Chapter 3 The Briefcase Saga
My constant complaints to Austel finally bore fruit when, for the first time in this story, Telstra investigators came to Cape Bridgewater. Dave Stockdale and Hugh Macintosh of Telstra’s National Network Investigation Division arrived at my office on 3 June 1993. At last, I thought, I would be able to speak directly to people who knew what they were talking about.
I should have known better. It was just another case of ‘No fault found.’ We spent some considerable time ‘dancing around’ a summary of my phone problems. Their best advice for me was to keep doing exactly what I had been doing since 1989, keeping a record of all my phone faults. I could have wept. Finally they left.
A little while later, in my office I found that Aladdin had left behind his treasures: the Briefcase Saga was about to unfold.
The briefcase was not locked, and I opened it to find out it belonged to Mr Macintosh. There was no phone number, so I was obliged to wait for business hours the next day to track him down. But what there was in the briefcase was a file titled ‘SMITH, CAPE BRIDGEWATER’. After five gruelling years fighting the evasive monolith of Telstra, being told various lies along the way, here was possibly the truth, from an inside perspective.
The first thing that rang bells was a document which revealed Telstra knew that the RVA fault they recorded in March 1992 had actually lasted for at least eight months — not the three weeks that was the basis of their settlement pay-out. Dated 24/7/92, and with my phone number in the top right corner, the document referred to my complaint that people ringing me get an RVA ‘service disconnected’ message with the ‘latest report’ dated 22/7/92 from Station Pier in Melbourne and a ‘similar fault reported’ on 17/03/92. The final sentence reads: ‘Network investigation should have been brought in as fault has gone on for 8 months.’
I copied this and some other documents from the file on my fax machine, and faxed copies to Graham Schorer. The next morning I telephoned the local Telstra office, and someone came out and picked the briefcase up.
Just the information in this document of 24 July 1992 was proof that senior Telstra management had deceived and misled me during negotiations with me and showed too that their guarantees that my phone system was up to network standard were made in full knowledge that it was nowhere near ‘up to standard’.
Not only was Telstra’s area general manager fully aware at the time of my settlement on 11 December 1992 that she was providing me with incorrect information which influenced my judgement of the situation, placing me at a commercial disadvantage, but the General Manager, Commercial Victoria/Tasmania was also aware of this deception.
The use of misleading and deceptive conduct such as this in a commercial settlement such as mine contravenes Section 52 of the Australian Trade Practices Act. Yet this deception has never been officially addressed by any regulatory body. To get ahead of my story here, even the arbitrator who handed down his award on my case in May 1995 failed to question Telstra’s unethical behaviour.
I took this new information to Austel, and on 9 June 1993, Austel’s John MacMahon wrote to Telstra regarding my continuing phone faults after the settlement, and the content of the briefcase documents:
Further he claims that the Telecom documents contain network investigation findings which are distinctly different from the advice which Telecom has given to the customers concerned.
In summary, these allegations, if true, would suggest that in the context of the settlement Mr Smith was provided with a misleading description of the situation as the basis for making his decision. They would also suggest that the other complainants identified in the folders have knowingly been provided with inaccurate information.
I ask for your urgent comment on these allegations. You are asked to immediately provide AUSTEL with a copy of all the documentation which was apparently inadvertently left at Mr Smith’s premises for its inspection. This, together with your comment, will enable me to arrive at an appropriate recommendation for AUSTEL’s consideration of any action it should take.
As to Mr Smith’s claimed continuing service difficulties, please provide a statement as to whether Telecom believes that Mr Smith has been provided with a telephone service of normal network standard since the settlement. If not, you are asked to detail the problems which Telecom knows to exist, indicate how far beyond network standards they are and identify the cause/causes of these problems.
In light of Mr Smith’s claims of continuing service difficulties, I will be seeking to determine with you a mechanism which will allow an objective measurement of any such difficulties to be made.
I can only presume that Telstra did not comply with the request ‘to immediately provide AUSTEL with a copy of all the documentation which was apparently inadvertently left at Mr Smith’s premises,’ for on 3 August 1993, Austel’s General Manager, Consumer Affairs wrote to Telstra requesting a copy of all the documents in this briefcase that had not already been forwarded to Austel. The following Telstra internal document dated 23 August 1993 and labelled as ‘folio R09830’ with the subject listed as ‘The Briefcase’ is alarming to say the least. This document, which had been copied to Telstra’s Corporate Secretary, notes:
“Subsequently it was realised that the other papers could be significant and these were faxed to but appear not to have been supplied to Austel at this point.
"The loose papers on retrofit could be sensitive and copies of all papers have been sent to Ross Marshall
I sent off a number of Statutory Declarations to Austel explaining what I had seen in the briefcase.
