Helen Handbury arrived at my holiday camp with the quiet confidence of someone who had seen much of the world yet still carried a genuine curiosity about the lives of ordinary Australians. She was Rupert Murdoch’s sister, yes — but she was also a woman who understood hardship, community, and the weight of responsibility. When she visited my camp, she saw more than a business. She saw the damage. She saw the empty cabins, the cancelled bookings, the staff I could no longer afford to keep. She saw the strain in my face that no amount of polite conversation could hide.

What she witnessed was not mismanagement. It was not bad luck. It was the direct result of telephone faults so severe and so persistent that they strangled the lifeline of my business. Calls dropped. Lines went dead. Bookings vanished into the ether. Customers assumed we had closed. Others assumed we simply didn’t care enough to answer the phone. In the tourism industry, a missed call is a missed season. Helen understood that immediately.

She had seen the same type of faults before — but in a very different context.

Her brother, Rupert Murdoch, had faced similar telecommunications failures during the rollout of his FOX cable network. The infrastructure Telstra was contractually obligated to deliver simply wasn’t ready. Deadlines were missed. Technical failures mounted. The project teetered on the edge of collapse. For Murdoch, the stakes were enormous: a national cable rollout, billions in investment, and the future of his media empire.

And yet, unlike the COT Cases, he did not lose his business.

He received compensation — hundreds of millions of dollars — because Telstra could not meet the contractual deadlines required for his expansion. The government intervened. The system bent. The machinery of the state moved to ensure that Rupert Murdoch did not fail.

Helen knew this. She had lived close enough to the centre of power to understand how these things worked. But nothing prepared her for what she saw when she read the early manuscript of Absent Justice.

She had visited my camp twice. She had seen the phone faults firsthand. But reading the full story — the years of losses, the unanswered pleas for help, the forced arbitration process that promised fairness but delivered obstruction — shook her deeply. She was horrified. Her reaction was immediate and visceral.

Her words were something like: “I will get Rupert to have it published. He will be shocked.”

She meant it. She believed that if her brother saw what Telstra had done to ordinary Australians — the same Telstra that had failed him, but had compensated him — he would understand the scale of the injustice.

What she did not know was that Rupert Murdoch had already been affected by Telstra’s failing network. He had already received compensation. He had already been made whole. The system had already worked for him.

For the COT Cases, the system did the opposite.

Helen read about farmers who lost their markets because buyers could not reach them. Motel owners whose phones rang out endlessly while guests booked elsewhere. Small business operators who watched their livelihoods collapse because Telstra’s network failed and the government refused to intervene.

She read about the arbitrations — processes that were supposed to be independent, transparent, and fair. Instead, they became traps. Evidence withheld. FOI documents blocked. Government archives cleansed. Claims dismissed not because they lacked merit, but because the proof had been systematically erased.

She read about my own arbitration, where two forensic accountants estimated my losses over seven years, only for the arbitrator, Dr Gordon Hughes, to award me just 11% of that amount. She read about the false allegations circulated about me — stories involving Hughes and his wife that may never have been true, but which served their purpose: to undermine my credibility and distract from the failures of the arbitration process.

Helen was not a political operator. She was not a lawyer. She was not a Telstra executive. She was a witness — a witness to the human cost of a system that protected the powerful and abandoned the ordinary.

Through her eyes, the contrast was stark.

Her brother faced the same type of telephone faults that crippled the COT Cases. But he had leverage. He had influence. He had a government that could not afford to let him fail. When Telstra could not deliver the infrastructure he needed, he received compensation — reportedly around $400 million — to keep his business afloat.

The COT Cases received nothing of the sort.

They were forced into arbitration. They were denied access to documents. They were labelled vexatious when they persisted. They were told their claims were frivolous. They were awarded a fraction of their losses. And when they sought answers through FOI, they discovered that the government archives containing the truth had been cleansed — twice.

Helen saw all of this laid out in the manuscript. She saw the pattern. She saw the injustice. And she saw the human toll — the marriages strained, the businesses lost, the reputations damaged, the years consumed by battles that should never have been necessary.

She saw that the same telecommunications failures that nearly derailed her brother’s empire had destroyed the livelihoods of ordinary Australians — but only one side had been rescued.

Her reaction was not political. It was human.

She was horrified because she understood the scale of the disparity. She understood that the COT Cases were not asking for special treatment. They were asking for the same fairness her brother had received — the same recognition that telecommunications failures can destroy a business, whether it is a global media empire or a small holiday camp on the Victorian coast.

Helen’s shock was not about the technical faults. It was about the system that allowed one man to be compensated while dozens of others were left to collapse.

Through her eyes, the truth was unmistakable:

The COT Cases were never afforded the chance to run their businesses. Rupert Murdoch was.

And that contrast — that brutal, undeniable contrast — is what she carried with her after reading Absent Justice.

The Arbitrator Who Changed the Rules

No sooner had we agreed to the arbitration process than, on 22 March 1994, the appointed arbitrator, Dr Gordon Hughes, began stripping away the very protections we relied on. Without warning, he removed clauses 25 and 26 — the only clauses that placed a $250,000 liability cap on the arbitration consultants. Those clauses had been accepted by the government and by our own lawyers as a necessary safety net, a small measure of control against a corporation with a long history of ensuring victory at any cost.

With those clauses gone, the consultants were effectively untouchable. We were left exposed. Telstra was left emboldened. And the process that was supposed to deliver justice was quietly reshaped into something else entirely — something designed to protect the powerful, not the truth.

I watched it happen in real time, the way you watch a storm roll in across the sea: slowly at first, then all at once. And by the time the rain hit, it was already too late.