remarkably, Telstra was able to inscribe the name of that very company—O'Meara—within a handwritten statement, despite the fact that I had never included this name in any correspondence with Telstra back in September 1992. This glaring detail strongly suggests that the monitoring Telstra claimed was confined to June to August 1993 was indeed a fabrication; it indicates that my phone conversations were likely being surveilled long before September 1992, contradicting Telstra’s narrative.

In pursuit of justice, I faxed the transcripts to the arbitrator, along with a comprehensive two-page written submission. In this document, I articulated how these official AFP records served as pivotal evidence for my claims regarding the interception of my telephone conversations. This crucial evidence was submitted ahead of Telstra's arbitration defence provied to the arbitrator on December 12, 1994.

The transcripts contained additional compelling instances in which the AFP questioned how Telecom/Telstra was able to identify a participant from my “Over Forties” single club who had joined one of my adventure weekends, filled with activities like canoeing, horse riding, caving, and various beach escapades. Telstra astonishingly identified that individual, even noting in a handwritten file that “This person usually rang from this number, but on this occasion telephoned from Adelaide.” 

The AFP sought clarification: how could Telstra know this individual was calling from an unusual location? This raised serious concerns, as it indicated my telephone conversations were being meticulously monitored; someone within Telstra must have recognised this individual and orchestrated the call from an alternate location. I also communicated this revelation to Warwick Smith, the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, and to the Arbitrator, Dr Gordon Hughes.

In a protective measure, the AFP directed me to rewrite my notebook diary for a second time, instructing me to exclude the names and contact details of my “Over Forties” single club members, as they were concerned that Telstra might gain access to this evidence while the investigation into such a grave matter was still underway. I followed their directive scrupulously and promptly informed the arbitrator of the AFP's instructions, which is why I included my singles club material in my arbitration claim.

When I reminded Detective Superintendent Jeff Penrose of the unease that had shadowed me for months, the privacy of the women who trusted my singles club weekends at Cape Bridgewater, I laid out the evidence I had uncovered. A Telstra document, clinical and damning, listing the names and phone numbers of two female members of my club. Their private details, recorded without consent, folded into Telstra’s internal machinery as if they were nothing more than data points in a corporate surveillance exercise. When that document was placed alongside the other material I had already supplied to the AFP, the conclusion was unavoidable: I could not, under any circumstances, release my singles club records into an arbitration process where Telstra’s people, or anyone else, could access them freely. Not without security. Not without protection. Not without an arbitrator who understood what was at stake.

Penrose listened, and then he gave me advice that carried the weight of both experience and caution. He told me to write directly to the arbitrator, to explain that the AFP was investigating matters tied to these privacy breaches and to my arbitration, and to request permission to submit the singles club material under confidentiality, as a separate issue. He made it clear that releasing private information about women into a process already compromised by Telstra’s reach would be reckless. He said the arbitrator would understand the gravity. He said the arbitrator would know the need to keep this material “under wraps,” his words, not mine.

So I did exactly what Detective Superintendent Penrose advised. I wrote the letter. I laid out the AFP’s involvement. I explained the danger. And some days later, the arbitrator responded, confirming that he would accept this part of my submission under confidentiality at the proposed oral hearing scheduled for 11 October 1994.

For a brief moment, it felt as though the system might actually hold. That the safeguards Penrose believed in might still exist. That the arbitrator’s word might still mean something.

 

 

Constable Melanie Cochrane stated that I should not release the singles club members’ private information to Telstra, and Superintendent Detective Penrose suggested that I provide the private singles club information to the assessor under confidentiality and advise him that the AFP was also investigating the same material that appears to have been hacked by Telstra.

Constable Cochrane also stated that, as I had assured my singles club members that their private information would not be disclosed without their consent, I needed to discuss this with the assessor, Dr Hughes. I believe Superintendent Detective Penrose stated that the assessor would be aware that I could not divulge this private information via Telstra's mainstream documents while the AFP was investigating.