On 27 August 1993, Telstra’s Corporate Secretary, Jim Holmes, wrote to me about the contents of the briefcase:
Although there is nothing in these documents to cause Telstra any concern in respect of your case, the documents remain Telstra’s property and therefore are confidential to us … I would appreciate it if you could return any documents from the briefcase still in your possession as soon as possible.
How blithely he omitted any reference to vital evidence which was withheld from me during their negotiations with me regarding compensation.
Flogging a dead horse
By the middle of 1993, people were becoming interested in what they were hearing about our battle. A number of articles had appeared in my local newspaper and interstate gossip about the COT group was growing. In June, Julian Cress from Channel Nine’s ‘Sixty Minutes’ faxed me:
Just a note to let you know that I had some trouble getting through to you on the phone last Thursday. Pretty ironic considering that I was trying to contact you to discuss your phone problems.
The problem occurred at about 11AM. On the 008 number I heard a recorded message advising me that 008 was not available from my phone and your direct line was constantly engaged.
Pretty ironic all right!
A special feature in the Melbourne Age gave my new ‘Country Get-A-Ways’ program a great write-up — I was marketing week-end holidays for over-40s singles in Victoria and South Australia: an outdoor canoe weekend, a walking and river cruise along the Glenelg River and a Saturday Dress-up Dinner Dance with a disco as well as a trip to the Coonawarra Wineries in South Australia with a Saturday morning shopping tour to Mt Gambier. I began to feel things were looking up for the camp.
It was too much to hope, however, that my telephone saga was at an end. On 26 October a fax arrived from Cathine, a relative of the journalist who had written the Age feature:
Alan, I have been trying to call you since midday. I have rung seven times to get an engaged signal. It is now 2.45 pm.
Cathine had been ringing on my 1800 free-call line. I had been in my office and there had been no calls at all between 12.30 and 2.45 that day. What was going on? (Telstra’s data for that day shows one call at 12:01, lasting for 6 minutes and another at 12:18, lasting for 8 minutes.) I cannot express how frustrating this was; there seemed to be no end of it in sight. But I was determined not to let the bastards get me down. Their lies and incompetence had to be exposed.
I stepped up my marketing of the camp and the singles weekends, with personal visits to social clubs around the Melbourne metropolitan area and in Ballarat and Warrnambool. I followed with ads in local newspapers in metropolitan areas around Melbourne and in many of the large regional centres around Victoria and South Australia. I also placed ads for the Get-Away holidays in the 1993 White Pages — or rather, I tried to: the entries never made it into the telephone books. I complained of this to the TIO (the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman), who attempted to extract from Telstra an explanation for my advertisements being left out of 18 major phone directories.
As the Deputy TIO said in his letter to me of 29/3/96, he believed his office would simply ‘be flogging a dead horse trying to extract more’ from Telstra on this matter. (In fact, the TIO is an industry body supervised by a board, the members of which are drawn from the leading communications companies in the country: Vodaphone, Optus and, of course, Telstra.)
Between May and October of 1993, in response to my request for feedback, I received many letters from schools, clubs and singles clubs, writing of the difficulties they had experienced trying to contact the camp by phone. The executive officer of the Camping Association of Victoria, Mr Don MacDowall, wrote on 6 May 1993 to say that 10,000 copies of their Resource Guide, in which I had advertised, had been direct mailed to schools and given away. Most of the other advertisers with ads similar to mine, he said, had experienced an increase in inquiries and bookings after the distribution of these books and so it seemed evident to him that the ‘malfunction of your phone system effectively deprived you of similar gains in business.’ He also noted that he had himself received complaints from people asking why I was not answering my phone. All in all, during this period, I received 36 letters from different individuals as well more than 40 other complaints from people who had tried, unsuccessfully, to respond to my advertisements. The Hadden & District Community House wrote in April 1993:
Several times I have dialled 055 267 267 number and received no response — dead line. I have also experienced similar problems on your 008 number.
Our youth worker, Gladys Crittenden, experienced similar problems while organising our last year’s family camp, over a six month period during 1991/1992.
In August 1993 Rita Espinoza from the Chilean Social Club wrote:
I tried to ring you in order to confirm our stay at your camp site. I found it impossible to get through. I tried to ring later but encountered the same signal on the 10th of August around 7 – 8.30 pm. I believe you have a problem with the exchange and strongly advise you contact Telstra.
Do you remember the same problem happened in April and May of this year?
I apologise but I have made arrangements with another camp.
