(Dated 22 February 2021, in the public domain since 24 Feb)
Dear Mr Wood,
Your letter to Allan Halse
I have seen your letter dated 18 February 2021 addressed to Allan Halse, concerning a letter I sent to the Chief of the Employment Relations Authority, Andrew Dallas, and his response to me.
It is correct that he replied to me and it went astray during a period when I was again having to relocate because of threats. I have long since acknowledged that to the Authority and expressed my regret about that. No-one has expressed any regret about the threats, which are commonplace in this area of supposed law.
As is widely known that Andrew Dallas does not generally acknowledge correspondence, so the apparent failure to reply appeared normal. It appears this apparent rudeness and inappropriate behaviour may be part of the attempts to pretend that the Authority is a court and its staff members are judges rather than public servants, which will be further explained below.
Andrew Dallas’ reply was in any case not substantive and so was irrelevant to what is a very important issue for the lawful governance of New Zealand.
As I believe Allan Halse has told you, the background events were another instance of the Authority making orders which it has no power to make. The process has been so widespread it has led to a sea-change in New Zealand law. In effect, a conflicting jurisdiction has been created within the New Zealand legal system, which can be used – and demonstrably has been used – for criminality, by various public officials and lawyers.
The main planks of this jurisdiction are that it enforces illegal contracts, which is how white-collar fraud is done, and it then suppresses the evidence of that. It can also suppress evidence of other offences, including bullying, and effectively continue the bullying after the employee has left, by blacklisting, especially using falsified records. The jurisdiction has also developed “non-identification orders”, so that everyone, including MPs, is told they are not allowed to know about the frauds or who is carrying them out.
Why people have swallowed that is mysterious. Who these people are and what they do, and that it is criminal, is visible from the reported cases alone – although I appreciate that when one starts to work out what is wrong, it is very intricate. I can’t help that, but I can set it out for you.
I am sure Parliament did not intend to set this system up. It does not appear that the practices of the Authority and lawyers are authorised by the legislation, as I will discuss below. However, the government is allowing officials to do whatever they like, and to sign out money to lawyers to suppress evidence of it. It is unsurprising that bullying and fraud are rife, because it is now so easy to get away with.
Whether or not Parliament intended this system, the government is answerable to the international authorities such as the UN Office on Drugs and Crime for running what amounts to overt domestic corruption and money-laundering.
It seems most likely to me that you have engaged a charlatan in a suit to advise you, and have failed to do any due diligence about him. Over a decade or so, he has gradually rearranged the New Zealand legal system so he can make money out of it, and close down any protests. If that’s right, I take my hat off to the success of such an expansive and lucrative confidence trick, but it is still disgusting.
The preliminary explanation of what has happened that I will set out here for you will form the basis of a better report in due course. If you want to use it, or ask questions, I am happy to help you.
However by now it does appear that New Zealand’s government is content to be overrun, so I will otherwise just proceed with the work that New Zealand actually paid for me to relocate to do, which is to operate as the critic and conscience of society – and to research and publish on how the legal system operates.
Judicial review in the case raised with Andrew Dallas
I had written to Andrew Dallas as a preliminary to judicial review of an illegal order made by a member of his staff Marija Urlich. Rather than confine herself to her proper role of resolving the employment problem before her, she chose to interfere with Allan Halse’s business arrangements at the request of a private lawyer, which she had no jurisdiction to do.
It would be normal for a manager in Andrew Dallas’ position to seek to resolve a problem created by a staff member, rather than invite litigation. He claimed he had no influence, which is incorrect.
He has a statutory duty under section 166A of the Employment Relations Act 2000 to ensure that his staff know what their powers are. He could and should have ensured education and training for his staff so that they would know the scope and limits of their powers and functions.
A Member should know that the renewal of their contract by the Minister can be effectively blocked by the Chief if they abuse their powers. However the record shows that that does not happen either.
The staff Member has since repeated the illegal order and published it, purporting to ban Mr Halse from conducting his business, so we are proceeding to judicial review. There is nothing in the governing Act giving Members power to interfere in private businesses.
Judicial review is there to ensure justice, which means enforcing the will of Parliament. It means ensuring that officials do not exceed their powers and act illegally.
However Andrew Dallas’ staff and others object to the use of that and are trying to stop it. They appear possibly to be trying to say their “orders” cannot be questioned.
Andrew Dallas’ letter to me went astray while I was relocating because of threats to me personally.
The personal attacks on both Allan Halse and me appear to be aimed at ensuring that you and others do not listen to what the Authority and lawyers have been doing. This compromises Parliament, because they have been overruling you.
Nature of the Authority’s conduct: systemic illegality
Authority members have been – on invitation - making up and using bogus rules of law. Insofar as they have no power to do that, those practices are all illegal.
An illegal practice, in a public body, can be just a harmless mistake. That is because public bodies can legally do only what Parliament empowers them to do.
However some of what the Authority does and allows parties to do, without the authority of Parliament, is very damaging to individuals and businesses; some of it stated and intended to be damaging, such as when officials and their lawyers make good on their threats to “bankrupt” or “ruin” people; and some of it is contrary to the criminal law, such as when they cover up fraud or issue bogus “fines”, especially those payable to fraudsters.
Although there has been more publicity for the effective permission given to sex offences by the conduct of the Authority and employment lawyers, the system set up by the Authority also allows employers or managers to transfer money secretly and conceal the evidence of the transfers.
Some of that concealment has gone wrong, and not only the frauds being concealed but the process of concealment, which has included lawyers stealing evidence and selling it, can be shown.
The reason for the threats and attacks on people like Allan Halse and myself appears to be that we know, and can show, what employment lawyers have but we do not participate in those processes ourselves. Because these processes have been presented as legalised, most lawyers have gone along with them and become compromised.
The consequences of unravelling the scam will be difficult, but the consequences of not doing that are worse.
This is far too big an operation to have arisen by accident. It appears probably to have been systematically taught. But in any case vital public governance systems have been visibly corrupted.