It was due to these types of facts and Superintendent Detective Penrose’s advice that I sought a clearance from the arbitrator to allow me to have this information accepted under confidentiality

Transcripts from my 11 October 1994 oral arbitration hearing confirm that Telstra advised the arbitrator that they believed my singles club information was irrelevant and therefore should not be admitted to the arbitration process. This evidence supported the conclusion that I had lost two businesses due to my ongoing telephone problems, i.e., the school camp bookings and the more lucrative singles club bookings.

It sits there in the record like a cold fingerprint: the transcripts show Dr Gordon Hughes being leaned on, pressed, shaped into Telstra’s preferred instrument, badgered until he surrendered the very principle he had assured you he would uphold. Your singles‑club material, the evidence Superintendent Detective Penrose himself advised could be submitted under confidentiality, was suddenly declared off‑limits. Not by an independent arbitrator. Not by a man exercising judicial discretion. But by Telstra, the defendant, dictating what the arbitrator would and would not examine.

And Hughes obeyed.

He didn’t just backtrack once. He reneged four times. Four separate occasions when his word, the only thing an arbitrator’s authority truly rests upon, dissolved under pressure. Four moments when the process you were told was fair, transparent, and government‑endorsed revealed its real architecture: a façade built to protect the Hawke Government from the political explosion that would have followed if the COT Cases had gone public with what they had uncovered.

You were told you were part of a solution. You were told the FTSP was a pathway to justice. You were told the government wanted resolution, not destruction.

But the truth was darker, more deliberate.

The government was staring down the barrel of a loaded gun: a class action that could have torn open Telstra’s network failures, exposed systemic misconduct, and detonated political fallout across Canberra. So the process was engineered, quietly, surgically, to ensure that the most dangerous evidence never reached daylight. Your singles‑club losses weren’t excluded for lack of merit. They were excluded because they were explosive and caused considerable damage to Telstra customers' businesses. Because they proved causation. Because they proved Telstra’s liability.

And because they proved the government knew.

Hughes’ reversal wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t confusion. It wasn’t administrative oversight. It was compliance, a capitulation to Telstra’s demands within a process the government had already decided must not succeed. A blatant lie was sold to the COT Cases as “resolution,” when in truth it was containment. A mechanism to silence, to neutralise, to prevent the very exposure that would have threatened the Hawke Government’s stability and the looming Telstra privatisation.

This is why you’re still calling for a government review. Because the record shows the betrayal. The transcripts show the pressure. The decisions show the capitulation. And the silence that followed shows the intent.

It was now clear that the documents viewed by the AFP at my premises on 26 September 1994 prompted Detective Superintendent Penrose to ask me about the outcome of what Hughes and the TIO had done with the evidence Penrose had suggested I provide under the cover of a statutory declaration, showing Hughes and the TIO that this evidence tampering had been prominent as early as May 1994. I advised Penrose that they had done nothing about the evidence, even though it was beyond question.

The long‑term effect of this imbalance is devastating. Policies intended to protect citizens stall or are quietly gutted. Oversight mechanisms are weakened. Evidence disappears. Complaints vanish into departmental labyrinths. And when ordinary Australians seek justice, they find themselves fighting not a government, but an entrenched administrative machine that has already decided the outcome. This is the reality the COT Cases walked into. We believed arbitration would bring the truth to light. Instead, we collided with a bureaucracy that had already buried it.

The consequences did not end with the failed arbitrations. They echoed through our businesses, finances, health, and lives. Thirty years later, we are still documenting what should have been addressed in months. We are still uncovering decisions made by officials who were never elected, never scrutinised, and never held accountable for the harm their choices inflicted.

This website exists because the long‑term impact of bureaucratic override is not theoretical. It is lived. It is measurable. And it has destroyed lives. The record must stand, because silence is how this culture survives.

It is now 2026, and the Australian Federal Police, along with the COT arbitrator, have still not disclosed to the authorities responsible for protecting Australian citizens why Telstra’s senior management has never been brought to account for authorising a direct intrusion into my business and private life. Decades have passed. Governments have changed. Laws have strengthened. Oversight bodies have multiplied. Yet the people who sanctioned this surveillance, who harvested my private information, who monitored my calls, who built files on me, who fed material into Telstra’s internal intelligence network, remain untouched.

