Chapter 10 and the faults continue.
A Darker, More Sinister, More Calculated Introduction
My name is Alan Smith, and this is the story of a battle I never sought — a battle against a telecommunications giant that knew exactly how defective my telephone service was and chose to bury that truth. It is also a battle against a government that allowed that concealment to take root and thrive. Since 1992, this struggle has twisted through governments, departments, regulators, the judiciary, and the corporation once called Telecom, now Telstra. What began as a simple request for a working telephone line became a descent into a system where silence was engineered, evidence was withheld, and the truth was treated as a threat. The quest for justice continues.
My story begins in 1987, when I stepped ashore after twenty years at sea. I wanted a new life, something steady and grounded. Of all the places I had travelled, I chose the quiet beauty of south‑west Victoria. Hospitality was my calling, and I had long dreamed of running a holiday camp. When I saw the Cape Bridgewater Holiday Camp and Convention Centre advertised in The Age, it felt like destiny. A peaceful rural property near the maritime town of Portland — everything appeared perfect.
I performed my due diligence, or at least everything I knew I needed to do. Who could imagine that in Australia — a modern nation with a national telecommunications carrier — one would need to verify whether the phones actually worked? Within a week of taking over the business, the truth began to reveal itself in fragments. Customers and suppliers told me they had tried to call but couldn’t get through. Calls vanished. Lines died. My business — dependent on communication — was being quietly suffocated.
And Telstra already knew.
They knew the lines were faulty. They knew the exchange was failing. They knew the service was unreliable. And instead of fixing it, they concealed it. Not through oversight. Not through incompetence. But through deliberate omission — a calculated decision to hide the scale of the problem and let the consequences fall on me.
What followed was a pattern: token compensation, hollow assurances, and repeated promises that the problem was “now resolved.” Each promise was a smokescreen. Each assurance was designed to pacify, not to repair. Telstra’s strategy was simple: deny, delay, and conceal. Seven years after I entered arbitration with Telstra, the faults still weren’t fixed. I eventually sold the business in 2002, and the new owners suffered the same fate. The problems were never resolved because Telstra never intended to resolve them.
I soon learned I was not alone. Other independent business owners — people whose livelihoods had been quietly sabotaged by the same hidden faults — joined me. We became known as the Casualties of Telecom, the COT Cases. Our request was simple: for Telecom/Telstra to admit the truth, fix the faults, and compensate us for the losses their failures had caused. A working phone — was that really too much to ask?
We initially called for a full Senate investigation into Telecom. Instead, we were offered arbitration. We entered that process in good faith, believing the technical problems would finally be addressed. But almost immediately, the atmosphere shifted. Something was wrong. We were promised access to the Telecom documents we needed to prove our claims. That promise was not merely broken — it was weaponised. The documents were withheld, locked away, or quietly removed from reach. They remain hidden to this day.
Without those documents, we were fighting blind. We lost arbitrations not because our claims lacked merit, but because the evidence we needed was deliberately kept from us. Telstra’s concealment was not accidental. It was systematic. It was strategic. And it was devastating.
The faults that drove us to arbitration continued to cripple operations long after the process ended. The silence was not passive — it was engineered.
So what were we to do? Accept defeat? Walk away? Pretend the truth didn’t matter?
Or continue the fight?
Should an ordinary citizen be responsible for exposing misconduct committed by public officials more than 24 years ago? The answer must be yes — mainly when those actions still affect the lives of Australian citizens today. Silence protects the powerful. Speaking out protects everyone else.
To be continued