If the government does not act, but accepts the situation and looks the other way, New Zealand will inevitably lose its international investment status.
Current judicial review of a range of cases
You will be aware that I have conduct of a current judicial review of a range of illegal orders against Mr Halse made by both MBIE and the Employment Court (which is not technically a court, but is staffed by real judges, and which is also run by MBIE). You are entitled to see the papers and I would be happy to talk you through them.
The disputed orders include baseless financial transfers and suppression of evidence. These are of the essence of classic corruption. If they are unauthorised and illegal, a number of public officials and lawyers have been committing and concealing offences. If Parliament has authorised these transactions, New Zealand itself is in breach of its international obligations as regards corruption.
Crown Law is representing the Employment Relations Authority and the Employment Court. They are not contesting the review. That is, the Crown does not dispute that the orders made by MBIE officials and judges were illegal. It is representing the Authority and the Employment Court but it is not suggesting that their disputed actions were legal.
It appears that the Authority (i.e. presumably Andrew Dallas) readily instructed Crown Law not to fight the issue. That was sensible, though it does not explain why he continues to enable the illegality in the meantime.
However the Employment Court for some time refused to acknowledge service of the proceedings or accept the jurisdiction of the reviewing Court at all – rather like those people who claim to be “sovereign citizens” who are not subject to the rule of law – and it then took some time to decide it would not defend what it has done.
In the past, Crown Law has defended MBIE in similar illegal processes, notably the Peter Whittall case, so MBIE and Crown Law are compromised.
The cases are actively contested by the publicly-funded bodies and lawyers who have obtained illegal orders. None of them has produced any legal basis for those orders. The closest they have come to that is to say that if the Authority or Employment Court order something, it is legal for that reason. As the question is whether what they were doing was legal, it is the “sovereign citizen” argument again. It has however been successful in the past, which is what creates the problem for New Zealand governance.
It is not certain how the judiciary will react, because certain of their members are also personally badly compromised, from past actions when they were lawyers.
No doubt because the judicial review process is capable of exposing the lawyers and officials, the level of threats and attacks on myself and Allan Halse has increased again. The attacks are illegal, both in their nature and in the funding and operation of them using public resources.
My correspondence with Andrew Dallas was about that illegality. The response of him and his staff has been, in effect, to say that illegality may not be raised.
That is also the response of other publicly-funded lawyers, including those who also have positions in the Law Society, when their conduct is raised.
If that is the situation, and people cannot be held accountable for wrongdoing because the subject cannot even be raised, it means Parliament has lost control of the country.
Breaches of reporting requirements by the New Zealand government
New Zealand has been in similar international trouble before, when it was removed from the European Union investment “white list” in 2012 because of money-laundering practices through shell companies. Money-laundering is a cause for concern because of the industries it supports – drug-trafficking, sex trafficking, child prostitution and pornography, and terrorism. To retrieve its investment industry, New Zealand promised to ratify the United Nations Convention Against Corruption, which it did in December 2015.
By then, the extension of employment law to allow abuse of public resources, procurement frauds and money-laundering in public bodies, and to damage the required transparency and accountability of the use of public resources, the new functions of employment law should have been addressed during the ratification and implementation of international anti-money-laundering obligations under the United Nations Convention Against Corruption. The changes were well established before 2015.
A legal regime allowing individuals to operate public sector corruption and cover it up was not mentioned to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, as it should have been.
As you will surely know, the treaty itself was mysteriously mislaid by MFAT immediately on ratification. However, it is on the Internet.
Andrew Little as Minister of Justice supplied a cabinet paper and held meetings, but he dealt with only the international corruption issues in the treaty, not the domestic ones.
There should have been acknowledgement and analysis of the problem, a plan to put it right, and then the implementation of the plan should then have been reported on in the periodic review process last year.
Andrew Little, and officials in the MoJ and MFAT, have declined overtly to address the domestic corruption issues. The MoJ also said it was “speculation” that coverup legislation piloted through Parliament by Andrew Little was drafted by an official who had personally and financially benefited from serious corruption. As his role had been reported on RNZ and in Hansard, it appeared that neither Andrew Little nor those officials were taking legal governance or New Zealand’s international obligations in respect of money-laundering seriously.
As far as I know, the domestic corruption, including the creation of a method for carrying it out, has still not been reported to the UNODC, even though the MoJ and MFAT were very obviously aware that it should have been throughout. The treaty was however moved to MoJ after I raised the issue with MFAT.
Legalising offences – personal, sexual and financial
Allan Halse’s interest is in countering workplace bullying. He has been concerned at the proliferation of cases, often serious cases in which the target has been threatened by managers and lawyers with “destruction”, and the Authority has assisted them by making orders it has no power to make, which then carry through that “destruction” instead of dealing with the original problem, as Parliament intended.
The methodology of that “destruction” is the same as the suppression of evidence of forgery, theft and money-laundering. It is the making of orders that are illegal because the Authority has no power to make them.
If government officials, or even judges, can make orders suppressing evidence and documents relating to alleged crimes, obviously it is relatively easy to transfer money illegally and get away with it. This is the essence of the problem for New Zealand governance now. These powers are powers to conduct illegal financial transactions and hide the evidence. Those are not powers a country can have individual, let alone any tribunal or court, operating.
That is why perverting the course of justice is such a serious offence. It undermines the country’s infrastructure.
The main mystery to myself - and possibly also, in another format, to Allan Halse - is why MPs and Ministers have allowed the employment jurisdiction, which is a statutory jurisdiction under the regulatory control of MBIE, to develop powers for government officials to commit offences and pay out of taxpayers’ money for them to be covered up, and has generally been allowed to wreck New Zealand governance systems.
It is not possible to run a country properly if its officials are allowed to commit offences, or cover them up, or use public money to do that.
The responsibility of MPs and Ministers to protect the authority of Parliament
The consequences of running this system will be that other countries will not trust New Zealand’s governance. It will not be seen as a safe place to do business, especially investment business, given that these are processes for making money disappear untraceably. The reason for that collapse in confidence will be that the rule of law has been allowed to lapse.
