INTRODUCTION — THE LONG SHADOW OF 1967

2. Learning How Systems Protect Themselves

In the shadowy months and years that followed the Hopepeak voyage, it became increasingly clear to me that what I had witnessed was far from a mere isolated incident or an unfortunate political misstep. It was a chilling window into the depths of how powerful institutions will insidiously protect themselves when confronted with inconvenient truths. They will go to terrifying lengths to ensure these truths are buried forever, wielding silence and deflection like a sword to shield their corruption from the light of day. 

As I watched these institutions in action, it became evident that when governments or corporations feel threatened, their response is not one of transparency or accountability. Instead, they envelop themselves in a blanket of calculated indifference, creating a sinister atmosphere designed to make problems—and the people who know them—vanish into oblivion.

This realisation did not hit me all at once; it crept in like a suffocating fog, thickening until I could no longer see the horizon. At nineteen, I lacked the words and experience to express the horror of what had unfolded, yet I felt it deeply in the way officials dodged inquiries, how the media turned a blind eye, and how the government acted as if the entire episode had been erased from existence. The wheat deal was not simply ignored; it was systematically eradicated from public consciousness, buried beneath layers of political convenience and bureaucratic deceit, leaving those of us who endured it to carry the heavy burden of truth alone.

And maybe, just maybe, that was enough. British Seaman’s Record R744269 -  Open Letter to PM File No 1 Alan Smith's Seaman.  → Chapter 7- Vietnam-Vietcong-2

What I could not yet grasp was that this treacherous pattern—the instinctual suppression of truth—would reemerge decades later in a different context, yet with the same chilling precision. The silence that enveloped the aftermath of the wheat deal was no anomaly; it was a foreboding signal of the lengths to which institutions will go to protect their interests. Although I couldn't comprehend it at the time, this experience would unwittingly prepare me for far more complex and devastating battles that lay ahead in the 1990s, battles shaped by the same sinister forces intent on stifling the truth.

3. A Life Built on Work, Not Privilege

4. The First Signs of a System Cracking

The government’s actions during this crisis revealed a disturbing level of corruption and treachery, one that prioritized self-preservation over the well-being of its citizens. As communication faults escalated, the institutions that were supposed to protect and serve us instead turned their backs. Telstra, backed by the government, deflected blame onto customers like me instead of confronting the reality of a failing system. It was an alarming reminder of how power can corrupt, leading those in authority to sacrifice accountability for profit and control.

Underpinning this charade was a government that fundamentally failed in its duty to uphold the public interest. The Minister for Communications, an entity expected to be an advocate for consumers, remained silent in the face of overwhelming evidence of systemic failure. It became clear that acknowledging the truth would not only inconvenience those in power but would also expose the rotten core of a flawed infrastructure that they had chosen to ignore. Instead of addressing the urgent concerns of citizens, they allowed the suffering to continue, treating people’s livelihoods as mere collateral damage in their game of political chess.

AUSTEL’s refusal to intervene spoke volumes about the depths of governmental betrayal. Rather than stepping in to protect consumers from the rampant issues plaguing the telephone exchange, they opted for complicity, perpetuating the cycle of negligence. It became evident that any investigation would lead to uncomfortable truths that the government was unwilling to face. The silence was deafening, a chilling testament to the lengths they would go to avoid accountability. They chose to uphold the status quo, allowing a deteriorating system to further jeopardize the lives of those who relied on it—demonstrating that, for them, self-interest eclipsed the principles of justice, fair play, and responsibility.

In this atmosphere of deceit, the government’s failure to act was not just a byproduct of negligence; it was a deliberate choice to protect its own interests at the expense of the very citizens it was meant to serve. The truth lay buried beneath layers of bureaucracy and denial, revealing a treachery both calculated and insidious. As the telephone faults persisted, it became increasingly clear that the government’s silence was not merely a failure to act but a conscious decision to side with the corporate entity, leaving ordinary people to suffer the consequences alone.

