Chapter Fourteen - Was it Legal or Illegal?

The perpetuation of fraudulent and treacherous conduct often precipitates systemic unethical behaviour with far-reaching repercussions. This behaviour is widely recognized as a severe form of treachery, necessitating a concerted effort to counter nefarious actions and rectify the ineffectiveness of misguided bureaucrats within bureaucratic systems. Addressing these issues is imperative to curtail the ongoing perpetuation of corrupt bureaucratic practices, including but not limited to corruption, bribery, fraud, distortion, and thuggery.

I want to emphasize the following four paragraphs. They are crucial for you to remember as you read them below. The government's decision to allow Telstra to handle arbitration claims in secret, depriving me of my legal right to challenge Telstra's information given to AUSTEL, is unprecedented and concerning. This has never happened during an arbitration before, especially not in Australia.

  

Based on the five volumes of arbitration evidence, Mr Kearney's statements in his February 1996 report that Dr Hughes did not allow his two arbitration consultants extra time to assess as part of their duty of care as independent technical arbitration consultants support my original arbitration billing submission. This indicates that Mr. Kearney found my arbitration claims valid. The twenty-three examples discussed in this summary report show that Telstra's late submission to AUSTEL on 16 October 1995 was incorrect.

 My original arbitration claim information, which AUSTEL allowed Telstra to submit in secret on 16 October 1995, did not align with Mr Kearney's February 1996 findings derived from the data he collected from my business on 19 December 1995. Essentially, AUSTEL's decision to permit Telstra to address some of my arbitration billing claims in secret, without an arbitrator present, was inappropriate in any arbitration process, regardless of the location. However, in my case, this secretive manoeuvring by AUSTEL and Telstra significantly compromised my future complaints regarding ongoing telephone problems. 

It is evident from absentjustice.com that John Pinnock, the second-appointed arbitration administrator, was still writing to my Federal Member of Parliament, David Hawker MP, the Communications Minister, and Telstra until I sold my business to Darren and Jenny Lewis in December 2001, telling them my ongoing telephone and faxing problems had been addressed and fixed as part of my arbitration in my 1994/95 arbitration.

In all that is just and sound, how can ongoing telephone problems that were still being experienced in 2001 have been fixed and addressed in 1994/95?

 

Chapter 14 - Was it Legal or Illegal? shows on 16 October 1995, Five months after my arbitration was deemed complete (and hence outside the arena of the arbitration process) AUSTEL allowed Telstra’s original arbitration defence liaison officer, Steve Black to address the worst of my 1800 Ericsson AXE billing claim documents in secret (see also  Open letter File No/46-A to 46-l) without the arbitrator or me being present. Simply put, I was denied my legal right to challenge Telstra's submission. These were the same Ericsson AXE billing faults that John Rundell, the Arbitration Project Manager, and Sue Hodkinson, second in charge of the arbitration unit who, later admitted in writing to Dr Gordon Hughes on (2 August 1996) that they had withheld several arbitration billing documents from the arbitration process (see Open letter File No/45-H).

These were the same two arbitration consultants who, between 19 and 21 April 1994, were covertly exonerated from all liability for any negligent acts when Dr Gordon Hughes and Warwick Smith allowed for clauses 25 and 25 to be removed after three different Senators, the COT Cases lawyers had all accepted the unchanged arbitration agreement. 

I only found out years after the conclusion of my arbitration that AUSTEL (for the government) allowed Telstra to address my arbitration claims documents using an arbitration witness statement dated 12 December 1994 prepared by a local Portland Telstra that had already been declared false on January 1995 by Mr Garry Ellicot, ex-Senior Detective Sergeant of the Queensland police. This witness statement was again assessed by Mr Neil Jepson, Barrister for the Major Fraud Group Victoria Police, between 1999 and 2001 and declared false. 

Here is John Rundell on his website in 2022 praising what a great arbitration process the COT v Telecom/Telstra process was for him, and here Sue Hodgkinson admits 15 months after the conclusion of my arbitration that the 1800 faults were not investigated in my arbitration.

How many other arbitration processes has John Rundell conducted where the rules of the arbitration agreement were not adhered to?   

