On 15 July 1995, two months after the arbitrator's premature announcement of findings regarding my incomplete claim, Amanda Davis, the former General Manager of Consumer Affairs at AUSTEL (now known as ACMA), provided me with an open letter to be shared with individuals of my choosing. This action underscores the confidence she placed in my integrity and professional character:
“I am writing this in support of Mr Alan Smith, who I believe has a meeting with you during the week beginning 17 July. I first met the COT Cases in 1992 in my capacity as General Manager, Consumer Affairs at Austel. The “founding” group were Mr Smith, Mrs Ann Garms of the Tivoli Restaurant, Brisbane, Mrs Shelia Hawkins of the Society Restaurant, Melbourne, Mrs Maureen Gillian of Japanese Spare Parts, Brisbane, and Mr Graham Schorer of Golden Messenger Couriers, Melbourne. Mrs. Hawkins withdrew very early on, and I have had no contact with her since.
The treatment these individuals have received from Telecom and Commonwealth government agencies has been disgraceful, and I have no doubt they have all suffered as much through this treatment as they did through the faults on their telephone services.
One of the striking things about this group is their persistence and enduring belief that eventually there will be a fair and equitable outcome for them, and they are to admired for having kept as focussed as they have throughout their campaign.
Having said that, I am aware all have suffered both physically and their family relationships. In one case, the partner of the claimant has become seriously incapacitated; due, I beleive to the way Telecom has dealt with them. The others have al suffered various stress related conditions (such as a minor stroke.
During my time at Austel I pressed as hard as I could for an investigation into the complaints. The resistance to that course of action came from the then Chairman. He was eventually galvanised into action by ministerial pressure. The Austel report looks good to the casual observer, but it has now become clear that much of the information accepted by Austel was at best inaccurate, and at worst fabricated, and that Austel knew or ought to have known this at the time.”
After leaving Austel I continued to lend support to the COT Cases, and was instrumental in helping them negotiate the inappropriately named "Fast Track" Arbitration Agreement. That was over a year ago, and neither the Office of the Commonwealth Ombudsman nor the Arbitrator has been succsessful in extracting information from Telecom which would equip the claimants to press their claims effectively. Telecom has devoted staggering levels of time, money and resources to defeating the claiams, and there is no pretence even that the arbitration process has attemted to produce a contest between equals.
Even it the remaining claimants receive satisfactory settlements (and I have no reason to think that will be the outcome) it is crucial that the process be investigated in the interest of accountabilty of publical companies and the public servants in other government agencies.
Because I am not aware of the exact citrcumstances surronding your meeting with Mr Smith, nor your identity, you can appriate that I am being fairly circimspect in what I am prepared to commit to writing. Suffice it to say, though, I am fast coming to share the view that a public inquiry of some discripion is the only way that the reasons behind the appalling treatent of these people will be brought to the surface.
I would be happy to talk to you in more detail if you think that would be useful, and can be reached at the number shown above at any time.
Thank you for your interest in this matter, and for sparing the time to talk to Alan.(See File 501 - AS-CAV Exhibits 495 to 541 )
Four months after the arbitrator Dr Hughes prematurely brought down his findings on my matters, and fully aware I was denied all necessary documents to mount my case against Telecom/Telstra, an emotional Senator Ron Boswell discussed the injustices we four COT claimants (i.e., Ann Garms, Maureen Gillan, Graham Schorer and me) experienced prior and during our arbitrations (see Senate Evidence File No 1 20-9-95 Senate Hansard A Matter of Public Interest) in which the senator notes:
“Eleven years after their first complaints to Telstra, where are they now? They are acknowledged as the motivators of Telecom’s customer complaint reforms. … But, as individuals, they have been beaten both emotionally and financially through an 11-year battle with Telstra. …
“Then followed the Federal Police investigation into Telecom’s monitoring of COT case services. The Federal Police also found there was a prima facie case to institute proceedings against Telecom but the DPP, in a terse advice, recommended against proceeding. …
“Once again, the only relief COT members received was to become the catalyst for Telecom to introduce a revised privacy and protection policy. Despite the strong evidence against Telecom, they still received no justice at all. …
“These COT members have been forced to go to the Commonwealth Ombudsman to force Telecom to comply with the law. Not only were they being denied all necessary documents to mount their case against Telecom, causing much delay, but they were denied access to documents that could have influenced them when negotiating the arbitration rules, and even in whether to enter arbitration at all. …
“Telecom has treated the Parliament with contempt. No government monopoly should be allowed to trample over the rights of individual Australians, such as has happened here.” (See Senate Hansard Evidence File No-1)
Karina Barrymore, the journalist at the Melbourne Herald Sun, wrote on 3 August 2016
WHEN THE FIGHT BECOMES YOUR PURPOSE
There comes a point in a long struggle when you stop asking why you are still fighting and start understanding what the fight has made you. It doesn’t happen in a single moment. It happens slowly, quietly, in the background of your life — in the way you wake up, in the way you think, in the way you carry yourself. The battle becomes part of your identity, not because you wanted it, but because it shaped you in ways you could never have imagined.