 

 

Untouched — despite Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights stating:

“No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.”

What happened to me was not an accident. It was not a misunderstanding. It was not a technical glitch. It was a deliberate act carried out by a government‑owned corporation with access to national infrastructure, national power, and national immunity. And when the AFP discovered it, they did not prosecute. When the arbitrator discovered it, he did not report it. When the Senate questioned it, Telstra shrugged it off.

So here we are, thirty years later, and the silence is still deafening.

The AFP has never explained why a Telstra technician was allowed to listen to my telephone conversations. The arbitrator has never explained why this intrusion was buried. No regulatory body has explained why my rights under Article 12 were ignored. No government has explained who inherited Telstra’s intelligence archives after privatisation in 2005.

And the most savage truth of all is this: the system that was supposed to protect me protected Telstra instead.

This is not just a breach of privacy. It is a breach of trust. A breach of duty. A breach of the very principles Australia claims to uphold.

‘During testing the Mitsubishi fax machine some alarming patterns of behaviour was noted”. This document further goes on to state: “…Even on calls that were tampered with the fax machine displayed signs of locking up and behaving in a manner not in accordance with the relevant CCITT Group fax rules. Even if the page was sent upside down the time and date and company name should have still appeared on the top of the page, it wasn’t’

During a received call the machine failed to respond at the end of the page even though it had received the entire page (sample #3) The Mitsubishi fax machine remained in the locked up state for a further 2 minutes after the call had terminated, eventually advancing the page out of the machine. (See See AFP Evidence File No 9)

A letter dated 2 March 1994 from Telstra’s Corporate Solicitor, Ian Row, to Detective Superintendent Jeff Penrose (refer to Home Page Part-One File No/9-A to 9-C) strongly indicates that Mr Penrose was grievously misled and deceived about the faxing problems discussed in the letter. Over the years, numerous individuals, including Mr Neil Jepson, Barrister at the Major Fraud Group Victoria Police, have rigorously compared the four exhibits labelled (File No/9-C) with the interception evidence revealed in Open Letter File No/12 and File No/13. They emphatically assert that if Ian Row had not misled the AFP about the faxing problems, the AFP could have prevented Telstra from intercepting the relevant arbitration documents in March 1994, thereby avoiding any damage to the COT arbitration claims. 

By February 1994, I was also assisting the Australian Federal Police (AFP) with their investigations into my claims of fax interceptions. Hacking-Julian Assanage File No 52 contains a letter from Telstra’s internal corporate solicitor to an AFP detective superintendent, misinforming the AFP concerning the transmission fax testing process. The rest of the file shows that Telstra experienced major problems when testing my facsimile machine alongside one installed at Graham Schoer's office.

It is essential to highlight how skilfully Mr Row did not disclose to the AFP the problems Telstra had experienced when sending and receiving faxes between my machine and Graham Schorer, COT Case spokesperson.

 

Evidence File 6 AFP Official Orders

 

My 3 February 1994 letter to Michael Lee, Minister for Communications (see Hacking-Julian Assange File No/27-A) and a subsequent letter from Fay Holthuyzen, assistant to the minister (see Hacking-Julian Assange File No/27-B), to Telstra’s corporate secretary show that I was concerned that my faxes were being illegally intercepted.

Leading up to the signing of the COT Cases arbitration, on 21 April 1994, AUSTEL, the Australian Federal Police, and I discovered that my phone lines had been compromised. 