A testing situation
Late in 1993 a Mrs Cullen from Daylesford Community House informed me that she had tried unsuccessfully to phone me on 17 August 1993 at 5.17, 5.18, 5.19 and 5.20 pm, each time reaching a dead line. She had reported the fault to Telstra’s Fault Centre in Bendigo on 1100, speaking to an operator who identified herself as Tina. Tina then rang my 1800 number and she couldn’t get through either. Telstra’s hand-written memo, dated 17/8/93, records the times that Mrs Cullen had tried to get through to my phone and reports Tina’s failed attempt to contact me.
A copy of my itemised 1800 account shows that I was charged for all four of these calls, even though Mrs Cullen never reached me. All this information was duly passed to John MacMahon of Austel and, soon afterwards, Telstra at last arranged for tests on my line. These were to be carried out from a number of different locations around Victoria and New South Wales. Telstra notified Austel that some 100 test calls would take place on 18 August 1993 to my 1800 free-call service.
First thing that morning I answered two calls from Telstra Commercial, one lasting six minutes and another lasting eleven minutes, as they set up in readiness for the test calls expected that day. Over the rest of that day, there were another eight, perhaps nine, calls from Telstra, which I answered. Some days later my 1800 phone account arrived, showing more than 60 calls charged to my service. I queried this with Telstra, asking first how I could be charged for so many calls which did not ring, and next, why I should be paying for test calls anyway. I did not ask, but perhaps should have, how more than 60 calls could all be answered in just 54 minutes when the statement shows that some of these calls came through at the rate of as many as three a minute.
Telstra wrote to Austel’s John MacMahon on 8 November 1993, informing him that I had acknowledged answering a ‘large number of calls’ and that all the evidence indicated that ‘someone at the premises answered the calls.’ Austel asked for the name of the Telstra employee who made these so-called successful calls to my business, and I have also asked for this information, but Telstra didn’t respond.
Then on 28 January 1994, I received a letter from Telstra’s solicitors in which they referred to ‘malicious call trace equipment’ Telstra had placed — without my knowledge or consent — on my service between 26 May and 19 August 1993. This was the first I’d heard of it. This device, they explained, apparently caused a 90-second lock-up on my line after a call was answered, meaning that no further call could come in to my phone for 90 seconds after I hung up.
This information put another complexion on the matter of those four calls from Mrs Cullen I was charged for in the space of a single 28 seconds, as well as the 100 test calls from Telstra. Even supposing I was able to answer the phone at such a fast rate, the malicious call tracing equipment, apparently attached to my line at that time, was imposing its 90-second delay between calls, making the majority of these calls impossible. Telstra management, of course, had nothing to say about this.
What was going on? As far as I could tell, most of those 100 test calls simply weren’t made, indeed couldn’t have been made.
Late in 1994 I received two FOI documents concerning these calls. K03433 and K03434 showed 44 calls, numbered between 8 and 63, to the Cape Bridgewater exchange, nine of which had tick or arrow marks beside them. More than once I asked Telstra what the marks represent but received no response. I presume, however, that these marks were made by a technician against the calls which I actually received and answered. A note on K03434 read:
Test calls unsuccessful. Did not hear STD pips on any calls to test no. The TCTDI would not work correctly on the CBWEX (Cape Bridgewater Exchange). I gave up tests.
The technicians themselves gave up on their testing procedure! A second series of tests conducted a year later in March 1994 fared little better. Telstra’s fault data notes that only 50 out of 100 test calls were successfully connected. This information was of no use to me at the time, however, as it was withheld from me until September 1997. All I was to hear in 1994 was the old refrain: ‘No fault found.’
Only one official document drew attention to the incapacity of Telstra’s testing regime, and this was the Austel Draft Report regarding the COT cases, dated 3 March 1994, which concluded:
Cape Bridgewater Holiday Camp has a history of services difficulties dating back to 1988. Although most of the documentation dates from 1991 it is apparent that the camp has had ongoing service difficulties for the past six years which has impacted on its business operations causing losses and erosion of customer base.
In view of the continuing nature of the fault reports and the level of testing undertaken by Telecom doubts are raised on the capability of the testing regime to locate the causes of faults being reported.
This conclusion would have been a triumph for me and for all the COT members — IF we had known of it. But this draft report, based upon the evidence we provides to Austel, was kept from COT members until 2007, long after it could have done us any good.
By law, this Draft Report should have been presented to the Minister for Communications, but it was never tabled or made public. The following month, the ‘final’ edited report was released, with significant alterations made at the behest of Telstra — including a general (and sometimes specific) watering down of findings and the deleting of this conclusion.
The details of this draft report and the ramifications of withholding it are discussed in depth later. Suffice to say here that if I had had access to its findings in March 1994, my case would have very likely been resolved in short order. Instead, along with my fellow COT members, I was pushed into a legalistic process in which Telstra, with its teams of lawyers, held all the cards.
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