By the time I reached this stage, the arbitration was years behind me, but the consequences were still unfolding. The truth had become my responsibility, the evidence my inheritance, and the silence of the institutions my constant reminder that justice — if it was ever going to come — would not come from them.
It would have to come from me.
The Shift from Survival to Purpose
In the early years, everything I did was about survival — surviving the lies, the gaslighting, the financial ruin, the collapse of my business, the isolation, the endless bureaucratic stonewalling. But somewhere along the way, the fight changed shape. It stopped being about what had been taken from me and became about what I refused to let be taken from others.
I realised that my story — painful as it was — had value beyond my own suffering. It was a warning. A blueprint. A record of what happens when a corporation becomes more powerful than the truth, when a regulator becomes more loyal to the entity it is meant to police than to the public it is meant to protect, when a government chooses convenience over accountability.
My story was no longer just mine.
It belonged to every Casualty of Telstra, ordinary Australian citizens who had been silenced by this terrible giant, Telstra. It belonged to every person who had been dismissed. Every person who had been told, “There’s nothing wrong with your service,” when the evidence said otherwise. And once I understood that, the fight became something else entirely. It became a purpose.
The Realisation That No One Is Coming to Save You
There is a moment in every long battle when you finally accept that no cavalry is coming. No minister will step in. No regulator will suddenly grow a conscience. No journalist will magically uncover the truth you’ve been shouting for years. No legal system will correct its own failures. You are on your own.
It’s a sobering realisation, but it’s also liberating. Because once you stop waiting for someone else to fix what was broken, you start doing the work yourself — not because you think you will win, but because you know the truth deserves to be told. That was the moment I stopped hoping for rescue and started building my own platform, my own archive, my own voice. That was the moment Absent Justice stopped being a website and became a mission.
The People Who Tried to Stop the Story
When you carry a truth that powerful institutions want buried, you learn quickly who fears it. You learn it in the way people avoid your calls. In the way officials speak in rehearsed lines. In the way documents go missing. In the way FOI requests come back with pages blacked out. In the way politicians suddenly “don’t recall” conversations you remember vividly. You learn it in the way Telstra behaved — confident, dismissive, certain that their version of events would prevail simply because they had the power to enforce it.
You learn it in the way AUSTEL folded — a regulator that should have been the shield for the public, but instead became the shield for Telstra. You learn it in the way the arbitrators hid behind legal language, pretending neutrality while allowing evidence to be withheld, altered, or ignored. And you learn it in the way the government stayed silent — not because they didn’t know, but because acknowledging the truth would have meant acknowledging their own complicity. These were not passive failures. They were active choices.
Choices that shaped the lives of twenty‑one Australians, each of whom knew at least two other small business operators suffering the same phone faults. Those operators knew others. And so on. The network of casualties grew exponentially. We were no longer talking about a handful of complainants. We were talking about thousands of Australian small business owners who lost their livelihoods or were forced to sell their businesses because the government was now covering up a systemic problem. And I refused to let those choices be forgotten.