 

Chapter 5 - US Department of Justice vs Ericsson of Sweden

5. The Witness Who Was Bought
If there was ever a moment that crystallised the true nature of the arbitration, it was the discovery that Lane Telecommunications — the very company responsible for assisting Howell and drafting the technical evaluation — had been acquired by Ericsson in the middle of the COT arbitrations. Ericsson, whose AXE telephone exchanges were at the centre of my claim, now owned the firm responsible for assessing the faults in that very AXE equipment. 

The implications were staggering. The witness had been bought by the accused. The independence of the technical investigation had been obliterated. And yet, the arbitration proceeded as if nothing had happened.

Lane made no findings on the Ericsson AXE faults. Howell refused to sign the report. The arbitrator used it anyway. This was not incompetence. It was not oversight. It was not a misunderstanding.
It was a cover‑up — executed with the same cold precision I had witnessed in 1967.

6. The Physical Toll of Carrying a Burden Alone
By the time the arbitration reached its final stages, the pressure I had been living under for years had accumulated into something far heavier than I had ever anticipated, because it was not simply the stress of running a business with an unreliable telephone service, nor the frustration of dealing with a corporation that refused to acknowledge the truth, but the deeper, more corrosive strain of realising that the very process designed to deliver justice had been quietly engineered to ensure that justice would never be reached. It is one thing to fight a technical fault; it is another thing entirely to fight a system that has already decided the outcome and is merely going through the motions to give the appearance of fairness.

The weight of that realisation settled into my body long before I understood what it was doing to me. I had been pushing myself for years — documenting faults, writing letters, gathering evidence, attending meetings, and trying to keep my business afloat — all while being treated as if I were the problem rather than the victim of a failing telecommunications system. The constant denial, the dismissive responses, the refusal to investigate, and the quiet but unmistakable hostility of those who should have been helping me created a kind of pressure that never eased, even when I tried to rest.

And then, four days after my arbitration hearing on 11 May 1995, my body finally gave out. I collapsed and was rushed to the hospital with what doctors suspected was a heart attack. I spent five days in a hospital bed, hooked up to machines, drifting in and out of sleep, wondering whether the fight had finally broken me. It was a frightening, disorienting experience, not only because of the physical symptoms, but because of the overwhelming sense that I had been pushed to this point by a system that had no interest in the truth and no regard for the human cost of its actions.

When I returned home, still weak and unsteady, the phone rang. It was Paul Howell. I had never spoken to him before. He wished me a speedy recovery, and then, in a voice that carried both frustration and sorrow, he told me that my arbitration had been “nothing but a criminal cover‑up.” His words were not dramatic; they were measured, deliberate, and spoken by a man who had seen the inside of the process and could no longer remain silent. In that moment, everything I had suspected — everything I had felt in my bones — was confirmed.

His apology was not just a personal gesture; it was a validation of the truth I had been fighting for, and a stark reminder of how deeply the system had failed.

7. The Loneliness of Knowing the Truth Before Anyone Else Admits It
There is a particular kind of loneliness that settles over you when you find yourself holding a truth that no one around you is willing to acknowledge, a truth that should have been obvious to anyone prepared to look honestly at the evidence, yet instead becomes something people avert their eyes from, leaving you suspended in a strange emotional limbo where you are surrounded by others but accompanied by none. It is not the loneliness of being physically alone; it is the loneliness of being dismissed, doubted, or quietly undermined by people who would rather maintain the illusion of order than confront the reality of corruption.

I lived with that loneliness for years. Every time Telstra denied a fault I had documented, I felt it. Every time a regulator refused to intervene, I felt it. Every time a politician ignored my evidence, I felt it. Every time a technical report contradicted the facts, I felt it. And every time a door closed in my face, I felt it. It was a slow, grinding isolation that wore down my confidence, tested my resilience, and forced me to confront the uncomfortable truth that the system I had trusted was not merely flawed, but actively hostile to anyone who dared to expose its failures.