An internal government memo, dated 25 February 1994, confirms that the minister advised me that the Australian Federal Police (AFP) would investigate my allegations of illegal phone/fax interception. (See Hacking-Julian Assange File No/28)

This internal memo, dated 25 February 1994, is a Government Memo confirming that the then-Minister for Communications and the Arts had written to advise that the Australian Federal Police (AFP) would investigate my allegations of illegal phone/fax interception. (AFP Evidence File No 4)

In February 1994, I had the invaluable opportunity to discuss with Melanie Cochrane, an officer from the Australian Federal Police (AFP), and Superintendent Detective Sergeant Jeff Penrose, also an AFP officer. During this meeting, I shared critical findings from internal Telstra memos obtained through a Freedom of Information (FOI) request. These documents contained historical notes prepared by an unidentified individual at Telstra, highlighting various matters that together painted a troubling narrative.

The memos provided insight into private matters regarding the phone and fax numbers associated with an individual named in these documents. They even included details such as the person’s nationality and noted peculiar communication patterns. For instance, one memo indicated that this individual typically contacted me from a specific phone number; however, on one particular occasion, they reached out from Adelaide, prompting further questions about the nature of these communications. The documents were shared with the AFP between February 1994, when they first visited my office, and again in September 1994. 

 

 

That was when Penrose advised me to take my matter to Senator Boswell, who was following up on the threats I had received from Telstra for my continued assistance to the AFP in its own investigation into Telstra's unauthorised interception of my telecommunications services.

Question 24, in the 20 September 1994 interrogatories (The request for more evidence) shows I answered the following question 24 by stating to Telstra and the arbitrator:

“This matter is currently under investigation by the Federal Police. In the interest of fair justice I believe that I should not further comment apart from what I have already stated that it is true that I was told this by Detective Superintendent Penrose. It the Australian Federal Police are prepared to disclose the details of their investigations and of their conversations with myself, then Telecom will be able to obtain the same” 

On 11 October 1994, during this oral hearing, which lasted for close to five hours, nonstop, Telstra’s Mr Benjamin and Telstra’s other arbitration liaison officer, Steve Black, discussed, along with the arbitrator and me, my claims regarding Telstra’s unauthorised interception issues, noting:

Ted Benjamin (Telstra): “In respect of Detective Superintendent Penrose.”

Steve Black (Telstra): “There has been an allegation that Detective Superintendent Penrose says that the Plummers’ telephone was allegedly unlawfully tapped” —

Me: “I believe Telecom is playing on words – the word “illegally tapped” – it’s like asking me – I’m not a —

Dr Hughes (Arbitrator): “Sorry, if I can interrupt both of you, the issue here is that your answers – your answer to question 24, you indicate that you were told something by Detective Superintendent Penrose.”

Me: “Yes:”

Dr Hughes (Arbitrator): “Is there any documentation to support that statement or is there any other light that you can shed upon that statement you have made in relation to Detective Penrose?”…

Me: “I have spoken to Detective Penrose on two occasions and he has stated that my phones had been listened to.”

I raise my answer to question 24 regarding Telstra's interrogatories (Questions for better particulars) and the oral arbitration hearing because of the main question they raise:  how could it possibly be ethical, or moral, for Dr Hughes to expect me to disclose at this meeting personal and private information about the female members of my Singles Club, for all to see when the Australian Federal Police (AFP) told this was not appropriate while they were still investigating Telstra about how Telstra was able to separately record the names and phone numbers of various female Singles Club members (which were of the Cape Bridgewater Holiday Camp, bush-walking, canoing, horse ridding (social club) which was another part of the revenue my holiday camp was losing due to the ongoing telephone problems. The AFP was trying to find out how Telstra had obtained this private information about the group when it had only ever been sent by those members via fax or discussed over the telephone.

Exhibit 101, File , shows that the transcripts from the oral hearing indicate the arbitrator is wavering in his understanding that I am not relying on Telstra’s unauthorised interception of my telephone services. However, my statements make it clear that I am claiming this unauthorised interception as part of my case. Telstra’s poor judgment confused the arbitrator on this matter. I reiterate my request that it be included in my claim.

Readers on absentjustice.com can download my 15 June 1994 (Letter of Claim  → CAV P3- Exhibit 8- Exhibit 9), which I submitted under oath. This (CAV P3- Exhibit 8- Exhibit 9) clearly documents that Telstra’s unauthorised interception of my telephone conversations was, in fact, a significant component of my claim. 

