One year ago we had no idea that most of the website traffic this year would be from the UK. By dumb luck we were the first media organisation in New Zealand to report on the Post Office scandal, albeit with articles by author Nick Wallis re-published with his permission. Original articles followed.
An employment law aspect of the shocking Letby murders was how NHS whistleblowers were treated. We found that while there was little evidence of retaliation at the hospital concerned, two doctors who had made Public Interest Disclosures were stonewalled and that had tragic consequences. Elsewhere we have covered weaponised costs claims against whistleblowers and lobbying for legislation to prevent this from happening in the future (in the UK) and early signs that New Zealand’s updated whistleblower legislation, the Protected Disclosures Act 2022, is actually doing its job.
Post Office Scandal
We ramped up our reporting of the Post Office Scandal in December just a few weeks before the explosive ITV mini-series Mr Bates vs The Post Office screened in the UK. At the time, Phase 4 of a statutory inquiry was underway. The Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry is gradually finding that the prosecution of hundreds of sub-postmasters for accounting shortfalls in their branches that were actually being generated by faulty POS/retail software, and revelations that convictions found to be unsafe, were covered up by way of disclosure violations. Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak described the scandal as one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British history.
Highlights, if that’s the right word, are probably:
- three days of evidence from the now disgraced former CEO (who had already handed in her CBE amid calls for her to be stripped of it),
- the spectacle of a former General Counsel who fled to her native Australia in 2020, refusing to give evidence at short notice, getting doorstepped by a BBC reporter and dropping off the Australian Law Society register soon after,
- the glib Kiwi lawyer who despite being called a liar by Ed Henry KC, a barrister representing several subpostmasters, Post Office Ltd (probably negligently) retains him as an employee.
Domestic stuff
There were several notable domestic matters including:
Two brothers receiving jail sentences for perverting the course of justice in relation to a WorkSafe prosecution, where a young worker suffered a life changing injury after being overcome with solvent fumes.
A couple of noncompete enforcements, including against a hairdresser who devised a clever workaround.
A several million dollar alleged fraud by the owners of now liquidated company Ameribuild Ltd, whose trial is scheduled for August.
The partial collapse of a five year, $600,000+ private prosecution brought by the former Bay of Plenty District Health Board against a cardiac physiologist and her employment advocate, and the subsequent disappearance of a 4.5 year old “hate page” operated by its former CEO.
Bottleneck shifts
While the backlog of cases waiting for an investigation meeting at the Employment Relations Authority has mostly cleared, sweeping public sector redundancies have caused long wait times for MBIE's free mediation service, forcing some parties to go private.
Metrics
In the year to 25 July 2024 we had 3.5 times the number of views as the previous one year period. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of that increase was from the UK.
Tristam, Editor
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