The processes themselves are visible. Records of officials and even judges perverting the course of justice are public and cannot be erased. I will explain in more detail below how that seems to have happened.
The physical suppression of evidence of forgery and false accounting, for example, has also not been entirely efficient. This seems to be why the gagging orders have become more and more desperate, until last year Parliament itself actually authorised a process for enforcing them, though without actually making them legal in themselves. That breached the constitutional separation of powers and made it much more difficult for New Zealand’s MPs and Ministers to claim any intention to comply with international money-laundering obligations.
Until that breach, the enforcement processes used – being proceedings for contempt of court orders made without Parliaments’s authorisation - were themselves a contempt of Parliament. There is a good argument that it is still not possible to enforce orders that are void because they were beyond officials’ powers, but what you have done recently means you are coming very close to putting New Zealand completely outside the international trade and investment regime, if indeed you have not already done that.
New Zealand’s MPs’ practice of turning a blind eye or even assisting the fraudsters is public and cannot be erased. This has been going on for years, and you have been informed.
Though it does not matter why you have let this happen, it looks to me as though you have probably been the victims of a remarkable confidence trick.
I am glad if you are engaging with Allan Halse and will make a start on having your colleagues do what they are supposed to do, and uphold the rule of law. Allan and I have obviously both been damaged personally by these officials, and so have many others, but the consequences for New Zealand are a huge structural issue on which the credibility of its governance systems depends.
It is easy to see that things are wrong, if you do not blank out any critique. If you have any questions, I’m sure you will ask.
How the ability to get away with offences was introduced
The powers the officials use to cover up – and so enable - offences are not in legislation, but have been introduced through systematic statutory misinterpretation over the past decade.
MPs understanding tribunal and court procedures
I understand that MPs and Ministers have been told that they should not query, or even look at, court proceedings. That is incorrect and unwise.
You cannot interfere with proceedings that are before a court and I would not invite you to. But you can certainly look at them, and MPs ought to be interested in judicial reviews, because they are about holding the executive and courts to account in respect of the will of Parliament.
By looking at such proceedings, you would be able to see the issues for yourselves, including what is being said on the part of the courts, the government and other parties.
Court proceedings are public and open. There is no good reason for anyone to tell you cannot look at them. If someone has told you that, they do not want you to realise that various government officials are paying various private lawyers to claim the right to overrule Parliament, mostly (so far) on the basis that they have done it before and got away with it.
These are serious reviews. What the executive and courts have been permitting and even enforcing include actions of MBIE and other government officials that Parliament has outlawed as criminal offences.
The offences are the ordinary ones of procurement frauds, including damaging others’ businesses; theft and money-laundering; and sexual assault and rape. The coverup method is itself an offence, namely perverting the course of justice.
It is the coverup that is more specialised and detailed.
Anonymisation and non-identification of offenders
Very early on, the employment jurisdiction began anonymising its proceedings in unauthorised ways. “Non-identification orders” can be seen on the front of orders in the employment jurisdiction or from other courts in cases emanating from there. They have no statutory reference because there is none. This ought to have been immediately obvious as contrary to the principles of open justice and an affront to proper Parliamentary process. Open justice is so fundamental that only Parliament can counter it, with primary legislation.
You will be aware that suppression and anonymisation in the criminal process has allowed considerable fraud, including in the public sector, to flourish. That does at least have parliamentary sanction. The use of unauthorised suppression in what is essentially a commercial jurisdiction ought to have appeared to everyone as highly dubious in itself. It is how you do white-collar fraud.
When the Authority has made a bogus “non-identification order”, they have carefully phrased it so that it does not assert directly that there is a power to do so, but it may often be made in the vicinity of the mention of clause 10 of Schedule 2 to the ERA 2000. This allows a “non-publication order” to be made, but not a “non-identification order”.
The adaptation of the employment jurisdiction, being by persistent statutory misinterpretation, relies heavily on slippage between words and concepts, and then the enforcement of orders that have no proper legal basis just because they are orders. That is, the assertion is that because the Authority or the Employment Court (that is, MBIE) have asserted they have a power and made a certain order, such as ordering silence about theft or corruption, or about the bodies or individuals that are involved in it, it becomes contempt of the Court or the Authority to report such theft or corruption.
The authorities for contempt proceedings in New Zealand come out of defamation proceedings. In such proceedings, it is a defence that the “publication” complained of is true. What fraudsters need is a means of making it dangerous to report the truth. The term “publication” in the context of defamation means anything said or stated to another person. If, as is vaguely claimed, that is what it means in clause 10 of Schedule to the ERA 2000, that would put the person or organisation concerned out of action completely.
A major problem for organisations or individuals that obtain some form of gagging order in relation to wrongdoing is that, if there is a dispute, the requirement of open justice means that the wrongdoing will be exposed in the course of that dispute, and will probably gain all the more notoriety for being thrashed out in court. This is sometimes known as the “Streisand effect” - from an attempt by Barbra Streisand to suppress a photograph of her house in Malibu that was being shown on the internet. The numbers of viewers multiplied rapidly as news of her court action spread.
Suppression of documents
The slippage operated in relation to “non-publication orders” has been to transfer the meaning of “publication” - any mention at all – from defamation proceedings, where the specific thing not to be “published” has been the subject of specific judgment by a court, to an Authority power to suppress any mention of those involved in an employment dispute. The way it is used means that the Authority simply claims power to suppress any report of serious wrongdoing. There is no defence that the report is true, or that it concerns criminal corruption by public officials.
There is no power for MBIE to silence people at all. The Authority is given a power to “prohibit” publication of names, pleadings or “evidence given” in relation to its matters. That is, the report of its determinations can omit those details despite being a quasi-judicial determination, and journalists should not report those details either. Unfortunately the drafter of the clause said “any matter”, which in context must mean the matter in hand, whatever it is, so it is interpreted as giving MBIE power to govern matters before other courts or anywhere at all – the implications of which would, as stated, make it impossible for the people or organisations concerned to conduct social or business interactions at all.