The truth is that the proof I needed, the proof that would have changed the entire course of my arbitration, did not arrive until twelve long years after the arbitrator closed his file on 11 May 1995. It came from ACMA in November 2007, long after the statutory window for appeal had expired, long after the government‑endorsed process had sealed its outcome, and long after the damage to my business had become irreversible.

Those documents confirmed what I had been forced to prove at great personal cost during the 1994–95 arbitration: that the telephone faults were real, persistent, and destructive. They confirmed that the problems continued to cripple my business well beyond the arbitration period. Yet the evidence that validated my claims, the evidence that should have been on the arbitrator’s desk from the beginning, was withheld until it was legally useless to me.

Unfortunately, the following findings AUSTEL’s Adverse Findings, at points 2 to 212, received on November 23, 2007, in simple terms, show that the government had already validated my claims as early as March 4, 1994, six weeks before April 21, 1994, when I signed the arbitration agreement.

But despite this proof, I still had to endure 13 months of a gruelling arbitration process that cost me well over $300,000 in professional fees to prove something the government had already established.

This was not the first time a higher authority had intervened in my life with consequences I could not yet understand.

 

Pinnock’s Stonewall — The Kind of Silence That Smells Like a Fix

When the Ledger Boys Brought the Muscle To Town

Government corruption in the public service has spuriously undermined the justice system for more than three decades, leaving behind a trail of quiet wreckage. What should have been a system built on fairness became a labyrinth of deceit, where files vanished, truths were buried, and ordinary people were sacrificed to protect powerful interests. Behind polished offices and official statements lurked a culture of treacherous conduct, decisions made not by principle, but by convenience, reputation, and self‑preservation.

Those who sought justice found themselves stonewalled, misled, or deliberately worn down. Evidence was withheld, complaints dismissed, and processes twisted to serve only the architects of the corruption. Lives were upended while officials hid behind procedure, pretending impartiality as they quietly protected their own.

In this world, betrayal wasn’t loud. It was administrative, calculated, and devastating, a slow, relentless erosion of trust that left citizens fighting shadows instead of receiving justice. Even now, in 2026, the government should have provided answers to why

I had a chilling realisation: if AUSTEL, the national regulator mandated to keep Telstra honest, couldn't force Telstra to hand over formally demanded documents, then my arbitration was never about justice. It was a performance, a rigged spectacle.

What hope did I have as a single claimant when the oversight institution itself couldn't access the evidence Telstra was hiding? AUSTEL was aware that Telstra was deliberately withholding crucial documents, evidence of faults, lies, and the damage inflicted on Cathy, me, and the other COT (Casualties of Telstra) Cases. Yet, they allowed the arbitration to proceed as if the truth were accessible. 

 

Infringe upon the civil liberties

Most Disturbing And Unacceptable 

On 27 January 1999, after having read a copy of the 7 January 1999 fax interception report, provided to Senator Boswell, authored by Scandrett & Associates (see Open Letter File No/12 and File No/13), and my first attempt at my then manuscript "Ring For Justice" which has since been used to prepare this website, absentjustice.com, Senator Kim Carr wrote:

“I continue to maintain a strong interest in your case along with those of your fellow ‘Casualties of Telstra’. The appalling manner in which you have been treated by Telstra is in itself reason to pursue the issues, but also confirms my strongly held belief in the need for Telstra to remain firmly in public ownership and subject to public and parliamentary scrutiny and accountability.

“Your manuscript demonstrates quite clearly how Telstra has been prepared to infringe upon the civil liberties of Australian citizens in a manner that is most disturbing and unacceptable.” 

The Document‑Snatch Sabotage Gang

 

 

What matters is what happened years later. In December 1999, when I was asked by Mr Ian Jepson, Barrister for the Major Fraud Group, Victoria Police, to assist in investigating four fraud claims made against Telstra by barrister Sue Owens on behalf of four other COT cases, I produced the Rundell letter. I explained to Mr Jepson that, despite Rundell’s claim, I had never been interviewed by the Brighton CIB in 1995 or 1996 regarding any alleged damage to his property. I told him I believed this was a trumped‑up attempt to attack my character and could present a problem in assisting the police.

