Questionable Justice - Chapter Two & Three

PLEASE NOTE:

All of the discussed exhibits, which support this side of our story, are collated on a CD (numbered AS-1 to AS- 1169) and were provided to the offices of the Prime Minister of Australia, two of his most senior cabinet ministers and the Australian Federal Police between May and September 2014.

No one from the Prime Minister's office, or anyone from the above mentioned government departments have refuted the information supplied to them on that CD.

Continued from Questionable Justice'Chapter One

Chapter 2 Casualties of Telstra

In July 1992 Karen rang to tell me she had heard of a restaurant in Melbourne suffering the same phone problems that were crippling me.

I felt a great comfort in hearing this, and knew I needed to meet the owner. Making phone contact with the restaurant was of course difficult, but eventually I got through to Sheila Hawkins, proprietor of The Society restaurant in Bourke Street, in the centre of the city. We arranged to meet and I travelled to Melbourne in early August.

It was so good to talk to someone who experienced similar problems. And there were more of us. Sheila knew of an Ann Garms who ran the Tivoli Theatre Restaurant in Brisbane, who was also having serious telephone problems. Back in Cape Bridgewater I rang Ann to discover she was coming to Melbourne the following week to register her own complaints with Austel, the Australian Telecommunications Regulator, and we arranged to meet together with Sheila. I went into the city again for the meeting, where Ann mentioned another Brisbane business that was in similar trouble — a car parts company run by Maureen Gillen. Like Ann’s business, Maureen’s was trunked off the Fortitude Valley exchange. Sheila, meanwhile, had contacted Graham Schorer who somehow ran the Golden Courier Service out of North Melbourne — despite a very bad phone service.

Finally our little group gathered together at Sheila’s restaurant in Bourke Street, except for Maureen who couldn’t make the journey from Brisbane. It was Sheila who suggested we call ourselves COT — Casualties of Telstra. This was one of her last actions with the group as she withdrew shortly after due to ill-health.

At the top of the list of problems we held in common were those three little words: ‘No fault found.’ It wasn’t just that we all had to put up with ongoing service faults, Telstra’s evasion of responsibility in this regard made those faults a nightmare. Telstra had a duty to deliver us service up to a recognised network standard, and by failing to ‘find’ their faults they were effectively avoiding carrying out their statutory obligation.

In October 1992 COT had its first official meeting with Telstra, at the Ibis Hotel in Melbourne. We were a united and optimistic group of small-business telephone users, on our way down the path to justice. We had no idea what a long haul we were in for. Indeed, this first meeting felt eminently successful. Telstra sent three executives; they treated us courteously and we felt that our claims were being taken seriously. We were seen, and treated, as a concerned group of small-business people who had been consistently ignored by Telstra. We asked for Austel (the government regulator) to be the ‘honest broker’ in our matters, and the executives agreed to this. They took the documentary evidence we had brought, and at the end of the meeting we were left with a sense that it was all soon to be resolved.

After that initial meeting there were a number of meetings with Telstra and Austel. Based as he was in the city, Graham Schorer was the COT representative. Under pressure from Austel, Telstra was acknowledging that faults existed, though they still held back from admitting the scale of faults we knew to be true — and indeed, as it turned out, that they too knew to be true.

Guaranteed to network standard

Meanwhile, in July 1992 I had been obliged to ask Telstra for a guarantee that my phone service was up to standard. A bus service wanted such a guarantee (in case of urgent needs for communication) before it would contract to bring groups to the camp. Although I did not see how Telstra could guarantee such a thing on the basis of current performance, I thought a guarantee might have some use as leverage.

Not one but two guarantees eventually arrived (in the event, both too late for the purpose of securing the contract with the bus company). The first stated that my phone service was indeed ‘up to network standard’:

'Whilst our recent tests indicate that your service is now performing to normal network standards, I am initiating a further detailed study of all the elements of your service and the tests which have been conducted' (AS12).

The second stated:

'We believe that the quality of your service can be guaranteed and although it would be impossible to suggest that there would never be a service problem we could see no reason why this should be a factor in your business endeavours' (AS13).

Now I need to jump ahead of myself here, to draw on material I did not have access to at this time, but which reveals something of what was going on in the telephone exchange while my business was sinking.