Most importantly, there is no power to suppress documents, nor to make them suppressible when they have been produced in evidence. The suppression of documents is how fraud is done. The Authority and Employment Court routinely suppress documents when they have no power to do so. This alone would be sufficient to bring New Zealand governance into question.
Use of made-up rules to suppress criticism and put people out of business
Allan Halse’s serial cases with the Rangiura Trust Board, also known as RPW or R (the last being an apparent attempt to make the report of the proceedings look like a criminal one against Allan), are all based on a bogus “non-identification order” originally made in an unsigned email from the Authority’s administrator. The lawyer and Authority member concerned then made increasingly incoherent orders springing off each other, and the Employment Court was persuaded to make orders as well, notwithstanding that Allan pointed out there was no power to do any of it.
I understand you are meeting with Allan soon. He will be able to tell you about the moment the judge – after seven Authority determinations and three previous Court decisions – actually went to show me the statutory basis for all those proceedings, because I said there was none. He seemed genuinely astonished to find it was not there. We made quite literal stacks of paperwork so that the judge could back out whilst saving face. I reported the lawyer, Sam Hood, to the Law Society for misleading the court. Allan put none of this in the public arena, though he was entitled to do so.
Nearly a year later, the judge decided to bluff it out and find against us – including an inappropriate ad feminam attack on me personally. Judges are not supposed to attack counsel personally without giving them an opportunity to make representations: I think the problem was that the judge had previously claimed we could not review his decision, but we had started review proceedings anyway, including of the judge’s earlier decisions. That was because of other attacks on Allan by another lawyer, also based on intricately wrong documentation.
If the law were as that judge claims, it would have to emanate from statute because the employment jurisdiction is a statutory jurisdiction. That would mean that when New Zealand loses its international status, it is Parliament’s fault rather than the fault of certain lawyers and judges.
I do not think the law is as claimed. The consequences of anonymisation, non-identification and general secrecy in the justice process are that the process can easily be hijacked by fraudsters. If they have not been brought in for those purposes then it is coincidental, but still extremely damaging.
Suppression of evidence of specific offences
To start with, the coverup method for specific illegal transactions was NDAs, or “non-disclosure agreements”. They can be illegal themselves, and then they have to be covered up too.
If you followed the legal angle of the #MeToo movement, you will have seen that Harvey Weinstein, in particular, bought the silence of many victims. His lawyers knew that process was illegal, so they hid the evidence of them procuring that illegal act – the only transaction that is more or less fully publicised is that by which Mark Mansell of Allen & Overy in London arranged with the lawyer of Zelda Perkins to suppress evidence of Harvey Weinstein attacking and raping women. The lawyers, cynically, paid her to sign a document which included her (supposed) consent to the concealment of that document itself. She came forward having obtained it through privacy requirements, as even her own lawyer would not produce it.
In New Zealand, some statutory misinterpretation led lawyers to claim that even illegal contracts – including contracts to hide evidence – were legal and enforceable if MBIE signed off on them under section 149 of the Employment Relations Act 2000.
A trend started to refer to such a contract as a “record of settlement”, or even as being a “creature of statute” or “like a family court order”. That seems to have operated as the primary method of officials getting away with offences between about 2014 and 2019.
A decision of Chief Judge Inglis in 2017 said that the enforcement of illegal contracts was obviously not what Parliament intended. It gave the lie to the idea that there was a sacred form of contract that lawyers could “advise” parties to make, and appears to have prompted the diversion of the Authority into just making further illegal orders itself.
The bogus “non-identification order” in the Rangiura cases was based on the enforcement of an illegal contract, which Rangiura’s counsel, and two Authority members, claimed could be done because MBIE had signed it off. It appeared then, and in a later hearing before a different judge in relation to a different matter, that whoever had put across the message that a “record of settlement” could overrule Parliament had omitted to mention Chief Judge Inglis’ decision that it could not.
The judicial studies organisation has claimed that who teaches judges is secret: that is nonsense, and you may wish to ask why that duty of transparency is breached, and indeed who does that teaching.
In relation to the correspondence between me and Andrew Dallas, that too was about education and training, this time for Authority members. You may wish to check whether there is in fact such education and training and, again, who does it. That is not information that is related to “judicial independence”.
It will be interesting to know whether the teaching is done by officials or lawyers who have personally benefited from the operation of theft and money-laundering scams in the employment jurisdiction. Of course, if they were protected by “non-identification orders”, you might not feel able to ask, except that there is no such thing in the employment jurisdiction, so, luckily, you can.
“Employment” becoming a universal jurisdiction
What apparently got overlooked completely was that the employment jurisdiction has no power in relation to anything except employment contracts. The Authority and Employment Court had started by reinterpreting their jurisdiction as being over anything on the same piece of paper as an employment agreement, moved into anything between an employer and employee, and then just claimed jurisdiction over anyone. Their takeover of Parliament’s powers over the country’s governance goes back well over ten years.
Parliament currently has some advantage in being able to say it was tricked, like the judge in Allan’s Rangiura case. I hope that you do not react as that judge did, by adopting the scam. You will lose that advantage and it will be much more difficult for those currently in place to be taken seriously in politics in future.
From about 2019 onwards, the Authority started overtly making orders that enabled the obstruction of justice in other jurisdictions, including in the High Court. That is, the employment jurisdiction started governing not only the executive, but the judiciary.
It did it by branching out from asserting that any contract signed off by MBIE employment officials became equivalent to a court order that could overrule the clear will of Parliament (such that forgery should be condemned, not concealed). That was done by saying that the consent of two parties to the concealment of evidence of fraud was equivalent to an order to conceal that fraud – whence the Authority saying that a contract signed off by MBIE is a “statutory instrument”. The Authority then moved on to say that the duties owed under a generic employment contract gave it the power to make any order the employer asked for. So if a company was contesting a liquidation, the Authority could order witnesses not to give evidence about that company’s operations.