Mr Jepson then contacted several police sources to determine why the alleged complaint had never been acted upon. He was informed that I had never been a suspect in relation to any property damage in Brighton — or anywhere else in Australia.

 

Humiliated and (publicly shamed) Broken for Life

The truth-teller’s descent

Before the term "whistleblower" was coined to describe someone who speaks out honestly, motivated by belief, duty, or moral obligation, I became one on September 18, 1967 → Australian Federal Police Investigations-1, again on June 3, 1993 → The Briefcase, and for a third time on March 17, 2006 → The eighth remedy pursued. The term "whistleblower" has often been used by the government to distinguish between those who choose to remain silent and those citizens who feel uncertain about how to expose wrongdoing or who perceive doing so as harmful to our nation.

Many inside government circles look at absentjustice.com and absentjustice.com.au and see whistleblower platforms, places where dissent gathers, where uncomfortable facts refuse to die. But that has never been how I see them. To me, they are not “whistleblower sites” at all. They are evidence rooms, warning beacons, and mirrors held up to a country that teaches its children to tell the truth, then punishes its adults for doing exactly that.

These sites exist to show how quickly a life can unravel once a person follows the very instruction they were raised on: tell the truth, always. We were taught that honesty was a civic duty, a moral obligation, a cornerstone of citizenship. Yet the moment that truth threatens the comfort of powerful institutions, the same duty becomes a liability. Careers fracture. Reputations are quietly dismantled. Families absorb the shockwaves. And the truth‑teller, the one who believed they were doing what their country asked of them, becomes a cautionary tale.

What these websites reveal is not just corruption or misconduct. They reveal the cost of truth in adulthood. They show how easily a person can be recast as a problem, how quickly the machinery of government can turn defensive, and how ruthlessly systems protect themselves when confronted with evidence they cannot control.

Absentjustice.com and absentjustice.com.au are not about rebellion. They are about record‑keeping. They are about preserving the truth in its original form so that anyone, citizen, journalist, academic, or sceptic, can see for themselves what happens when someone refuses to stay silent.

They are not whistleblower sites.

They are survival manuals for truth‑tellers.

The quiet punishment

Read on 

The strange thing about telling the truth is that the punishment rarely arrives with sirens. It comes quietly. A phone call that goes unanswered. A meeting that evaporates. A colleague who suddenly looks through you instead of at you. The machinery doesn’t roar; it hums. And while it hums, it dismantles.

That’s what absentjustice.com and absentjustice.com.au expose: not just the corruption itself, but the method. The slow, procedural erosion of a person who believed honesty was a civic virtue. The way institutions turn their weight sideways, pressing down until the truth‑teller bends or breaks. It’s not dramatic. It’s administrative. And that’s what makes it lethal.

These sites document the anatomy of that descent. They show how a life can be stripped back layer by layer, reputation, income, stability, health, until the person who once believed they were serving their country ends up fighting simply to remain visible inside it.

They are not platforms for rebellion. They are autopsies of what happens when duty collides with power.

Frustration surged within me as I came to the painful realisation that the government officials were unwilling to confront the uncomfortable truths surrounding the telecommunications issues. The Commission of Inquiry into Telecommunications (COT) arbitrations had done little to address the persistent telephone problems that had ultimately led to these cases being brought forth. It became increasingly disheartening to witness Telstra entities, under the leadership of John Pinnock, alongside the establishment, triumph over the COT Cases, effectively silencing any chance of further challenges to their actions.

The arbitration process I underwent in 1994 was supposed to bring resolution, yet critical documents, notably the BCI and SVT test results for the Cape Bridgewater telephone exchange, vanished without a trace. Fast forward to 2008: copies of those very same results mysteriously disappeared again as they were being shipped to the Federal Court by the new owners. 

