One.Tel

And you were part of those, actually those two cases.

So one of them I can name was OneTel and the other was HIH.

How did you get there? Were you at the firm that was called in or was that something that you were specifically brought in to do? So, and really what's extraordinary, what What did it actually take? Because these cases had enormous public scrutiny.

So it was on TV every night, lots of people lost money, shareholders lost money, it was huge.

I think starting with your last question, you tend to ignore or avoid listening to anything that's going on around you.

I mean, once you start acting for a client in any matter, irrespective of what noise there may be, your focus really is on what you're doing for the client and what you need to understand in order to help the client out.

What got me to those matters, I was brought in to deal with the OneTel matter, and it And the HIH matter I was involved in when I moved firm.

So both those matters and those collapses just happened to occur very shortly after one after the other.

And this isn't just a small business problem as you grow.

OneTel, back in the 1990s, early 2000s, look, it had the backing of some of the biggest names in Australian businesses, including the Packer and Murdoch interests with James Packer, Lachlan Murdoch.

They were both sitting on the board.

and its customer base grew extraordinarily quickly, but the research into that collapse found that its IT strategy hadn't adapted to that rapid growth.

The systems that it worked for, the smaller business, simply didn't keep pace with what the business had become.

OneTel had a lot of complaints from customers about service and delivery and dissatisfaction.

Their systems did not keep pace with the growth.

So at this point, be honest with yourself.

... industry.

But there was a change, a deregulation, and they brought in Optus, and then the famous One.tel, uh, and in Vodafone and others.

So they needed to have engineers who could, uh, be put into silos so that, you know, you had this common knowledge of the telecoms industry.

The infrastructure-

... of course, was all Telstra.

Everything-

Let me just interrupt there, d- 'cause I think everybody would know the name Telstra and Optus and One.tel, uh, infa- famously.

Uh, the name Alcatel doesn't strike me as really well known.