Chapters 7 to 10 (draft) My Story Warts and All
CHAPTER 7
Secrets, Codes, and the Machinery of Disappearance
As I sifted through the FOI documents, a disturbing pattern emerged: Telstra had stamped numerous files with the chilling label “Secret,” particularly those tied to the so-called “guarantees” they had issued me.
Among these buried records was a cryptic reference to “RVA on congestion”—a covert code for disconnection masquerading as technical jargon. In 1993, the Regulator confirmed the deception:
Telstra’s congestion tone was engineered to mimic a standard engaged signal. Unless one was trained to detect the subtle difference, callers were misled into believing my line was simply busy. In truth, it was choked by Telstra’s outdated infrastructure.
This wasn’t a technical hiccup—it was a calculated illusion. The Cape Bridgewater exchange, a relic of neglect, was perpetually congested. Potential customers, unaware of the truth, likely assumed I had shut down.
My bookings dwindled, not from lack of interest, but from a manufactured silence.
Then came document C04007, another “Secret” file, ominously noting: “Mr Smith’s service problems… network related and spanning a period of 3–4 years.” C04008 echoed the same damning truth: “Mr Smith’s telephone service had suffered from a poor grade of network performance over a period of several years.” These weren’t anomalies—they were admissions.
The Guarantees of Deceit
At the bottom of C04008, a handwritten note from the area general manager I had previously confronted revealed a chilling contradiction:
“These are preparational notes recorded at the time of settlement. Alan Smith was not prepared to provide better substantiation of his claim.”
But she knew. She had already acknowledged the years of poor service. So why, just three months earlier, had she issued me two guarantees?
The deception was brazened. The same document admitted “some difficulty to detect exchange problems in the last eight months,” placing the origin of these faults as far back as April 1992.
This wasn’t oversight—it was orchestration. A senior corporate manager knowingly issued guarantees while the network crumbled beneath her. It was a deliberate act of misdirection, a corporate sleight of hand designed to pacify while concealing the rot.
This chapter doesn’t just expose negligence—it indicts a system built on corruption, manipulation, and betrayal. The guarantees were not promises—they were weapons of silence. And the shadow they cast over Telstra’s integrity is long, cold, and damning.
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CHAPTER 8
The Trap Tightens: Isolation by Design
By this stage in our relentless battle, the weight of loss was suffocating. Two partners gone. My health deteriorating. My business bleeding out. The once-vibrant Cape Bridgewater camp now stood in quiet decay—its buildings weathered, its spirit dimmed.
Telstra’s grip was tightening, and the cost was no longer just financial—it was existential.
The COT members clung to each other like survivors in a storm. We met often; our discussions charged with urgency and desperation. But beneath our resolve lay a grim truth: we were five small business owners staring down a corporate behemoth engineered to crush dissent.
Every strategy we devised felt like a whisper against a hurricane.
As 1992 faded into the cold dawn of 1993, doubt crept in like rot. Had I made a fatal error in settling with Telstra’s area general manager? The guarantees meant nothing.
The new exchange was a hollow promise. My phone faults persisted, mocking every effort to stay afloat. The silence from customers wasn’t natural—it was manufactured.
Meanwhile, my mortgage loomed like a guillotine. Forced to refinance, I absorbed new setup fees that deepened my financial wounds. I could no longer afford to maintain the camp’s infrastructure.
What once welcomed families now resembled a forgotten outpost—abandoned, neglected, and haunted by betrayal.
Surveillance and Suspicion: The War Behind the Wires
In this crucible of despair, two allies stood firm—Ann Garms and Graham Schorer. Together, we became comrades in arms, bound by shared suffering and a burning need for justice.
We dissected Telstra’s tactics, each revelation darker than the last. Their mishandling of our complaints wasn’t incompetence—it was strategy. A deliberate campaign to exhaust, confuse, and silence.
Ann’s suspicions grew sharper. During rare moments when our phones worked, she voiced a chilling theory: were our lines being bugged? Was Telstra listening, not just failing?
The idea wasn’t paranoia—it was plausible. In a war waged through wires, surveillance was just another weapon.
We weren’t just fighting for compensation. We were fighting to expose a system built on deception, manipulation, and control. Every fault, every delay, every silence was part of a larger design—a corporate architecture of suppression.
This chapter marks a descent—not into defeat, but into deeper awareness. The battlefield had shifted. It was no longer just about broken lines. It was about broken trust. And the war was far from over.
Chapter 9:
Surveillance, Sabotage, and the Machinery of Silence
On 19 August 1992, as the shadowy COT group began its descent into the dark underbelly of Australia’s telecommunications empire, a Telstra document surfaced—one that reeked of paranoia and covert operations.
It referenced Ann Garms’s business, The Tivoli Theatre Restaurant, with a chilling notation:
“Description: Line 1 NDT NRR suspect sabotage ?????”
NRR—Not Receiving Ring. But it was the handwritten scrawl that truly unsettled:
“… maybe the bug has slipped off” and “Looks like a job for super sleuth Sherlock Kelly?????”