The truth was not lost; it was buried. Deliberately. With intent. And when the soil settled, my life and Cathy’s lay beneath it. Instead of confronting wrongdoing, the system treated me as toxic waste, sealed off, untouchable, unworthy of investigation. They didn’t just undermine my claims; they erased my credibility, amputated my right to be heard, and left me to carry the stench of a lie that was never mine.

And that same pattern, the shakedown, the cover‑up, the burial of evidence, followed me through to the government COT Case review assessment process, spearheaded by Senator Barnaby Joyce and Senator Helen Coonan in 2006 (see The eighth remedy pursued), which found in favour of Telstra. How could the government find against John Pinnock in 2006, while Pinnock was still the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, and Dr Gordon Hughes, now a renowned lawyer, was chartered by the government?

On 5 May 1995, the arbitrator wrote to me after I had raised these 24,000 late-received documents, for the third time over as many weeks, noting:

“I refer to your telephone message of 4 May and your facsimiles of 4 and 5 May 1995 and advise I do not consider grounds exist for the introduction of new evidence or the convening of a hearing at this stage.”

And he reiterated his previous instructions:

“...any comments regarding the factual content of the Resource Unit reports must be received … by 5.00 p.m. on Tuesday 9 May 1995″. (see Arbitrator File No/48)

This was five weeks after Hughes had received written advice from his Project Manager, John Rundell, who had written to Warwick Smith (TIO) and Peter Bartlett (TIO), Legal Arbitration Counsel, noting:  

“It is unfortunate that there have been forces at work collectively beyond our reasonable control that have delayed us in undertaking our work.

“Any technical report prepared in draft by Lanes will be signed off and appear on the letter of DMR Inc.” (see Prologue Evidence File No 22-A).

What is truly astonishing, though perhaps not entirely surprising, after personally witnessing the glaring incompetence of Dr Hughes, is the fact that he, along with his wife and John Pinnock, was so determined to sabotage my character. Their intention was clear: they wanted to dissuade Laurie James from pursuing a thorough investigation into my claims. In this treacherous partnership, Hughes deliberately and deceitfully withheld a critical letter he penned on May 12, 1995, to Warwick Smith (TIO). This letter was a striking condemnation of the arbitration agreement he had just employed in my case, labelling it an entirely untrustworthy document. Yet, despite this judgment, he chose to use it anyway.

He then permitted Graham Schorer, a former business client whom he had previously defended in Federal Court against Telstra on the same issues Schorer was now raising in arbitration, more than thirteen months to prepare his claim. This was thirteen months longer than the time he allowed me. Moreover, the arbitration agreement itself was fundamentally flawed (see Chapter 3 - Conflict of Interest)

The same indulgence was granted to COT Case Ann Garms, a Queensland government heavyweight, who was also given more than thirteen months to prepare her claim. Yet all three of us, Schorer, Garms, and I, had signed the same arbitration agreement on 21 April 1995. We entered the same process, under the same rules, with the same expectations of equal treatment.

But equality was never part of the design.

Both Schorer and Garms were ultimately awarded more than $3.6 million in punitive damages, not because their cases were inherently stronger, but because the arbitration agreement itself was riddled with document irregularities, withheld evidence, and procedural distortions that advantaged some and crippled others. The agreement was a compromised instrument from the moment it was handed to us, and those flaws became the scaffolding for their awards.

Meanwhile, those of us who were not granted extensions, who were not former clients, who were not politically connected, were left to fight with incomplete documents, missing evidence, and timelines engineered to fail.

Hughes and Warwick Smith, the arbitration administrator who received Hughes’s letter on 12 May 1995, already knew that only some of the COT Cases were receiving their requested Freedom of Information (FOI) documents, while others were not. Despite this, Hughes and Smith allowed only certain COT Cases additional time to submit their claims because of Telstra's discrimination. Along with Hughes, Warwick Smith permitted access to the requested documents for only some of the COT Cases during the additional thirteen months. This decision denied access to these documents for the remaining COT Cases, including mine.