The Cost of Becoming the Messenger
People often assume that exposing the truth brings relief. It doesn’t. It brings consequences. You lose friends. You lose allies. You lose the comfort of being someone who doesn’t know what they know. You become the person others avoid because your story makes them uncomfortable. You become the reminder of what happens when systems fail. You become the witness no one wants in the room. And yet, despite all of that, you keep going — because the alternative is to let the truth die. I learned to live with the cost. I learned to live with the isolation. I learned to live with the knowledge that telling the truth often means standing alone. But I also learned something else: Standing alone is still standing.
The Quiet Power of Persistence
Persistence is not dramatic. It is not loud. It is not glamorous. It is the act of showing up again and again, long after everyone else has stopped. It is the act of refusing to let the truth be buried. It is the act of continuing the fight even when the outcome is uncertain. Persistence is what kept Absent Justice alive. Persistence is what kept the evidence intact. Persistence is what kept the story from being rewritten by those who had the most to hide. And persistence is what brought me to Part IX — the part of the journey where the fight is no longer about what happened, but about what must never happen again.
The Purpose That Emerged From the Ruins
By the time I reached this stage, I understood something I had never understood before: The fight was never just about me. It was about the system that failed all of us. It was about the truth that deserved to be preserved. It was about the future that deserved protection. My purpose became clear:
To ensure that what happened to me — and to thousands of others — would not be erased, forgotten, or repeated.
That purpose gave me strength.
It gave me direction.
It gave me a reason to keep going when everything else had been taken.
And that purpose is what carries me into the next chapter.
PART X — THE MOMENT THE SYSTEM BLINKED
There comes a time in every long fight when the system you’ve been pushing against finally shows a crack. It doesn’t crumble. It doesn’t collapse. It doesn’t confess. But it blinks — just long enough for you to see that your persistence has landed a blow.
For years, I had been dismissed as a nuisance, a troublemaker, a man who “wouldn’t let go.” Telstra had written me off. The government had written me off. The arbitrators had written me off. They believed that time would wear me down, that exhaustion would silence me, that the weight of the truth would eventually crush the man carrying it.
But they underestimated something fundamental:
The inadequate and severely lacking telephone service had already drained my finances. The truth I wanted to expose, which these government bureaucrats failed to understand—having never stepped outside their government bubble—is that I had something to gain that they had never experienced: self-esteem and the determination to survive during tough times. I possessed what most small business owners have: self-determination.
The First Signs of Movement. It didn’t happen with a headline. It didn’t happen with a ministerial apology. It didn’t happen with a sudden burst of integrity from the institutions that had failed us. It happened quietly.
A document that had been withheld suddenly appeared in a FOI release.
A bureaucrat who once stonewalled me slipped and acknowledged something they shouldn’t have.
A journalist who had ignored me for years finally asked for a meeting.
A former Telstra technician reached out, saying, “I think it’s time someone knew what really happened.”
These were small things — tiny fractures in a wall that had stood for decades. But to someone who had been pushing against that wall alone, they were seismic. Because cracks mean pressure. Cracks mean strain. Cracks mean the truth is no longer contained. And cracks mean the system is afraid.
The Power of Being Proven Right — Slowly, Reluctantly, and Without Credit
There is a strange kind of vindication that comes when the very institutions that dismissed you begin to quietly confirm your claims — not publicly, not honourably, but through their own internal contradictions. A technical report that once “did not exist” suddenly appears in a Senate archive. A Telstra memo that was “never written” shows up in a bundle of documents released to someone else. A regulator’s internal briefing contradicts their public statements. A government department quietly updates its records without explanation.
They never admit wrongdoing. They never apologise. They never acknowledge the damage done. But the truth leaks out anyway — through the cracks, through the paperwork, through the people who can no longer carry the weight of silence. And every leak is a victory. Not for me personally, but for the record. For the truth. or the thousands who were told they were imagining things.
The System’s Greatest Fear — A Citizen Who Doesn’t Go Away
Governments and corporations are built on one assumption:
that ordinary people will eventually give up. They rely on fatigue. They rely on confusion. They rely on the complexity of bureaucracy. They rely on the belief that no one will keep fighting once the cost becomes too high.