COT Spokesperson Graham Schorer and I provided Grant Campbell of the TIO office with my Fast Track Settlement Proposal claim material on 008/1800 billing issues. We were not told that Grant Campbell had been seconded from Telstra. That FTSP 008/1800 billing claim material was not investigated. Did Grant Campbell supply it to the TIO and Telstra for discussion or provide it to Telstra? (see Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman - Chapter 3 - Julian Assange - Hacking -1).

In early 2000, Telstra's CEO on pages 132 and 133 in his publication Managing in Australia (See File 122-i - CAV Exhibit 92 to 127) discussed the problems Telstra had with their 008/1800 billing problems 

The following link Evidence - C A V Part 1, 2 and 3 -Chapter 4 - Fast Track Arbitration Procedure confirms Frank Blount, Telstra’s CEO, after leaving Telstra in he co-published a manuscript in 1999. entitled Managing in Australia. On pages 132 and 133, the author exposes the problems Telstra were hiding from their 1800 customers:

• “Blount was shocked, but his anxiety level continued to rise when he discovered this wasn’t an isolated problem. 
• The picture that emerged made it crystal clear that performance was sub-standard.” (See File 122-i - CAV Exhibit 92 to 127)

Frank Blount's Managing Australia https://www.qbd.com.au › managing-in-australia › fran can still be purchased online. 

Trying to produce a readable claim when the story was so complex, multi-layered and obscured by long-delayed access to necessary information was highly challenging. My phone and fax lines became lifelines to Garry Ellicott in Queensland. Ex-senior Queensland police officer Garry Ellicott was heavily involved in my arbitration. While working on my claim between May 1994 and May 1995, Garry frequently experienced significant problems when he tried to contact me by phone or fax (this was pre-email). Sometimes, he attempted to phone me but received an incorrectly recorded voice announcement (termed an RVA fault) telling him my phone line was ‘no longer connected’; sometimes, the line was dead. Sometimes, he could not send faxes to me, or I could not receive them; on other occasions, when faxes did get through, if they weren’t completely blank pages, they were so distorted they were unreadable.

When Garry attempted to ring me on 27 May 1994 on my 1800 service, he twice reached a recorded announcement telling him my number was not connected, before he finally got through. When Garry rang the Telstra fault centre to complain about these voice messages the operator told him she could not register the fault because the complaint had to come from the customer. Garry’s response was understandably blunt. He asked, ‘How can the customer complain if he doesn’t know I’m trying to reach him?! How can he complain if he is unaware that his incoming callers believe he’s no longer trading?’ When my telephone account arrived, I was, of course, charged for both failed calls.

Frank Blount's Managing Australia https://www.qbd.com.au › managing-in-Australia proves Telstra knew they were fastly falsly providing AUSTEL with incorrect information concerning the ongoing 008/1800 billing faults.

AUSTEL, allowing Telstra to address arbitration issues outside of my arbitration, prohibited me from legally challenging (as part of the original arbitration process) Telstra’s response to the ongoing billing problems that still affected the viability of my business. AUSTEL did not alert me to this, which meant that I could not use my legal right to challenge Telstra on this matter.

When AUSTEL allowed Telstra to address these ongoing Ericsson AXE RVA billing issues covertly (see Open letter File No/46-L to 46-l) and without the involvement of the original ‘umpire’ (in my case, the arbitrator), AUSTEL could not have known that my claim advisors had already proved to the arbitrator that Telstra’s witness statement was full of inaccuracies. Telstra submitted this witness statement to AUSTEL, fully aware that AUSTEL did not know what Gary Ellicott (my claim advisor) had proven.

Anyone who uses a telephone has at some time reached a recorded voice announcement (known within the industry as RVA):

‘The number you have called is not connected or has been changed. Please check the number before calling again. You have not been charged for this call.’

This incorrect message was the RVA people most frequently reached when trying to ring the Camp. While Telstra never acknowledged this, I discovered much later, among a multitude of FOI documents I received in 1994, a copy of a Telstra internal memo which explained, ‘this message tends to give the caller the impression that the business they are calling has ceased trading, and they should try another trader’.

Another Telstra document referred to the need for:

‘a very basic review of all our RVA messages and how they are applied … I am sure when we start to scratch around we will find a host of network circumstances where inappropriate RVAs are going to line’.

It seems the ‘not connected’ RVA came on whenever the lines in or out of Cape Bridgewater were congested, which, given how few lines there were, was often.