Unfortunately, the judiciary went along with that. However, judges are former lawyers. By then it was known that at least one High Court judge was personally badly compromised by having been shown to have used the “record of settlement” process not only to cover up forgery and fraud but to commit fraud by which she and her client improperly received further money.
The justification claimed – that she did not realise certain evidence was forged – does not help her. It is an offence to hide evidence, regardless of whether or not it is forged.
What is even more concerning is that various of her High Court judge colleagues publicly wedded themselves to the idea that documents could be validly suppressed from the legal process by private parties.
Claiming a right to overrule Parliament
In June 2020, Chief Judge Inglis gave a decision which very obviously and publicly required the Authority to stop making things up. She also reviewed a case in which the Authority had put a lower value on the business of an advocate, having obtained the private contractual terms agreed between him and his client. Allan and another person went to the Court of Appeal about a couple of dozen orders of the Authority and other judges of the Employment Court - as I say, Crown Law on behalf of the Authority and Employment Court is not contesting the case, and only private lawyers funded by certain public sector bodies are saying the orders are valid, and then only on the basis that they have been made, not that there was any entitlement to make them. In effect, they are saying that the employment jurisdiction, or MBIE, is a law unto itself.
The basis for that general jurisdiction to overrule Parliament is asserted by the lawyer relevant to the correspondence with Andrew Dallas as clause 1 of Schedule 2 to the ERA 2000. *
The matter on which I wrote to Andrew Dallas shows very obviously that the Authority intends to keep
When the Authority or Employment Court takes a decision that Parliament has not given it a power to take, it is overruling Parliament. By now it is clear that this part of the executive persistently exceeding its powers is not accidental. That is clear from the current judicial review cases, where Crown Law for MBIE is taking no active part and the lawyers for the various institutions who have been attacking Allan give no authority for the powers they have claimed.
The reliable coverup of offences is key to the effectiveness of conducting the secret financial transfers.
It consists of a range of methods of silencing people and “ruining” them if they threaten to expose the scam – also threatened by the lawyers concerned in the terms: “We will destroy your entire career.” The Authority then enables that, or carries out that threat itself. You will be aware that MBIE was recently found to have conducted such an operation against Grant Dalton of Team New Zealand. It is the extension of the procurement frauds that government officials operate and then conceal – it wrecks not only proper public procurement, but also market competition.
The matter I raised with Andrew Dallas was an Authority member threatening to make an order cancelling a private business contract of Allan Halse, which she has since done. I have had similar threats and actions myself, as have many people. I understand that the clients in that case have given up on New Zealand as, in effect, a rogue or failed state, and returned to their own country reporting that no-one else should go there to do business.
Universal or near-universal practice amongst employment lawyers
The implementation of the threats also depends on victims’ lawyers cooperating with the offenders, often directly betraying their own clients as well as their own professional standards. In some cases it is very obvious that the lawyers have cooperated between themselves in offences such as selling evidence of officials’ and others’ offending behaviour, especially of false accounting. In other cases MBIE can be seen cooperating with threats to “ruin” victims for raising employers’ or officials’ wrongdoing at all.
This has now become open practice amongst the lawyers as well. I have just received an email from a hifalutin firm “reminding” me of my duty of “respect and courtesy” because I wrote to say that we intend to judicially review another publicly-funded action against Allan Halse, this time in the District Court. I explained how the action was carried out, pointed out that the legislation they relied on did not say what they said, and asked for an explanation of how what they did was legal, if it was. The hifalutin lawyer did not of course give any explanation but “reminded” me of my duty of “respect and courtesy”. There is nothing disrespectful or discourteous about a lawyer identifying wrongdoing that may be the subject of proceedings – that is what lawyers do.
This firm has previously threatened to report me for “misleading the court” by stating the actual text of a section of the Act – I thought they were joking, but they actually did that.
If I had something wrong, they needed just to disagree with me in the pleadings. It is obviously rather difficult to disagree with a direct quote from legislation, which was what I was presenting. The judge then mentioned my supposed “misconduct” in court, and when I pointed out the assertion of it was an obviously desperate act of a lawyer who has been caught misleading the court himself, it appeared the judge had merely trusted the rich man in a suit. That appears to be largely what judges and MPs do. You should be able to, but it makes you vulnerable to lawyers who abuse the system.
Can I suggest please that you question any supposed rules that are presented to you, and ask for an authority? and do not assume that men in suits are everything they claim to be. I have been a lawyer for over thirty years, and was an academic for twenty of those. All my qualifications are genuine, but when I have offered to help, I have been rebutted, often quite cheekily, apparently in favour of a man who not only forged documents to sign out money and promotions to his friends and relations and to pay lawyers to “destroy my entire career” with forged documents, but also purchased his PhD, for example. The material used for the statutory misinterpretations appears to come straight from things he has written in other areas of law.
I take a wide interest, but have never seen or imagined anything like this, where a bunch of lawyers set out to subvert a whole legal system, and succeed.
Evidence of unlawful alterations to the New Zealand legal system
This alteration of the legal system had to be publicly done, because of the method chosen. Once you understand what was done, it is then readily visible.
The lawyers involved openly claim, when challenged, that they have created the illegal jurisdiction in effect by various forms of precedent. “Precedent” is a familiar idea in the common law, which is often established by court decisions. However, as the lawyers also know, it does not apply to the employment jurisdiction.
The employment jurisdiction is a creature of statute. That is, it is entirely governed by the powers and functions that Parliament gave to it. Parliament created institutions by the Employment Relations Act 2000, which are MBIE’s mediation service, the Employment Relations Authority and the Employment Court. It then gave them powers, which do not include most of what they now do.
Parliament is supreme and can do what it likes. If public bodies have any powers, they must be granted by Parliament. The Authority and the Employment Court are public institutions and anything they do in excess of their statutory powers and functions is illegal.
