My YouTube Video

In the four-minute video below, I discuss a legal document called “The COT Strategy” prepared by Telstra’s arbitration lawyers, Freehill Hollingdale & Page. The document targeted four businesses, including mine, and attempted to prevent us from accessing Freedom of Information (FOI) documents through legal professional privilege. This hindered my ability to prove that my telephone faults were ongoing and still affecting my business.

The document named the owners of the four businesses and targeted them on 10 September 1992, even though the arbitration didn't begin until April 1994, and no relevant FOI document was released to the four claimants. 

If you scroll down after watching the video, you'll find the official Senate Hansard dated 24 June 1997. In it, a Telstra whistleblower, speaking under oath during a Senate Committee, revealed that Telstra instructed him to stop the COT Cases (which included me and three others) from proving our arbitration claims against Telstra.

 

 In the four-minute video above, I discuss a legal document called “The COT Strategy” prepared by Telstra’s arbitration lawyers, Freehill Hollingdale & Page. The document targeted four businesses, including mine, and attempted to prevent us from accessing Freedom of Information (FOI) documents through legal professional privilege. This hindered my ability to prove that my telephone faults were ongoing and still affecting my business.

The document named the owners of the four businesses and targeted them on 10 September 1992, even though the arbitration didn't begin until April 1994. No relevant FOI document was released to the four claimants, highlighting the injustice faced by newcomers to the legal process of arbitration in Australia.

If you scroll down after watching the video, you'll find the official Senate Hansard dated 24 June 1997. In it, a Telstra whistleblower, speaking under oath during a Senate Committee, revealed that Telstra instructed him to stop the COT Cases (which included me and three others) from proving our arbitration claims against Telstra.

Arbitration 

The arbitrator, whose actions aimed to protect the government during COT case arbitrations, claimed that no ongoing issues affected the Cape Bridgewater Holiday Camp. His May 11, 1995 award only mentioned old, historic, anecdotal Telstra-related faults while ignoring the ongoing faults. Suppose the arbitrator had been aware of the 120,000 ongoing faults in Telstra. In that case, he might have asked his arbitration technical consultants to investigate whether my complaints of ongoing telephone faults were genuine.

It raises the question of whether 120,000 COT-type customers around Australia (Falsification Report File No/8) also had similar significant problems, which could be related to the Ericsson AXE telephone exchange problems that were the concern of AUSTEL, as well as problems from CAN and AXE → Falsification Report File No/8). The following two letters, dated April 8 and 9, 1994, from Telstra's General Manager to AUSTEL's Robin Davey, should not have been acted upon in the manner he did on behalf of the government. Concealing how many people were affected by these faults within Telstra ruined lives. Moreover, households being overcharged for telephone conversations was not the only issue. Many of these 120,000 COT-type customers were businesses, and the lost calls contributed to those businesses going bankrupt, as was the case of the twelve COT Cases now in arbitration.

 

Ongoing telephone problems 

 

In the world of political and media misinformation attached to the NBN, one crucial issue hasn’t been fully addressed – Did Australia’s copper network meet the original mandatory government regulatory requirements when the government privatised Telstra? When the COT arbitrator was officially provided (in my case) nine separate sworn Telstra witness statements that my service was now up to network standard, i.e., no more ongoing telephone problems, were these nine sworn statements made under oath true or false?

If this question is answered honestly, it would not only directly affect billions of dollars in Commonwealth spending but also mean that Telstra lied to the arbitrator while hearing my cases so that Telstra could minimise its liability towards me. As seen from the following exhibit, my phone problems continued for eleven years after the arbitrator found in favour of Telstra, i.e., they had now fixed their network.

23 June 2015: Had the arbitrator appointed to assess my arbitration claims correctly investigated ALL of my submitted evidence, he would have had to value my claim as an ongoing problem, NOT a past problem, as his final award shows. It is clear from the following link dated > Unions raise doubts over Telstra's copper network; workers using ... that when reading in conjunction with Chapter 1 - Can We Fix The CAN, which was released in March 1994, these faults copper-wire network faults have been in existence for more than 24-years.

9 November 2017: Sadly, many Australians in rural Australia can only access a second-rate NBN. This didn’t have to be the case: had the Australian government ensured the arbitration process it endorsed to investigate the COT cases’ claims of ongoing telephone problems was conducted transparently, it could have used our evidence to start fixing the problems we uncovered in 1993/94. This news article https://theconversation.com/the-accc-investigation-into-the-nbn-will-be-useful-but-its-too-little-too-late-87095 and absentjustice.com/Introduction again shows that the COT Cases claims of ailing copper wire network were more than valid.  

Almost two decades after this cover-up had been executed, with the government spin doctors successfully branding my claims as frivolous and me as a vexatious litigant, I have been left the government stopped financing the roll-out of the National Broadband Network (NBN), which still utilises part of the existing, seriously degraded copper network. The “… state of the copper network is considerably worse than expected, leading to extensive work beyond the node,” say leaked documents.

28 April 2018: This ABC news article regarding the NBN see >NBN boss blames Government's reliance on copper for slow ... needs to be read in conjunction with my own story because these lies told under oath by so many Telstra employees had not occurred then the government would have been in a better position to evaluate just how bad the copper-wire Customer Access Network (CAN) really was just four years ago.

Sadly, many Australians living in rural Australia can only access a second-rate NBN. This wouldn’t have been the case if the Australian Government had ensured the arbitration process they endorsed to investigate the COT cases’ claims of ongoing communication problems had been conducted lawfully.