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Who We Are

Absent Justice - My Story

Children's lives could be at risk

Comments made from the Herald Sun newspaper dated 30 August 1993, confirm just how damaging some of these newspaper articles were to my already ailing business, with statements like:

“The Royal Children’s Hospital has told a holiday camp operators in Portland that it cannot send chronically ill children there because of Telecom’s poor phone service. The hospital has banned trips after fears that the children’s lives could be at risk in a medical emergency if the telephone service to the Portland camp continued to malfunction”.

The centre’s stand follows letters from schools, community groups, companies and individuals who have complained about the phone service at Portland’s Cape Bridgewater Holiday camp.”

Youths from the Royal Children’s Centre for Adolescent Health, who were suffering from “chronic illnesses”, visited the camp earlier this year.   

Group leader Ms Louise Rolls said in a letter to the camp the faulty phones had endangered lives and the hospital would not return to the camp unless the phone service could be guaranteed” Arbitrator File No/90

After the Melbourne Children's Hospital recorded a near-death experience involving me rushing a sick child with cancer to the Portland Hospital, which is 18 kilometres away from my holiday camp, the new owners of my business faced declining sales. This decline continued until at least 2006, thirteen years after the tragic event at the Children's Hospital → Chapter 4 The New Owners Tell Their Story

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“…the very large number of persons that had been forced into an arbitration process and have been obliged to settle as a result of the sheer weight that Telstra has brought to bear on them as a consequence where they have faced financial ruin if they did not settle…”

Senator Carr

This is the compelling story of a group of ordinary small business owners who found themselves in a David-and-Goliath struggle against one of the country's largest corporations—Telstra. For years, these dedicated individuals faced a barrage of phone issues that severely compromised their ability to run their businesses effectively. Time and again, when they reported the problems, Telstra responded with the dismissive phrase "No fault found," even though compelling evidence, meticulously documented in this publication and available on our website, clearly demonstrated that faults did exist, as illustrated in AUSTEL’s Adverse Findings.

The situation grew more dire as Telstra and its legal arbitration defence team resorted to manipulating the judicial process through dubious and unethical tactics. They intercepted critical faxes, failed to deliver crucial Freedom of Information documents—sometimes months, or even years late, and often riddled with extensive censorship that rendered them nearly unintelligible. They even destroyed vital documentary evidence while fabricating information that cast doubt on the legitimacy of the COT Four's claims.

Throughout this chaotic arbitration process, the arbitrator overlooked the key issues at the heart of our claim. Despite our persistent efforts to draw attention to these points, we found ourselves met with silence and indifference. Meanwhile, the regulatory bodies tasked with oversight—Austel, representing the government's interests, and the TIO, advocating for the telecommunications carriers—failed to rein in Telstra’s activities, appearing to collude in the struggle against our pursuit of justice.

This series of events highlights a profound breakdown of justice, far exceeding the initial concerns of simple phone malfunctions. We were merely asking for reliable phone service—an essential tool for conducting our businesses smoothly and efficiently.

Like most telephone users, each COT member once assumed that Telstra’s skilled technicians could easily detect and resolve their phone faults. Yet, the refrain of "No fault found" persisted, and the problems continued without resolution, echoing through our arbitration proceedings and into the years that followed, leaving devastating impacts on our livelihoods. The situation was perplexing: in a world where nearly everyone relied on telecommunication, how could a system designed to serve the public go so profoundly wrong? What was truly happening behind the scenes?

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