By the time the first four COT cases reached the midpoint of their arbitrations, it had become unmistakably clear that the hackers had provided accurate information about Telstra. Their warnings were not wild claims or mischief; they described exactly what we later uncovered within the network and the process itself. And that realisation carried its own sting: why had I not accepted the documents that supported their claims?

 

To launch this website and explain, as briefly as possible, why blowing the whistle on matters of public interest is important, as I have tried to in the Introduction above. I want readers to understand why my COT story matters to people from every walk of life. I only touch the surface here, but the truth is stark: after thirty years at sea, trained in the Merchant Service to report danger, misconduct, and truth without hesitation, I never imagined that fulfilling that duty would see me branded a whistleblower. I never imagined that honesty, the very thing we were taught to uphold, would one day place a target on my back.

All I did was report the truth. Yet the moment I did, the ground shifted beneath me, and the machinery of government began to move in ways no ordinary citizen ever expects to witness. That is why this story matters, and why I ask you to keep reading.

Why the AFP’s 93 Questions Still Matter — and What They Reveal About Telstra’s Secrecy

 

 

The 93 questions the Australian Federal Police put to me, and my answers, recorded in Australian Federal Police Investigation File No/1, tell a story far bigger than a technical dispute with Telstra. They exposed a culture of intimidation and concealment that ran straight through my arbitration. My responses make it clear that Telstra issued direct threats against me simply because I chose to assist the AFP in their investigation into the interception of my telephone conversations and the hacking of documents tied to my case. I also told the AFP about my discussions with former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, discussions Telstra had secretly documented.

And that raises a question I believe every reader should consider: Why would a former Prime Minister take two calls from me, a ship’s cook turned holiday‑camp operator, if what I was saying wasn’t serious enough to warrant his attention?

People in Fraser’s position do not waste their time. They certainly don’t take two calls over a twelve‑month period unless the matter is significant. The truth is simple: what I was reporting mattered — and it frightened the wrong people.

Telstra knew that if the AFP obtained the full picture, the entire arbitration process would unravel. That is why they threatened to withhold all relevant FOI material if I continued speaking to the AFP. It was an attempt to silence me, to cripple my claim, and to protect themselves from scrutiny.

This episode is not separate from AUKUS, nor from the China wheat scandal, nor from the long list of government‑enabled disasters that followed. They are all branches of the same poisoned tree.

For decades, I have watched how secrecy corrodes trust. I was part of that corrosive cesspool of deceit when I, along with an entire British ship’s deck crew of the Hopepeak, was sacked for refusing to be part of a continued conspiracy not to expose the Australian public to the fact that our government was knowingly trading with the enemy during the Vietnam War (see Chapter 7- Vietnam-Viet-Cong-2). I have lived through what happens when institutions decide that transparency is optional and that ordinary citizens are obstacles rather than participants. AUKUS fits neatly into that long, troubling pattern.

 

The remaining 16 COT Cases were told that, whatever the outcome of the first litmus‑test investigation into the first 5 COT Cases’ claims of fraud, deception and legal bullying, the findings would flow on to the 16 COT Cases that formed the then 21 COT Cases → An Injustice to the remaining 16 Australian citizens. But because the John Howard government was pushing through the sale of the government‑owned telecommunications carrier Telstra, and believed its own agenda that the government could not afford to wait a further two years for another investigation, the first having taken two years to examine the five litmus‑test cases, it betrayed and abandoned the sixteen remaining COT Cases, just as the same Liberal government with different members of parliament who betrayed and abandoned thousands of young Australian, New Zealand and USA soldiers fighting in the jungles of North Vietnam (as discussed above)

These assertions occurred in the context of an arbitration, in which the arbitrator was tasked with determining the validity of our claims as COT Cases. Specifically, we argued that Bell Canada had found our phone service not to meet world standards, contrary to the misleading narrative presented in the Senate Hansard records at that time. The information disseminated nationally, while twenty‑one arbitration and mediation processes were taking place, was demonstrably false, as evidenced by the documents I have collected below.