This wasn’t technical banter. It was a glimpse into a culture of mockery, surveillance, and sabotage.
Another document, B00474, deepened the fog. It spoke of “three particular customers” and the writer’s frustration at being “continuously bombarded by these allegations”—allegations they simply “shrugged off.” Who were these three? And what of the cryptic mention of “Compass Security”?
Was it tied to Compass Airlines, a small carrier that collapsed amid swirling rumours of sabotage and persistent phone failures? Its owner claimed the faults were fatal. The implications were chilling: was someone deliberately engineering failure?
Then came the request for a “bug scanning device” by someone in “protective services.” What threat were they guarding against? What secrets were being whispered through the wires?
Ann and I felt it—an invisible presence on every call. The paranoia wasn’t imagined. It was earned.
In early 1993, Graham Schorer, now our COT spokesperson, stepped into the murky waters of politics, meeting with the chairman of the Regulatory body. As whispers of our plight reached Parliament, one question loomed like a spectre:
Would they dare challenge Telstra—or protect their golden goose?
Desperate and depleted, we scraped together what little we had to reach Canberra. It was a last-ditch mission to storm the gates of power.
Meanwhile, my phone service had reached a breaking point. Only through careful manoeuvring with the banks did I stave off repossession—a temporary reprieve from a system designed to crush.
By then, I had amassed over 70 letters from customers who were unable to reach me. One, dated 5 February 1993 from Mrs. Elsie Teer of the Werribee Outreach Centre, cancelled a booking due to “poor membership response”—a response crippled by Telstra’s engineered silence.
“It appears that you don’t answer your phone,” she wrote. The accusation hung in the air like smoke.
When I reported difficulties reaching Graham, Telstra’s staff responded with hollow promises. Then I uncovered FOI document K00045. A Telstra employee had scribbled a damning note:
- Once they recognised Schorer as a COT member, they opted not to test the service.
- It was abandonment. It was sabotage.
Another unnumbered FOI document chronicled my own complaint. The Telstra worker’s note read:
“Probably caused by ‘RCM.’ No need to investigate. Spoke with Bruce—he said not to investigate also.”
The rot was systemic. The conspiracy was real. Telstra wasn’t just ignoring us—they were orchestrating our collapse.
We weren’t fools. We were targets. And the machinery of silence was working exactly as designed.
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Chapter 10
The Theatre of Deception: Politics, Power, and the Poisoned Handshake
By the first half of 1993, the damage was undeniable. Eleven more written complaints from would-be customers joined the growing archive of despair—each one a testament to the relentless sabotage that had plagued my business since April 1988.
Telstra’s negligence wasn’t just persistent—it was pathological. And yet, as June approached, a flicker of hope appeared. A Shadow Minister for Communications took notice.
A National Party Senator reached across the divide from Queensland, offering support to our battered community in Victoria.
But hope, I learned, can be a weapon. Behind the political curtain, deals were struck in hushed tones, in rooms where truth was a liability and manipulation reigned supreme.
My local Member of Parliament answered our call—but was he a champion or a chess piece? His allegiance felt slippery, his motives cloaked in ambition.
During the June 1993 campaign, the Opposition Senator and the National Party Senator pushed for a Senate Inquiry into our claims. An ex-Telstra insider confided that they were close—dangerously close—to exposing the rot at the top.
Had they succeeded, it could have shattered the fortress of impunity that Telstra’s executives hid behind. But the inquiry never came. The machinery of power closed ranks.
While politicians bartered influence, I stood alone in the labyrinth. The Regulator, visibly uneasy, seemed less a guardian and more a pawn.
Between February and June, I bombarded them with evidence—fraudulent overcharging on my 1800 free-call line and other vital services. But the silence was deafening. The system wasn’t broken. It was rigged.
Hijacked Signals: The Horror Beneath the Wires
Then came a new horror. Short-duration calls—ghost rings that vanished before I could answer. Deadlines that mocked my attempts to connect. These weren’t glitches.
They were symptoms of something darker. I began to suspect foul play. Were my calls being diverted? Was someone siphoning my business for their own gain?
What once seemed paranoid now felt prophetic. The idea that faxes and phone calls could be hijacked in secret was no longer absurd—it was real. And if it was happening to me, what did that mean for every phone subscriber in the country? Had we opened the door to a world where our communications could be weaponised?
The Commonwealth Ombudsman’s Office was drawn into the mire, alongside the Regulator. But instead of answers, I received stonewalling.
My FOI requests for data from the exchange’s testing equipment—crucial to understanding the scope of these violations—were met with silence. Fifteen years have passed since my first inquiry.
The only response? A six-day data snippet from May 1993. Was this incompetence—or a calculated act of obstruction?
As I pieced together the puzzle, the threads of corruption tightened like a noose. This wasn’t just a failure of service—it was a betrayal of trust, a systemic conspiracy to silence, deflect, and destroy.
How deep does this deception run? And when the truth finally surfaces, who will be left standing?
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