Bad bureaucrats and the establishment
Rorted millions from the government coffers - no one has been jailed
Perhaps even worse, however, on 25 June 1997, the day after Lindsay White informed the above aforementioned Senate committee that he was told by Telstra he “had to stop the COT Cases at all cost” from proving our claims page 5163, SENATE official Hansard – Parliament of Australia, shows Telstra employees rorted millions upon millions of dollars from Telstra shareholders: i.e., the government and Australian citizens, who then owned Telstra. The pressure Senators Alston and Boswell applied, for a Senate investigation into the Casualties of Telstra (COT cases) phone fiascos, was one of the reasons Telstra agreed to settle the COT cases’ issues in a proposed Fast Track Settlement Proposal signed by Telstra and the four claimants in the third week of November 1993. Telstra, it seemed, could not afford a further investigation into its operation: NSW was not the only state where this rorting, and others, was taking place. Many people made threats against the COT cases because our persistence, in order to gainfully functional phone systems, was about to expose other unethical behaviour at Telstra, including at the management level. The fact that both the Telstra CEO and board knew millions upon millions of dollars (again, see 5163 of SENATE official Hansard – Parliament of Australia) were being unlawfully syphoned from the government coffers is unbelievable. In fact, figures running into the billions have also been quoted.
The fact that Frank Blount Telstra’s CEO was able to sell is book admitting while he was at the helm Telstra had a 1800 problem and that AUSTEL knew that this same 1800 problems was linked to incorrectly charging Telstra’s customers and did not demand answers from Frank Blount to ask the Telstra board to make know to the COT Cases arbitrator the COT Cases arbitration claims where they say they lost money as well as business must be taken into account by the arbitrator shows once again how corrupt Telstra is.
The following link Evidence - C A V Part 1, 2 and 3 -Chapter 4 - Fast Track Arbitration Procedure confirms Frank Blount, Telstra’s CEO, after leaving Telstra in he co-published a manuscript in 1999. entitled, Managing in Australia. On pages 132 and 133, the author exposes the problems Telstra were hiding from their 1800 customers:
- “Blount was shocked, but his anxiety level continued to rise when he discovered this wasn’t an isolated problem.
- The picture that emerged made it crystal clear that performance was sub-standard.” (See File 122-i - CAV Exhibit 92 to 127)
Frank Blount's Managing Australia https://www.qbd.com.au › managing-in-australia › fran can still be purchased online.
At the time, those COT Cases who had NOT already lost their businesses (as a direct result of the poor network services provided by Telstra) didn’t know that, after being pressured into signing up to the arbitration process, once they had been actually locked in to that process, the ongoing telephone problems that sent those claimants into arbitration in the first place were then covered up by the arbitration process so that the arbitrator then only awarded the claimants for damage caused BEFORE they went into arbitration, while completely ignoring the problems that continued to haunt those businesses and, eventually, drive them to the wall. In other words, the arbitration process was nothing but a ruse that led to the COT Cases paying dearly while Telstra played catch-up, and the end result of all that was a very poor, Australia-wide, National Broadband Network (NBN) system as the following segments show below.
As we started to tell our COT vs Telstra arbitration stories and placing each collusive and deceitful act into some sequence, we found many further acts of collusion and deceit committed by others outside of our arbitrations. As the website grows, we have discovered some issues relate to more than one event and, in fact, are often linked to multiple events and therefore one event may need repeating in different sections of the website, to enable the depth of the corruption and illegal activities committed during the arbitration to be fully understood. Hence a number of previously detailed situations in other parts of absentjustice.com are used here, again, and we make no apology for that.
It became obvious many problems experienced by the COT cases originated from either negligence or deliberate malfeasant on the part of a number of government agencies. Therefore, we have used page 3 of the Australian Herald Sun newspaper dated 22 December 2008, written under the heading Bad bureaucrats as proof that government public servants need to be held accountable for their wrongdoings.
“Hundreds of federal public servants were sacked, demoted or fined in the past year for serious misconduct. Investigations into more than 1000 bureaucrats uncovered bad behaviour such as theft, identity fraud, prying into file, leaking secrets. About 50 were found to have made improper use of inside information or their power and authority for the benefit of themselves, family and friends“
It is also most important to link how, on 2 February 1995, AUSTEL (the Government Communications Regulator) public servants decided to withhold their true findings from the then-Minister for Communications, Michael Lee MP, regarding the deficient arbitration Service Verification Tests (SVT) conducted at my Cape Bridgewater business on 29 September 1994. My own story on the website absentjustice.com includes examples of the way some bad bureaucrats clearly favoured Telstra during the COT arbitrations, to the detriment of the claimants. Altering the facts of their findings is appalling enough but, according to the Telecommunications Act 1991, AUSTEL was duty-bound, under Section 342 of the Act, to provide the Communications Minister (the Hon Michael Lee MP) with all of their findings regarding the deficiencies in their Cape Bridgewater Holiday Camp SVT process.
We will never know what action the Hon Michael Lee MP might have taken in 1994, had the government bureaucrats advised the Minister that the SVT testing at my Cape Bridgewater business had not occurred according to mandatory government communications regulatory specifications. On 12 December 1994, as part of Telstra’s arbitration defence, it was stated under oath to the arbitrator in my case, that all three of the service lines tested at my holiday camp on 29 September 1994, had exceeded all of AUSTEL’s specifications. However, the person who made this statement could not get the SVT monitoring device to work in conjunction with its sister device installed at the Cape Bridgewater unmanned roadside exchange.
It is clear from Telstra's Falsified SVT Report that these tests had not been performed, however, Telstra stated under oath that they had been. Further exhibits on absentjustice.com and Telstra correspondence to AUSTEL during November 1994, show that Telstra dictated to AUSTEL which information they could or could not provide to the Australian public concerning the SVT testing process of the six cases tested to that date, which included my business.
In simple terms, in 1994 Telstra called the shots on how the government, as the regulator during the COT arbitrations, could or could not proceed. Sadly, the Herald Sun statement concerning corrupt conduct of government bureaucrats suggests this conduct was still present in their ranks 14 years after the COT arbitrations.
The COT Cases themselves have been saying for years that, if AUSTEL and Telstra had properly advised the relevant government communications ministers of the truth about the poor condition of the copper-wire network, some of the decisions made by those government ministers during the selling off of Telstra and the upgrade of its infrastructure, might have been completely different. The latest news (in 2018) regarding the NBN (see NBN boss blames Government's reliance on copper for slow speeds and dropouts ) suggests that someone should have been listening to the complaints that the COT Cases lodged in relation to the ongoing problems that continued to haunt them, even after their arbitrations were over, and they should have been listened to as a priority.
When the COT Cases disclosed to the various Telecommunication Industry Ombudsman (TIO-bureaucrats) the truth surrounding how bad Telstra’s network was affecting their businesses those bureaucrats were recycled into another position where they assisted the powers to be to conceal the truth in what the COT Cases had proved.
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