In 1994 we COT members all ended up involved in arbitrations with Telstra. According to the rules of arbitration, Telstra had a legal obligation to provide us with relevant documents under the Freedom of Information Act. You will hear a lot more about this in due course, not least about the unreasonable time it took for FOI document requests to be delivered (often years too late); enough to say here, that in an FOI release in mid-1994 I received documents referring to the general congestion problem at Cape Bridgewater.

The second paragraph of a document titled ‘Subject PORTLAND – CAPE BRIDGEWATER PCM HBER’ of 12 July 1991, was of particular interest:

'When the ‘A’ direction of system 2 was initially tested, 11,000 errors per hour were measured. In the ‘B’ direction, approximately 216 errors per hour were measured, 72 errors per hour is the specified number allowable (see absentjustice.com Main Evidence  File  No/31)

This level of error was in fact known at least as early as February 1990, the very time my complaints were being stonewalled. And nor was it acknowledged to me at the time of writing (July 1991). And in the new exchange, the problems continued, as another document, titled ‘Portland — Cape Bridgewater — RCM System’ showed, referring to information logged in March 1993, long after Telstra had first reported these massive error rates (AS30):

The second page of this document explains why they ‘had no idea over what period of time these errors had accumulated’:

'The alarm system on all three RCM systems had not been programmed. This would have prevented any local alarms being extended back to Portland'.

They didn’t know how long these errors had been accumulating because, from 18 August 1991, when the new exchange (RCM) was installed at Cape Bridgewater, the fault alarm system had been left unconnected. Since this was an un-manned exchange, no-one could know when faults occurred — except, of course, us poor, defenceless customers.

This means that in September 1992 when Telstra management had written to me stating that the quality of my telephone service was guaranteed as up to network standard, they had failed to realise that this alarm had not been connected. Even the local telephone technicians were oblivious to the call loss due to the unconnected alarm system in the exchange. What kind of investigation into the faults I had reported over several years does this demonstrate? A farcical one. How, for several years, could they fail to notice that the alarm wasn’t connected?

A compensation deal

The formation of COT had come not a moment too soon for me. The frustration of struggling with problems that seemed immune to complaints, and about which I could do nothing but complain, could finally be shared. I had lost faith in my own judgement by this time; I had let down two different partners who had trusted me, and I was now borrowing from friends just to keep the camp running on a day to day basis. Through all of this, of course, the phone faults implacably continued.

The COT group continued to negotiate with Austel and Telstra, and in late 1992 our combined pressure finally produced results: Telstra approached me with a proposal for a compensation payout which included a confidentiality agreement to the effect that I would not disclose the value of any settlement which resulted from this. I signed this agreement on 11 December 1992 and I have honoured my word not to disclose the amount of the payout without prior approval by Telstra.

That same day, I went to Telstra’s city fault centre where the area general manager and I began a long discussion regarding the extent of my financial losses over the four and a half years since I first complained about the phones. This manager and I were the only people involved in this discussion. I provided her with copies of numerous letters I had received from clients and tradespeople, describing their experiences trying to ring me, and I explained how I had calculated the sum of my losses.

On a number of occasions the manager left me alone to examine documents she had given me. As she left on the first occasion, she explained that she would close the door so I could read in private and added that, if I needed to discuss anything with my advisors I was free to use the telephone: there was a direct outside line available at all times so I wouldn’t need to speak to an operator within the building. I made use of the phone a couple of times to ring Karen and talk over the offer; together we calculated how much I needed to repay her.

The documents provided by the manager were mostly hand-written and included copies of the so-called ‘guarantees’ I had received. According to one of the documents (AS12).  there was only a ‘single’ fault, lasting only ‘three weeks’, that triggered the recorded message (RVA) that my number was not connected. This document claimed that the RVA probably caused me to lose only about 50% of all incoming calls over this three-week period. Other documents referred to a minor fault in the phone exchange at Heywood plus some other minor faults which may have contributed to some call loss. The manager told me Telstra agreed to accept responsibility for these faults if I agreed to their offer [7].

I protested, and reeled off again the continuing and constant complaints I had been and still was getting from customers. Her response was a simple ‘take it or leave it’: this was Telstra’s last offer, she told me, and the only other avenue I could follow would be court proceedings. Her final comment was along the lines that, ‘Telstra has more time than you have money to fund court proceedings.’ Reluctantly, but feeling I had no other choice, I accepted. My reluctance was well justified.