What they do is misinterpret provisions, usually by taking half a sentence out of context or some similar expedient, and say that they do have power which was given by Parliament.
I do not believe it is difficult to see that Parliament did not give the various powers claimed. When I have challenged them in court, no basis for the powers has been claimed. Instead, the response has been everything from lawyers making procedural manoeuvres to outright threats of violence, some of which have been carried out.
I have also seen judges in hearings taken aback to find that, although they have trusted lawyers to be asking for orders that are available in law and so have made the orders asked for, when they check, they find the provisions are just not there. I find this fairly incredible, but I have seen it more than once and I do not think the judges were acting. It looks as though some alternative view may have been taught, and they just never checked.
A teaching programme where the “students” are uncritical would also explain the similar words used by disparate lawyers when talking about the reinterpretations.
For example, lawyers I do not think are crooks have asserted that if MBIE signs off a contract under the ERA 2000, it is then a “creature of statute” and is “like a family court order”. That is obvious nonsense. A contract is a private arrangement, and if it is a contract to commit a crime, it is illegal and ineffective. But if Parliament legislates for something in statute, it can and should be ordered by a court, and if it conflicts with statute that says the substance of the order is illegal or criminal, there is some sort of constitutional (or drafting) problem. I see no such problem. An arrangement between private parties is a contract, To assert that it has the status of legislation is just wrong.
Whichever it is, MBIE can be seen doing it, and it’s a breach of international obligations against corruption, so the New Zealand government is in trouble either way.
There is a mass of evidence in the published decisions. It looks like a case of a big scam being easier to get away with than a small one.
Role of the Law Society: how lawyers have obtained illegal orders
I have spoken to the Law Society about the process of obtaining illegal orders. That is done by the lawyers just asking for them, and the Authority and judges granting them, even though they have no power to do so.
It is clear that the Law Society has cooperated with, rather than prosecuting, the lawyers involved for, for example, misleading the courts. It also appear that the Law Society’s hierarchy knows what it has done. It is exactly the same process as the one used to support the Russell McVeagh rapist.
Nikki de la Mare, the National Complaints Manager, told me that the Law Society had decided not to implement its regulatory duties in respect of litigation but to leave it to the judges.
Although that sounds fine, it means that, if the judges don’t check that what they are being asked to order is something they have power to order, they then can embarrass themselves and the court system by making illegal orders, if they do not question the assertions made to them by lawyers about their powers.
I have several experiences of this, both in relation to bogus orders obtained against Allan Halse.
Bogus “non-identification” orders
In November 2019 I went on the record just before a rehearing of yet another application for Allan to be fined or imprisoned for breach of a non-identification order. The judge wanted to know if I was aware that there had been orders about this before, and I confirmed I was. I told the judge there was no power to make the non-identification order on which all the cases were based. He went to show me the power in the Act. He appeared genuinely astonished to find it was not there. If I had not seen it, I would not have believed it, but I do not think his astonishment was a feat of acting. I think he genuinely had no idea the lawyer had been deceiving him. It was also obvious from the lawyer’s response that he had known all along.
As well as appalling behaviour by the lawyer, this was a deep-set failure of judicial legal education. My interest in that form of order actually began by seeing such an order from the employment jurisdiction on an external court order i.e. Court of Appeal. It had no statutory reference, which real orders do, but I assumed that was just missing. I then wondered why Parliament had given such a power in a jurisdiction where it could be used for fraud. The answer was, of course, that it hadn’t. It’s not there. But the very first judge who was asked to make a bogus non-identification order in the employment jurisdiction should have seen that as well. We are now years down the line. But it’s still bogus and the lawyers still know it’s bogus.
Bogus “appeal” process
The judge also agreed with the lawyer for the other side to treat the case as an appeal from the Authority. There is no power to hear an appeal from the Authority. It would elevate the executive to the status of judiciary (which they sometime claim, as that judge also did), it would mean that the right to justice was routinely ignored, contrary to the will of Parliament in NZBORA, and it would also reverse the burden of proof. It is extremely difficult to see that the judges would not know the difference between a rehearing and an appeal, but, assuming it is not a deliberate act of bad faith, it must be a serious failure of education that they do not see that they cannot just miscellaneously use powers they do not have.
I attended a case of Allan’s in which I was not acting. Allan’s own lawyer, whom I believe he has since sacked, also asked for the case to be heard as an appeal. He did so quickly and quietly and only orally. I may have been the only person who noticed, except for the judge, who then made the order on that basis (this is the one where I was threatened and “reported” for the misconduct of citing the actual law).
Enforcing illegal contracts against third parties – contempt of Parliament
She ordered that a contract to obstruct justice be enforced against third parties. None of that is legally possible unless Parliament has authorised it. I don’t believe Parliament has done that, but as you are now allowing it to be enforced, you are guilty in the international arena either way. The only alternative is that the lawyers were mistaken, but it has been shown in the current judicial reviews that they were not. Accordingly what they are doing is contempt of Parliament, as appears.
Shortly after that, I represented Allan in a case where the Authority had made a gagging order out of the blue. Again, I am sure that is not legal as Parliament has not authorised it. if you had, you would be in serious international trouble; and as you are now (since the amendment piloted by Andrew Little) giving power to enforce, you are in that trouble anyway.
Failure of education or mischievous education?
In the course of that case, the enforcement of illegal contracts came up. The judge, who had previously sent a man to prison by way of enforcing a contract to pervert the course of justice (by which his own lawyer “advised” him to hand back to Tauranga City Council officials the evidence of their own corruption – this is actually recited in the case report), actually claimed that where MBIE had signed a contract off, it became unquestionable. Again, I do not think he was acting. When I said there was a case of the Chief Judge saying that was just wrong –and gave him the case reference, he had no idea how to spell it. The best interpretation is that he had been taught the wrong thing and taken it in uncritically. The cases he produced himself came from a 2011 report on a different area of law, again written by the same man that drafted your recent Act allowing MBIE orders to be enforced by way of contempt proceedings.
