Long-running proceedings involving former cardiac physiologist Ana Shaw passed seamlessly from the former Bay of Plenty District Health Board (BOP DHB) to Health New Zealand (Te Whatu Ora) in mid-2022.
Shaw was dismissed from BOP DHB in March 2015 and challenged the dismissal all the way to the Supreme Court, which in late 2022 declined her leave to appeal an Employment Court decision that dismissed her personal grievances earlier that year. There was some sporadic media coverage of Shaw’s personal grievance claims over the years, but surprisingly nothing on a second set of proceedings until very recently.
In December 2018, BOP DHB brought what one of Shaw’s lawyers described as bogus proceedings against Shaw, her then employment advocate, anti-bullying campaigner Allan Halse, and his company, CultureSafe NZ Ltd.
Shaw claims that in early 2018, the then Chief Operating Officer of BOP DHB started stalking her, mostly outside her workplace. This was at Spotlight in Tauranga; she had been reduced to working in retail because of the blacklisting in the medical profession.
Shaw was able to substantiate those claims in her personal grievance case by way of photographic evidence that was submitted to the Employment Relations Authority (ERA) a few months before the Investigation Meeting on October 4 and 5, 2018.
We understand that BOP DHB filed those same photos in the Employment Court in order to assert that Shaw had made “scandalous allegations” for which she was liable in contempt (of the ERA).
In February 2019 the contempt claim was moved up to the Employment Court. What does BOP DHB want the Employment Court to decide, exactly? Check out BOP DHB’s Amended Statement of Claim dated 14 June 2022.
As vague as it is, we see three problems:
The stalking! On 1 September 2022 we asked Te Whatu Ora’s barrister Mark Beech, among other things, ‘Can you confirm that the "scandalous allegations" Shaw made were mostly about being stalked, outside her subsequent workplace Spotlight Tauranga, by the then Chief Operating Officer Peter Chandler via photographic evidence provided to the Employment Relations Authority in 2018…?’ and ‘On what basis would the making of "scandalous allegations" be actionable in this matter?’. Beech replied, presumably as instructed, that it would be inappropriate to comment as the matter was before the courts.
As far as we can tell Te Whatu Ora have not made any attempt to shut down the contempt proceedings, even though we still don’t know if the DHB felt that it’s an actionable “contempt” to report stalking by one’s former boss! In an interview with Maria Slade last week, National Business Review senior reporter Dita de Boni said “when you are the type of skilled migrant New Zealand is supposedly crying out for and goes to the bother of headhunting to this country, and you expose what you think is an unpalatable truth and are subsequently reduced to both working a low-paid retail job while defending yourself against long-term malicious legal action, you serve as a kind of warning to other skilled migrants seeking to enter our workforce”.
The cost to the taxpayer – about $0.5M for the BLAPP alone.
As Chandler discovered in 2020, NetSafe and the District Court are of no assistance with cover-ups – not even for a CEO!
We were blissfully unaware of this development for a couple of months and this article marks our discovery of it. A screenshot of parts of the NetSafe report is below:
Maybe it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Ana Shaw is not scared any more, just super angry. But the number of Filipina nurses, for example, who are aware of this debacle via social media and been scared off applying to work here is impossible to know. Maybe Te Whatu Ora should seek a second or even a third legal opinion on how to deal with an emerging PR disaster that the NBR article alludes to. This Friendly Jordies YouTube video on the recently-collapsed ClubsNSW proceedings against the comedian-journalist and whistleblower Troy Stolz, which was very similar to the BOP DHB baggage Te Whatu Ora inherited, should offer the latter some guidance:
How I Avoided Prison - YouTube - 1 March 2023