For a newly established business like ours, this was a major disaster, but despite the memo’s acknowledgement that such serious faults existed, Telstra never admitted the existence of a fault in those first years. And with my continued complaints I was treated increasingly as a nuisance caller. This was rural Australia, and I was supposed to put up with a poor phone service — not that anyone in Telstra was admitting that it was poor service. In every case, ‘No fault found’ was the finding by technicians and linesmen.

Absent Justice Part 2 - Chapter 14 - Was it Legal or Illegal?

NOTE: The arbitration confidentiality agreement, which both Telstra and I signed, prohibited us from exposing these types of documents outside of the arbitration process. Yet Telstra, on 16 October 1995, supplied AUSTEL some of their original arbitration defence documents. Telstra not only breached the confidentiality agreement but also used documents already proven false. If AUSTEL had gathered the main players together and insisted the arbitration issues be addressed because the systemic billing issues affected thousands of Telstra customers, the arbitrator would have been duty-bound to reopen the arbitration.

How can AUSTEL (now the ACMA) continue to state that they are independent of Telstra and did not compromise my position? Mr Kearney’s report, from the information I provided him on 19 December 1995 (see below), confirms Telstra incorrectly charged me for telephone calls for more than two years, both before and during my arbitration. Between June 1993 and December 1995, I provided AUSTEL with copies of Telstra System CCAS data, showing that Telstra had a systemic billing problem in their network. Over this period, AUSTEL wrote to Telstra on numerous occasions regarding my claims. One letter, dated 4 October 1994, demanded answers (see Open letter File No/46-F to 46-l) and another letter, dated 2 August 1996, show AUSTEL was very concerned as it appeared this systemic billing problem still existed within Telstra’s network (see Arbitrator File No/115). Will the Australian public ever know how much extra revenue Telstra made during the period in which this systemic billing problem existed in their network?

AUSTEL's Mr Kearney's statements in his February 1996 report (see Arbitrator File No/109), which were derived from the five volumes of arbitration evidence which Dr Hughes disallowed his two arbitration consultants the extra weeks to assess during my arbitration Mr Kearney found my arbitration claims were valid and that it was apparent these ongoing faults were still in Telstra's network on 13 January 1995. The twenty-three examples in this report show that the late submission by Telstra to AUSTEL on 16 October 1995 was fundamentally flawed. Had I not agreed for AUSTEL to send Mr Kearney to my business at Cape Bridgewater a twelve-hour- round trip by car from Melbourne to collect copies of the information that was not investigated by Dr Gordon Hughes (the arbitrator), AUSTEL would not have uncovered Telstra's submission of 16 October was a pack of lies. 

I reiterate that the information AUSTEL allowed Telstra to give in secret on 16 October 1995, without granting me my legal right of reply, did not match Mr Kearney's February 1996 findings. 

I reiterate that the information AUSTEL allowed Telstra to submit in secret on 16 October 1995, without granting me my legal right of reply, did not match Mr Kearney’s February 1996 findings. In essence, AUSTEL's allowing Telstra to address some of my arbitration billing claims in secret, without an arbitrator present and disallowing me my legal rights to challenge Telstra’s submission severely compromised my future complaints of ongoing telephone problems. It is clear from absentjustice.com that John Pinnock (the second-appointed arbitration administrator) was still writing to my Federal Member of Parliament David Hawker MP and the Communications Minister and Telatra until I sold my business to Darren and Jenny Lewis in December 2001.  

When Mr Kearney saw my further evidence, which confirmed that some 80 or more incoming telephone calls into my business could not have possibly been generated into either my fax line 267230 or 267267 service, yet they registered as having connected, it was he who said a call diverter had intercepted those calls. His words, not mine. 

I advised Mr Kearney of a hairdresser in South Australia who experienced similar diversions where his calls were diverted to another Hairdresser business in Adelaide, South Australia. A lady of the night who had a massage parlour in Melbourne known to the COT Cases (not as a client) but a person who had warned us about a Telstra employee Tony Watson who in my arbitration mislead the arbitrator concerning six faxes that never arrived at the arbitrator's office even though my Telstra fax account shows they were faxed to Dr Hughes office on 23 May 1994. 

And here I was informing Darren Kearney (a government public servant) that here was proof in front of him that some confirmed 80 or more incoming telephone calls over two months had been diverted to a yet unknown location. 

He took this material back to Melbourne for analysis, and as of 2024, I still have not received a response to where those 80 calls ended up.

