C A V Part 1, 2 and 3

I am an 82-year-old individual with no formal education. Thirty-five years ago, in 1987, I made the significant decision to purchase a holiday school camp in Cape Bridgewater, a charming coastal area of Victoria, Australia. Within just a month of this acquisition, I was confronted with a harsh and disheartening truth: the Australian telecommunications company Telstra had long been plagued by systemic mismanagement. This failure was not only detrimental to my camp but also impacted countless rural businesses and households in the area.

Telstra's telecommunications service, or lack thereof, was shockingly inadequate for our needs. To add insult to injury, our phone system was poorly managed, trying to accommodate 130 adult residents, along with numerous holidaymakers who descended upon our coastal village on weekends and during peak holiday seasons. The service was notoriously unreliable; there were times when the phone would not ring at all, and when it did, it created an atmosphere of chaos due to the woefully limited lines available. With only eight phone lines assigned for the entire holiday village, the communications infrastructure was woefully deficient. If four individuals were on calls, only four lines remained for the remaining 126 adults and any additional visitors.

The government's audacity in expecting us to function effectively on such a pitiful service is both treacherous and absurd. It reveals a blatant disregard for the needs of the many, privileging the interests of the few. My website, absentjustice.com, exposes the sinister intertwining of government corruption and the neglect of essential services for those less fortunate. It highlights how systemic issues consistently conceal telecommunications failures, favoring the wealthy while effectively ignoring the pressing needs of those without influence. Powerful corporations like Telstra invest heavily to protect their own interests, but this comes at a dire cost to the most vulnerable in our communities. Through my platform, I aim to raise awareness and advocate for a fairer approach to service provision—one that genuinely addresses the needs of all citizens, regardless of their socioeconomic status.

My story starts in 1987 when I decided my life at sea, where I had spent the previous 20 years, was over. I wanted a new land-based occupation to see me through to my retirement years and beyond. Of all the places in the world I had visited, I chose south west Victoria, Australia.

My business is hospitality, and I had always dreamed of running a holiday camp. Imagine my delight when I saw the Cape Bridgewater Holiday Camp and Convention Centre advertised for sale in The Age newspaper. It was located in rural Victoria, near the small maritime port of Portland. Everything seemed perfect. I performed my due diligence to ensure that the business was sound: or at least, all of the due diligence I was aware I needed to perform. Who would have guessed that I had to check whether the phones worked? Within a week of taking over the business, I knew I had a problem. I was hearing from customers and suppliers alike that they had tried to call and couldn’t get through to me.

Yes, that’s right. I had a business to run and a phone service that was, at best, unreliable, and at worst, just not there at all. Of course, we lost business as a result. And so, my saga began as I set out on a quest to get a working phone at the property. Along the way, I received some compensation for business losses and many promises that the problem was now resolved. It was still NOT resolved seven years after I went into arbitration with Telstra. I sold the business in 2002 and the subsequent owners suffered a similar fate to me.

Other independent business people, similarly affected by poor telecommunications, have joined me on my journey. We are known as the Casualties of Telecom, or the COT cases. All we wanted was for Telecom/Telstra to admit to our various problems, fix them all and pay compensation for our losses. A working phone: is that too much to ask?

We initially asked for a full Senate investigation into Telecom in general and these issues in particular. We were offered an alternative: an arbitration process. At this early stage, we honestly expected the technical problems preventing our phones from working to be resolved.

No such luck. Suspicions that something was not quite right about the arbitration process began almost immediately. We were promised that the Telecom documents we needed to support our claims would be made available to us if we entered into arbitration. Despite that promise, those documents were never made available, and we still do not have them. An arbitration process might be our only chance of justice; of course, in a democracy like Australia, we could rely upon the arbitrator… or so we thought.

Consumer Affairs Victoria Report Introduction

Learn about the criminal conduct, unscrupulous public servants, corrupt politicians and the lawyers who control the legal profession in Australia. Rdad about corruption in government. Read my book Warts and all.