By August 1993 came my first bundle of FOI documents from Telstra. In it, astonishingly, was a Telstra minute of 2 July 1992, which revealed that local Telstra technicians regarded my complaints were correct about the ‘service disconnected’ RVA on my line. Not only that, the observation was made that the problem, ‘is occurring in increasing numbers as more and more customers are connected …’ Senator Alston raised this document in Senates Estimates in February 1994, demanding a response from Austel. No response was forthcoming, and nowhere else did this revelation gather any advance for my cause.

 absentjustice.com / Arbitrator Evidence File No/60 (download)

And two years later I received a copy of an FOI document headed Telecom Secret (AS8).This was a copy of the notes brought by the manager to the settlement meeting. The opening page, reproduced here, shows all too clearly that Telstra knew how solid my case was. The manager had blatantly misled me into agreeing to sign.

The document goes on to state,

‘Mr Smith’s service problems were network related and spanned a period of 3–4 years,’ and, ‘Overall, Mr Smith’s telephone service had suffered from poor grade of network performance over a period of several years; with some difficulty to detect exchange problems in the last 8 months.’

My acceptance of the offer notwithstanding, I continued to experience faults in my phone service, particularly call drop-outs when, part-way through a conversation, the line would simply go dead, and short duration rings when the phone would ring once or twice and then stop, with no-one there if we picked up the receiver. Finally, in October of 1992, the area general manager arranged for two testing machines (called ‘Elmi’ machines) to be installed, one at the local Cape Bridgewater exchange and the other at my office.

On 13 October I reported four calls dropping out, at 1.20, 1.40, 2.00 and 3.00, and an occasion when I had answered the phone to find a dead line. Despite the Elmi machines, the Telstra technicians found, as they had in so many instances before, no faults that they could detect. What was going on?

It was two years before I got any elucidation from Telstra, and even then it shed no light on the matter. In 1994, in a bundle of FOI documents I received was a hand-written file note stating, ‘We had the Elmi disconnected at the RCM [exchange] and were installing it at Mr Smith’s house and the CCAS showed no evidence of above [not receiving ring] 1.20, 1.40, 2.00 and 3.00. (AS11)

This was simply not the case at all; I knew they were not installing it at my house at this time; it was already installed. So I asked Telstra to supply their Elmi print-outs from September–October 1992. Some weeks later a number of documents arrived, including tapes which show that the call drop-outs and dead lines that I had experienced appeared on Telstra’s monitoring equipment (CCAS) records as answered calls at approximately 1.30 pm and 3 pm.

 absentjustice.com / Main Evidence File No/28 (download)

I could not fathom why a local technician would state that the Elmi equipment was disconnected at the exchange and to be installed at my house when these two print-outs show that it was actually installed and operating at both locations, albeit incorrectly. I could only assume that all this reflected the competence and capacity of Telstra’s fault centre, as well as the accuracy of their records and reportage. That thought alone was very worrying when you are reliant on the telephone.

And now I began to suspect that there might not be a simple answer to the phone faults, just waiting to be discovered and fixed. It looked as if the problems were endemic throughout the organisation and its infrastructure.

As I struggled from the end of 1992 to the New Year of 1993 I began to wonder if ‘settling’ with Telstra had been such a good idea. Nothing had changed. I had been forced to re-finance, incurring more set-up fees, and because I still couldn’t afford to maintain the camp properly the place was looking decidedly abandoned. I felt as if I had been abandoned too. Both the buildings and I were tired, run-down and in need of a face lift!

The other COT members were no better off. Maureen and Ann had also accepted settlements directly from Telstra, while Graham had his through the courts. And for each of us, poor and faulty phone service continued unabated.

My only source of strength at this time was from my fellow COT members. One Saturday evening a couple of Scotches left me in tears of complete frustration. I knew I was easily capable of running the camp as I pictured it but instead I was trapped in a vicious cycle. Without customers I would soon be completely broke, but the customers couldn’t reach me because the phones didn’t work. Right then Graham Schorer rang, urging me to hang in there, convinced that we would win out in the end.