But I had lived through 1967. I had survived interrogation in North Vietnam. I had survived the Red Guards. I had survived the government’s silence. And I knew, with a clarity that came from experience, that the truth does not disappear simply because powerful people refuse to acknowledge it. It remains, waiting for the moment when someone is willing to speak it aloud, even if doing so comes at a personal cost.

8. The Moment the Past and Present Collided
The most jarring moment of the entire arbitration came when I discovered that Telstra had been keeping internal files on me — files that included details of my 1967 arrest, my interrogation in North Vietnam, and the circumstances of the wheat deal that the government had spent decades trying to bury. Seeing those documents was like being struck by lightning. It was not just the shock of realising that Telstra had dug into my past; it was the deeper, more unsettling realisation that my past was being used against me, twisted into something suspicious, as if surviving political imprisonment made me untrustworthy.

In that moment, the two great betrayals of my life collided with a force I had never anticipated. The wheat deal. The arbitration. The silence. The cover‑ups. The institutional instinct to protect itself at any cost. It was the same pattern, unfolding across decades, and I was caught in the middle of it — again.

The message was unmistakable: the truth I carried from 1967 had never been forgotten by those who wanted it buried. And now, decades later, it was being used to undermine my credibility in a completely different battle, as if the mere fact of having witnessed one cover‑up made me a threat in another.

9. The Realisation That Changed Everything
There comes a point in any long and bruising battle when you stop waiting for the system to correct itself, when you finally accept that the people and institutions who should have acted with integrity are not going to suddenly discover a conscience, and when you understand, with a kind of painful clarity, that the process you placed your faith in was never designed to deliver justice in the first place. For me, that moment arrived slowly but decisively, as the pieces of my experience — the wheat deal, the silence that followed it, the telephone faults, the compromised arbitration, the technical cover‑up, the acquisition of Lane by Ericsson, the refusal of AUSTEL and the Minister to act, and the use of my 1967 history inside Telstra’s files — all began to align into a single, undeniable pattern.

I realised that what I had been fighting was not just a faulty telephone exchange or a flawed arbitration agreement, but an entrenched culture of self‑protection that ran through government, corporations, and regulatory bodies alike, a culture in which the preservation of institutional reputation mattered more than the lives, livelihoods, and sanity of the people those institutions were supposed to serve. The wheat deal had shown me how a government could bury the truth to avoid political embarrassment. The arbitration showed me how a corporation and its allies could manipulate a supposedly independent process to avoid accountability. Together, they revealed something far more disturbing than either event alone: that corruption does not always announce itself with bribes, threats, or overt criminality, but often grows quietly in the spaces where truth is inconvenient and silence is rewarded.

Once I saw this clearly, something inside me shifted. I stopped hoping that a letter from a minister, a report from a regulator, or a reconsideration by an arbitrator would suddenly set things right. I stopped expecting that those who had benefited from the cover‑up would voluntarily expose it. And instead, I accepted a different responsibility — that if the truth of what had happened was going to survive, it would have to survive because I refused to let it be buried.

That realisation did not make the burden lighter, but it made it clearer. I understood that my role was no longer that of a claimant waiting for justice, but that of a witness determined to record, preserve, and share what had really happened, so that future readers, future citizens, and perhaps even future investigators would not be forced to rely on the sanitised, incomplete, and misleading versions of events that institutions so often leave behind.

10. Closing the Introduction
And so, this is where the introduction to my story must pause, not because the events that followed were any less significant, but because what comes next belongs to the pages that follow rather than to these opening reflections. The journey from a nineteen‑year‑old seafarer caught in the middle of a covert wheat deal, to a small business owner fighting a corrupted arbitration process in Australia, is not simply a tale of personal misfortune; it is a record of how systems behave when they are threatened, how truth is treated when it becomes dangerous, and how ordinary people are left to carry the trauma of wondering what will come next after they dare to expose what those in power would rather keep hidden.

For those wishing to know how real corruption blossomed on the trauma of wondering what was to come next after I exposed more corruption, this time in the system of arbitration in Australia, I suggest you read my book The Arbitraitor.