In 1999, while I was drafting Absent Justice, I handed an early manuscript to Helen Handbury, Rupert Murdoch’s sister. She had visited my holiday camp twice. She had seen the chaos the phone faults caused — the missed bookings, the angry callers, the silence where a ringing phone should have been. But nothing prepared her for the scale of what she read in that manuscript.

She was horrified. Her words were something like, “I will get Rupert to have it published. He will be shocked.”
I remember standing there, holding that moment like a fragile thing, knowing I could not bring myself to tell her the truth that sat like a stone in my chest: her brother had already been affected by the same failing network that destroyed my business.

When Telstra failed to meet the contractual deadline for the communications infrastructure he needed to expand his operations, he received significant compensation — hundreds of millions of dollars. His losses were acknowledged. His inconvenience was recognised. His rights were protected.
Mine were not.

And neither were the rights of thousands of ordinary Australians — farmers, motel owners, small business operators, rural families — all forced into arbitration, paying enormous fees just to have their ongoing telephone problems investigated “impartially.” The rules were simple: if our claims were proven valid and the faults threatened the viability of our businesses, Telstra would be compelled to fix them. But the arbitrator could not award compensation for lost revenue if those same faults were still affecting the business on the day the findings were handed down. That impossible condition was buried in the AUSTEL government‑prepared COT Cases April 1994 Report, handed to both the arbitrator and the claimants as if it were a fair and reasonable framework.

It was nothing of the sort.

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.