I enquired as to who did judicial teaching but was told it was a secret because of “judicial independence”, which is again obviously nonsense. I am sure you will be interested to know who does do that teaching.
Role of the Law Society and courts in dealing with misconduct by lawyers
All this has actually been done by lawyers, though.
You will know that the previous President of the Law Society was an employment lawyer, Kathryn Beck, and that she assisted actively in the coverup of the sexual assaults and rape at Russell McVeagh. This appears to have been done by the enforcement of illegal NDAs, including by way of superinjunction, granted by another employment lawyer.
That sort of action is legally similar to the practices for which Donald Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen served a prison sentence and for which Harvey Weinstein’s lawyer Mark Mansell (of whom Wellington’s Geoff Davenport is a protege) is being prosecuted by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. It is only in New Zealand that anyone claims it is actually legal, or behaves as though it is. I cannot actually see anyone overtly claiming it is actually legal. They just do it.
Difficulty of cleaning up a legal profession that has fallen into corruption
It is not clear that even if Tiana Epati, the new President, wanted to clean this up, it would be at all easy to do. Many of the lawyers who have developed and used these illegal provisions are part of the regulatory committees by which the Law Society operates.
For example, the lawyer who misled the judge as to the existence of “non-identification orders” and asked for an appeal process obviously (from the way it is requested) knowing it could not be done legally, also received a private payment via the Authority. The contract on which the bogus “non-identification” order was supposed to be based was not only between other parties, but itself turned out to have been a concealment of payroll fraud, so again illegal.
I reported the lawyer for serious misconduct for all of this (such reports are compulsory, and are not the same as complaints).
However nearly a year later the judge, who in court had seemed devastated that this man had deceived him into making illegal orders, instead claimed publicly that it was “insulting and unacceptable” for me to draw attention to the lawyer’s misconduct. Where judges are going to shaft counsel openly, they are supposed to give them a chance to comment on that in advance. Needless to say, he did not, and this appears to have been retaliation for my questioning the very entertaining of the case against Allan in the first place The lawyer then reported me to the Law Society for drawing attention in the case to his own serious misconduct. The Law Society is pursuing that, and so making a further exhibition of itself.
Attacking individuals such as Allan Halse and myself for drawing attention to this scam actually only exposes that the New Zealand legal system is in serious trouble.
I think it is particularly a great pity that Tiana Epati has agreed to go along with this scam. It is a creation of middle-aged Pākehā, especially men.
I can however see that when MPs and Ministers (also mostly middle-aged Pākehā men) have been supporting it for a decade, it would be difficult to lead a clean-up. I do not envy you young MPs being unable to continue your political careers without either having to confront those people or having your career tainted, but letting the focus of this scam rest on the shoulders of a young Pasifika woman whose career could be wrecked by that is very cynical.
Methods of changing the substantive law of New Zealand
The method of changing the substantive law to introduce illegal rules – both rules that Parliament has not authorised, and rules that Parliament says are criminal offences – is basically very simple.
The Authority just makes it up, at the request of a lawyer.
The implementation is quite intricate, which is why even this report to you now will need to be superseded by a fuller one for the international authorities.
The basic justification that is given in the case that you wrote about in your letter of 18 February 2021 is clause 1 of Schedule 2 to the ERA 2000. The clause refers to how the Authority can deal with its role in resolving employment disputes, and it says if a question of law comes up, it can decide it. What the lawyer says, and Andrew Dallas allows, is that that means the Authority can decide any question of law any way it wants and that will be valid. It seems unlikely that Parliament intended to give MBIE officials authority to change settled law that is nothing to do with employment. If it did, it has abdicated its role.
So the lawyer asked the Authority to decide it could say that Allan was legally not allowed to represent his clients. Trying to put him out of business by fines and imprisonments hasn’t yet worked. The Authority member said that section 236 of the ERA 2000, requiring advocates to establish an authority to act for their clients, meant she could choose who acted for them and she could therefore sack him. This is all clearly spurious. I understand the clients have left the country and are reporting New Zealand’s corrupt processes in their home country.
All the following methods, and more, are documented. Most of the cases are conducted as though they were entertainments for the lawyers, most of whom are paid at public expense (though the one you wrote about is being conducted at the expense of a private company), in conjunction with the judges, who until recently claimed, sometimes with explicit contempt, that they could decide what the law is, rather than deciding what Parliament said it is:
1. “estoppel” - saying they got away with a baseless order before, and so must now have acquired the power to make such orders;
2. asserting that baseless orders are valid and enforceable if they are not challenged within the 28-day time-limit set down for seeking rehearing (this is their problem with review: there is no such time-limit);
3. labelling orders as “procedural” and saying they therefore cannot be challenged, when they do not relate to procedure;
4. enforcing contracts to hide evidence and refusing to admit evidence, or ignoring evidence, along with saying “there is no evidence”;
5. the adoption by the Authority of a strict version of the High Court rules which even the High Court would not use, under guise of its “choice of procedures”, which was clearly aimed at allowing informality;
6. making rules contrary to law e.g. legalising fraud, the suppression or sale of evidence or sexual assault, so that there is no avenue for vindicating rights granted by Parliament;
7. imposing crippling costs on ordinary parties, preventing rehearing according to law;
The statutory misinterpretation involved in each of those, and other tactics, will fall to be explored in a fuller report than this letter.
The greatest statutory misinterpretation, in which it is very clear the judges have assisted MBIE officials, is making out that the Authority is a form of court that can deal with anything and anyone, and can make any order it likes. The Employment Court has also operated that. This has enabled the installation of the new contract regime which is a contempt of the authority of Parliament and will bring New Zealand down.