The TIO and Telstra both refused to investigate the ongoing problems until 16 January 1998 properly, and then it was agreed (see Main Evidence File No 35 and File No 36) that these problems continued to haunt my business long after the end of my ‘completed’ arbitration. So, in 2021, how can the government say that the government communications regulator did not breach their statutory obligation to me as a citizen of Australia? Particularly when they allowed Telstra to covertly address issues, which had cost me $300,000-PLUS merely to submit them to arbitration where ultimately only a part of my claim was assessed.

Three months after my arbitration was declared final, the elusive comprehensive log of my fault complaints that had been concealed from the technical unit (refer Arbitrator File Nos/29 and 30) by either the arbitrator or the resource unit, re-emerged. The concealment of this important fault log – possibly the most essential document in the whole arbitration process – means there had to be a sinister motive behind it. What if this was not gross misconduct on top of criminal conduct?

Behind all this deception is a smoking gun that links together all the crimes committed against the claimants. These crimes began even before the signing of the arbitration agreements, continued throughout the arbitrations, and were even committed after those arbitrations had been labelled as ‘complete’.

For years, I could not bring myself to believe the rumours floating around Melbourne while the TIO was administering the COT arbitrations. I heard that the Institute of Arbitrators Australia, the Commercial Arbitration Act 1984, and the confidentiality clauses in the COT’s arbitration agreement were being used as a shield to hide behind during the COT arbitrations. This would mean that the only way to challenge the arbitrations would be through a formal, legal appeal process, which, according to the Act, is almost unachievable.

Various interested parties looking at my story have suggested that the concealment of a document like my comprehensive log of fault complaints during a litigation process like my arbitration is considered a jailable offence in many Western democracies. Here in Australia, however, this crime was concealed under the confidentiality clauses in my arbitration agreement even though it is now clear that the arbitration was not administered according to the agreed ambit of the Australian Arbitration Act 1984. If the Arbitration resource unit had provided this log for assessment, as they should have, it would have instantly been evident that the telephone Ericsson AXE phone and fax problems were STILL occurring, even as my arbitration proceeded

In connection with these problems, in August 1994, George Close, my technical advisor, produced an arbitration report using Telstra’s data showing that, between December 1993 and February 1994, two of my primary service lines suffered blockage periods of up to 47%. George could not report occurrences between February 1994 and April 1995 because Telstra refused to supply data for that period, even under the official arbitration discovery process. Even if we had received that extra data, however, the deletion of the arbitrator’s technical consultants’ request for an extension of time to investigate the ongoing billing issues meant it is unlikely this period would have been inspected anyway.

Garry Ellicott reported the two RVA faults to Telstra on 27 May 1994 and I reported these faults to both AUSTEL and the TIO. My main complaint to the TIO was that I should not even have been in arbitration while these faults continued to destroy my business and interfered with the preparation of my claim. The TIO, however, would not listen to these valid points. Instead, the arbitration technical unit informed me that they would investigate these matters when they visited Cape Bridgewater as part of the arbitration process. As Open letter File No/46-F to 46-l) shows, and we discuss elsewhere, the arbitrator stopped the technical unit from conducting that investigation. In a 16 February 1996 letter to the then-president of the Institute of Arbitrators Australia, the arbitrator states:

 “Mr Smith’s assertion on page 4 that a technical expert refused to discuss technical information at his premises on 6 April 1995 is correct – in this regard, the technical consultant was acting in accordance with his interpretation of my direction which prohibited him from speaking to one party in the absence of the other party at any site visit”. (See Open letter File No/45-A to 45-I and more importantly Open letter File No/45-G page 2, bullet 2)

I am sure if Garry Ellicott and Senator Barry O’Sullivan had known the arbitrator would stop the technical consultants from investigating most of the $ 51,000 worth of work they had prepared on my behalf, they would have demanded an investigation into the arbitrator’s refusal of the extra weeks his technical resource unit requested to investigate my claims properly. Barry and I both signed each of the 16 pages of my official arbitration agreement. I believe if Barry had known that none of the ongoing problems with my service lines would be addressed during my arbitration, despite those issues causing billing problems and interfering with my arbitration claims, and if he had known the arbitrator would have ‘no control over the process’ because it was going to be ‘conducted entirely outside of the agreed ambit of the arbitration procedures’ then he would have refused to sign the agreement at all, and probably would have advised me not to sign it either.