Yes, some calls did get through, in what proportion I shall never know, though perhaps the rate is indicated by the following story. In personal desperation, I decided to ring Don Burnard, a clinical psychologist the COT members had contacted when we were first creating the group. Dr Burnard had written a report regarding our individual conditions, noting the breakdown in our psychological defences due to the excessive and prolonged pressures we endured:

'All of these clients have been subjected to persistent environmental stress as a result of constant pressure in their business and erratic patterns of change in the functioning of their telephones which were essential to the success of their businesses'.

I rang Dr Burnard for support, but my conversation with his receptionist was interrupted three times by phone faults. Later I received a letter from his office, saying:

'I am writing to you to confirm details of telephone conversation difficulties experienced between this office and our residence mid-morning this day, 5 May 1993. At approximately 11.30 am today Mr Alan Smith telephoned this office requesting to speak with Don Burnard. Mr Burnard was not available to take his call. During this time the telephone cut out three times. Each time Mr Smith telephoned back to continue the call'.

Ann Garms and Graham Schorer had, by now, become my ‘comrades in arms’ in this war we were fighting, and we had many group discussions as we tried to find a way to deal with the evasions and deceptions of Telstra management. But we were simply three small-business people struggling against the might of a huge corporation. Not encouraging odds! We wondered if we could ever be in a position to expose Telstra’s unethical corporate strategies and continued and apparently deliberate mishandling of our complaints. And Ann, like myself, had begun to suspect that our phone lines were being bugged. I will return to this later, once we were able to provide evidence that our concerns were valid.

Early in 1993, as spokesperson for COT, Graham Schorer met with Robin Davey, the chairman of Austel (the telecommunications industry regulator) to discuss our way forward. Austel was sympathetic to our situation. It recognised we had been let down in our settlements and sought to establish a standard of service against which Telstra’s performance could be objectively measured in any future settlements.

Meanwhile, COT decided it was time to try to inform the Australian Senate of our plight. We sent submission after submission, with supporting FOI documents, and followed through with visits to Canberra, financed from our already depleted pockets, to meet with ministers who were sympathetic to our case.

By now I had accumulated more than seventy letters from customers who had been unable to reach me by phone. This example, from a year 7 co-ordinator for Hamilton High School (now Bainbridge College), who brought his group along every February from 1990, is typical:

'I wish to acknowledge in writing the repeated difficulty I have had contacting Alan Smith at the Cape Bridgewater convention centre by telephone. In the week March 1st to 5th I made 5 or 6 attempted phone calls to Alan but I was unable to get through, indeed the line was ‘dead’. This was extremely frustrating and had I not been aware of Alan’s phone problems, I would have used another camp site'.

Astonishingly, one letter, dated 17 May 1993, was from a senior Telstra technical engineer, who wrote regarding his own experience of trying to ring me:

'On the 24/2/93 I received a phone call from a technician at Portland who stated he had been given a fault from (1100 fault dept.) indicating a customer in Ballarat had trouble calling your business 055 267 267. I then attempted to ring 055 267 267 myself, the ring was tripped after several bursts, i.e. ‘answered’ and I received a loud noise similar to a radio carrier noise and a very faint ‘Hello’.

At last, a second person inside Telstra acknowledged that I had a problem with the phone service! The engineer had even given me his name. Yet in the course of their defence of my arbitration claims, Telstra proffered a Witness Statement from this man (made in December 1994) that included no reference to this.

Was the engineer pressured to stay quiet during my arbitration? I don’t know. Certainly, not all Telstra engineers or technicians treated COT complaints in good faith. Another Telstra technician, who experienced major problems during his official fax testing process on 29 October 1993, nevertheless advised the arbitrator that I had no problems with that service, even though the Telstra document that discusses these faults notes:

'During testing the Mitsubishi fax machine, some alarming patterns of behaviour were noted, these affecting both transmission and reception. Even on calls that were not tampered with the fax machine displayed signs of locking up and behaving in a manner not in accordance with the relevant CCITT Group 3 fax rules' (AS767-A).

In a similar incident, an FOI document regarding a complaint I lodged about my own phone service bears a hand-written note which states: ‘No need to investigate, spoke with Bruce, he said not to investigate also (AS1154).