But I didn’t go away. I didn’t fold. I didn’t disappear into the silence they had prepared for me. And that — more than any document, any letter, any technical report — is what frightened them. Because a citizen who refuses to go away is a citizen who cannot be controlled. A citizen who refuses to go away exposes the cracks. A citizen who refuses to go away is a citizen who forces the truth into the light. And once the truth is in the light, the system loses its power to rewrite it.
The Moment I Realised the Fight Was Bigger Than Telstra
For years, I believed my battle was with Telstra — with their lies, their manipulation, their technical failures, their abuse of power. But as the cracks widened, I began to see the truth:
Telstra was only the beginning. The real fight was with the machinery that protected Telstra. The regulators who surrendered their independence. The arbitrators who hid behind procedure.
The ministers who chose silence over accountability. The bureaucrats who buried evidence.
The government that allowed a national scandal to be sanitised into a footnote. This wasn’t a Telstra problem. It was an Australian problem. A systemic problem. A cultural problem — the culture of “don’t rock the boat,” the culture of “protect the institution,” the culture of “the public doesn’t need to know.” And once I understood that, the fight expanded. It became not just about what had happened to me, but about what had been allowed to happen to all of us.
The Responsibility of the One Who Sees the Whole Picture
When you are the only person who has read every document, every memo, every technical report, every FOI release, every Senate transcript, every internal briefing, every contradiction — you become the one who sees the whole picture. Not because you wanted to. Not because you sought it out. But because no one else bothered to look. And once you see the whole picture, you cannot unsee it.
You cannot pretend the system works.
You cannot pretend the regulators are independent.
You cannot pretend the arbitration was fair.
You cannot pretend the government acted in good faith.
You cannot pretend the casualties were few.
You become the keeper of a truth that the nation was never meant to know.
And with that truth comes responsibility — not chosen, but inherited. And that is where the story now turns.
Below are three further examples where the unaddressed arbitration issues continued for 27 years after the completion of my arbitration.
Sadly, as the above shows, many Australians living in rural areas can only access a second-rate NBN. This wouldn’t have been the case if the Australian Government had ensured the arbitration process it endorsed to investigate the COT cases’ claims of ongoing communication problems had been conducted lawfully.
The following three A Current Affair YouTube videos expose similar COT-type phone complaints raised by our COT group in 1994. Twenty-seven years after the COT Cases exposed these problems during a government-endorsed arbitration process that was supposed to have fixed them, Australia still has an inferior telecommunications NBN network.
“…your persistence to bring about improvements to Telecom’s country services. I regret that it was at such a high personal cost.”
Hon David Hawker
“…the very large number of persons that had been forced into an arbitration process and have been obliged to settle as a result of the sheer weight that Telstra has brought to bear on them as a consequence where they have faced financial ruin if they did not settle…”
Senator Carr
“I am writing in reference to your article in last Friday’s Herald-Sun (2nd April 1993) about phone difficulties experienced by businesses.
I wish to confirm that I have had problems trying to contact Cape Bridgewater Holiday Camp over the past 2 years.
I also experienced problems while trying to organise our family camp for September this year. On numerous occasions I have rung from both this business number 053 424 675 and also my home number and received no response – a dead line.
I rang around the end of February (1993) and twice was subjected to a piercing noise similar to a fax. I reported this incident to Telstra who got the same noise when testing.”
Cathy Lindsey
“A number of people seem to be experiencing some or all of the problems which you have outlined to me. …
“I trust that your meeting tomorrow with Senators Alston and Boswell is a profitable one.”
Hon David Hawker MP
“Only I know from personal experience that your story is true, otherwise I would find it difficult to believe. I was amazed and impressed with the thorough, detailed work you have done in your efforts to find justice”
Sister Burke
“I am writing in reference to your article in last Friday’s Herald-Sun (2nd April 1993) about phone difficulties experienced by businesses.
I wish to confirm that I have had problems trying to contact Cape Bridgewater Holiday Camp over the past 2 years.
I also experienced problems while trying to organise our family camp for September this year. On numerous occasions I have rung from both this business number 053 424 675 and also my home number and received no response – a dead line.
I rang around the end of February (1993) and twice was subjected to a piercing noise similar to a fax. I reported this incident to Telstra who got the same noise when testing.”
Cathy Lindsey
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