As mentioned above, it is not plausible that the lawyers and judges did not understand that the effect of holding an appeal rather than a rehearing is to reverse the burden of proof and to elevate the informal determinations of the officials of MBIE who staff the Authority into quasi-judicial decisions. A year or two ago, when bogus “appeals” were being established, someone organised the recasting of the Authority’s determinations on the NZLII website as “decisions” instead, and put up “decisions” going back to 2000, when previously they had been cast correctly as “determinations” and began only in 2007. This retrospective operation must have represented considerable expense. An attempt to find out who sponsored it was fruitless but it would appear to have been requested, and so probably paid for, by or on behalf of MBIE, with a view to making itself appear to have its own court system.
However the most obvious substantive attacks on the authority of Parliament and the integrity of the legal system itself have been the following bogus claims, all by now well established as bogus law – and which are exactly what is needed to conduct effective theft, fraud and money-laundering:
8. that all negotiations overseen by MBIE as “mediation” are privileged (enabling not just the blackmail, threats and bullying reported in case law and by Allan Halse, but also other criminal acts such as the secret sale of stolen evidence between lawyers, as occurred in my case);
9. that any contract signed off by MBIE is “confidential” or governed by “statutory confidentiality”, even where the issue is that it is illegal;
10. that any contract signed off by MBIE is enforceable and unquestionable, even if it was procured by blackmail or fraud or is a contract to commit a crime, such as the suppression of evidence, especially evidence of a crime – such as laundering drug money;
11. that there is a power to make a “non-identification order” (see above);
12. that the power to make a “non-publication order” means a power to order general suppression (see above);
13. that there is a power to suppress evidence in other proceedings e.g. in the High Court, or to order evidence in other proceedings to be changed – this constitutes asserting a power to pervert the course of justice.
This excessive suppression, beyond what there is power to do, has been mirrored recently in High Court proceedings, including “sealing” files, the reinterpretation of powers under the Access to Court Records legislation, the inability to browse records (so you have to know exactly what you are looking for, which people may have been told they must not tell you) and the imposition of crippling fees for obtaining copies. This appears to be because certain High Court judges have been involved in dubious “employment” transactions in the past.
The employment jurisdiction having established powers to make up laws allowing offences then broadened its remit to push out the mainstream jurisdiction, claiming that the employment institutions:
14. can deal with contracts other than contracts for services;
15. have a universal tort jurisdiction (Parliament granted it only in respect of strikes and lockouts) in relation which they can also invent previously unknown torts;
16. can enforce contracts against third parties if they are signed off by MBIE;
17. can make orders against anyone, not just the parties to an employment relationship as specified in the legislation (employers, employees and unions).
Reasons for choosing the employment jurisdiction to enable criminality
The employment jurisdiction appears to have been chosen to run the criminal operations through for the following reasons:
Firstly, it is run by MBIE, which is a sufficiently large organisation for whatever internal grouping runs this to hide in. They instituted a process for licensing firms for government contracts that would go along with undermining Parliament by obtaining illegal contracts and orders, such as McBride Davenport James, Dundas Street, Buddle Findlay, Dyhrberg Drayton and so on. They had control of the “mediation” process which was then adapted to become a secret session for conducting illegal transactions, which the Authority and Employment Court then treated as privileged, as per the arguments in the Whittall case.
Secondly, MBIE had already run the successful precedent for permitting criminal operations to be covered up, namely the presumed contracts protecting all the directors of Pike River and the successful deal between Brent Stanaway for MBIE and Stuart Grieve for Peter Whittall. These were illegal contracts, as the Supreme Court eventually decided in late 2017. Before that, illegal contracts signed off by MBIE were used for enabling criminality through the employment institutions. After that, the Authority just made illegal orders suppressing evidence.
Thirdly, the cooperation of the Law Society was needed, and both its internal structures and its prominent lawyers were very strong in that. Tony Smith and Helen Cull had been on committees dealing with the basic structures for overcoming the rule of law and adapting lawyers’ ethics to that in 2011. Steph Dyhrberg, then a protege of Helen Cull, was apparently positioning herself for power until she was caught supporting procedures to protect sexual offenders, and Kathryn Beck would do that openly.
Fourthly, MBIE also makes the Employment Court Regulations. These are particularly useful to criminals, because they provide a right to refuse to disclose on the basis of self-incrimination. That is entirely understandable in the context of the jurisdiction that Parliament gave. It is only about contracts for services between employers, employees and unions. Once it was expanded to cover other contracts, torts and property, that meant that the person with control of the administration – that is, the employer – could control the evidence entirely. That is obviously extremely useful if you are conducting a process that is itself fraudulent.
Fifthly, there is no right of appeal. Again, when the institutions only dealt with what Parliament empowered them to deal with, and also dealt in good faith, that mattered less. These were relatively small matters that could not wreck anyone’s life. Once the Employment Court started dealing with multi-million-dollar property actions and having people bankrupted, claiming that anything vaguely involving employment is an employment matter in the same way that the funny bone is connected to the ear bone, there was a huge and obvious use for a court in which fraudsters could pursue claims whilst excluding evidence of their own fraud.
Sixthly, in 2004, at the same time as abandoning appeal to the Privy Council, Parliament restricted the right of review to cases of no jurisdiction, and established a long and contorted process for dealing with misconduct or mistakes. It meant that the Authority and Employment Court could be as unreasonable or procedurally improper as they liked, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. No doubt Parliament relied on the requirement of good faith, but it removed any sanction for when – as has since happened – good faith was thrown out of the window. Only if the Authority or Employment Court dealt with cases they were not entitled to deal with could their decisions be queried. But for years they have done that, just crippling the losing party so they can go no further. The crucial element is however that they have also used that to say that any unreversed order becomes law, thus expanding their own jurisdiction by “estoppel” to cover everything and to usurp the authority of Parliament.
Conclusion
As you will see, this has been an intricate and long-term operation which has led the employment jurisdiction away from its roots entirely. It is supposed to be a limited and informal jurisdiction dealing solely in employment relationships and on the basis of good faith. It has become a major financial jurisdiction capable of ousting the process of the High Court and enabling serious illegality.
There will be a more complete report in due course.
Yours sincerely
Caroline Sawyer