Where was this attitude coming from? If from higher management, it seems an odd way to do business: exacerbating our problems so that we would only complain more.

In the first five months of 1993 I received another eleven written complaints, including letters from the Children’s Hospital and the Prahran Secondary College in Melbourne. The faults had now plagued my business, unabated, from April 1988 to mid 1993.

By now, due to COT’s pressure in Canberra, a number of politicians had become interested in our situation. The question was, would these politicians actually take any action on our behalf, or would they protect the ‘milking cow’ of the Telstra corporation?

In June 1993 the Shadow Minister for Communications, the Hon. Senator Richard Alston, was showing an interest. He and Senator Ron Boswell of the National Party both pushed for a Senate Inquiry into our claims and, I was recently told by an ex-Telstra employee, they were very close to pulling it off. If this Senate Inquiry had got off the ground, heads in Telstra might have rolled but it this didn’t happen, and those same ‘heads’ continue to control Telstra to this day.

Even though Senator Boswell is based in Queensland and most of the remaining members of COT are in Victoria, he has continued to offer his support. David Hawker MP, my local parliamentary member, was another who saw his ‘duty of care’ to his constituents and so answered our call for help. He took my claims seriously — indeed, he took the problem of poor phone service in his electorate seriously and was appalled at its extent. Mr Hawker sent me letters of support, put relevant people in touch with me, organised assistance for me, and has continued to go into battle on COT’s behalf for ten years now.

Non-connecting calls

While the politicians tried to launch a Senate Enquiry, COT continued to lobby Austel for assistance. Yet another telephone issue was affecting my business. In February 1993 I installed a 1800 free call number to encourage telephone business and right from the start experienced problems. Many calls to this number were not connecting; the caller heard only silence on the line and typically hung up. The business was thus potentially losing a client, but adding insult to injury, I was being charged for these non-connecting calls. Even worse, in many instances the caller heard a recorded announcement from Telstra to the effect that the number wasn’t connected. I first knew this problem was occurring through people reporting their difficulties trying to reach me. After this, I checked my bills carefully.

According to Telstra’s policy, customers are charged only for calls which are answered. Unanswered calls are not charged, and include:

… calls encountering engaged numbers (busy), various Telstra tones and recorded voice announcements as well as calls which ‘ring out’ or are terminated before or during ringing.

Between February and June 1993, I provided Austel with evidence of erroneous charging on unanswered calls on my 1800 service (in fact, it went on for at least another three years after that). John MacMahon, General Manager of Consumer Affairs at Austel, wanted a record of all non-connected calls and RVAs that were being charged to my 1800 account. In order to provide that, I needed the data from my local exchange.

Both Austel and the Commonwealth Ombudsman’s Office were aware that I made repeated requests of Telstra, under the rules of FOI, to provide me with the relevant data. Yet despite the involvement of these institutions, Telstra held out on me. In the end, it was more than a decade later that I received any of the relevant information, and that was through Austel. And of course it was too late by then, the statute of limitations on the matter had long expired.

I did not understand then, nor do I understand now, why Austel, as the government regulator of the telecommunications industry, was unable to demand that data from Telstra.

From June 1993 I had proof myself that Telstra knew the faulty billing in the 1800 system was a network problem from its inception.

PLEASE NOTE this billing evidence was provided to the Australian Government in 2014 on a CD numbered (AS1097).

_________________

Some of the hand written documents discussed in this segment (above) were provided by me and some by Telstra, so as to compare my claims with Telstra’s fault reports. Telstra failed to return to me various records, including my own, citing the confidentiality agreement as the reason. I therefore cannot cite the details of the document I refer to here. But what I can convey is, that had those documents been returned to me under  the 'arbitration discovery process' the award/compensation granted by the arbitrator would have been substantially higher than what he awarded.

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. Two 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. A story on the 'Briefcase Saga' is currently being written.

The briefcase was not locked, and I opened it to find out it belonged to (name deleted). 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 (AS1199) .

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 (AS1133-A; AS1133-B).

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, 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'.

Catharine 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 (AS694) 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 (absentjustice.com - Main Evidence File No/16)

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, under the Telecommunications Act 1991, 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.

https://www.facebook.com/Absent-Justice-868125286658054

Chapter-Four to follow