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Seventeen Regional Family Violence Reviews (six times updated)

Peter Zohrab 2016

The Health Quality & Safety Commission is the parent body of the Family Violence Death Review Committee. One day I went to their website and, using their website contact form, requested – under the Official Information Act – copies of the “17 in-depth regional reviews” referred to (for example) on page 16 of the Fourth Annual Report of the Family Violence Death Review Committee.

After a few days, I had had no reply, so I wrote the following letter to the Associate Minister of Health:

19 May 2016

<snip>

Dear Mr. Lotu-Iiga,

A few days ago, I contacted the Health Quality & Safety Commission via their website form, requesting – under the Official Information Act – copies of the “17 in-depth regional reviews” referred to (for example) on page 16 of the Fourth Annual Report of the Family Violence Death Review Committee.

I have not received any reply or acknowledgement from them so far, and I have absolutely zero trust in their professionalism or integrity, so I am writing to you to reiterate the above Official Information Act request.

Yours sincerely,

Peter Zohrab

I received the following reply:

Unfortunately, I overlooked the content of the above email, concentrating on the attachment, which was proof of receipt of my letter, so I subsequently copied the wrong Minister into my emails (which did not matter much, I suppose).

Next I received the following email from the Health Quality & Safety Commission:

I replied as follows:

Then I received the following reply:

Next, I received the following letter:

I then sent the following email to the Ombudsman:

Dear sir/Madam,

Could you please investigate and review the decision of the Health Quality and Safety Commission not to supply me with copies of the “17 in-depth regional reviews” referred to (for example) on page 16 of the Fourth Annual Report of the Family Violence Death Review Committee (https://www.hqsc.govt.nz/assets/FVDRC/Publications/FVDRC-4th-report-June-2014.pdf).In this connection, I draw the following points to your attention:

1. The Health Quality and Safety Commission omitted to mention that I could ask you to investigate and review their decision, whereas mentioning this fact is a standard practice of government agencies, I believe.

2. These seventeen reviews are the only thing that resembles hard evidence, on which the recommendations of the Fourth Annual Report of the Family Violence Death Review Committee, the Law Commission's Report R139 Understanding Family Violence (http://www.lawcom.govt.nz/sites/default/files/projectAvailableFormats/R139%20Understanding%20Family%20Violence%20-%20Reforming%20the%20Criminal%20Law%20Relating%20to%20Homicide%20(Summary)_0.pdf) and possible law changes to allow women to muder their husbands and get away with it have been, or will be, based (as the case may be). The issue which I am raising here is that of transparency.

3. The Health Quality and Safety Commission's letter appears to me to state a complete untruth, in claiming that section 2(I)(a) of the Official Information Act 1982 bars it from releasing this information to me.

4. The NZ Public Health and Disability Act 2000 lists exceptions to the illegality of disclosure of such information, and the Health Quality and Safety Commission's letter does not mention that fact.

5. Clause 4 of Schedule 5 specifically permits the production, disclosure, and recording of information if the information does not identify, either expressly or by implication, any particular individual. I request that the Health Quality and Safety Commission delete identifying information before supplying me with the requested items.

6. The above points indicate that the Health Quality and Safety Commission did not deal with my request in good faith, but is determined to frutrate attempts to bring transparency to the ideology-based activities of the Family Violence Death Review Committee.

I attach copies of the relevant correspondence.

Yours sincerely,

Peter Zohrab.

I did not receive the usual automatic response email to the above email, so I phoned the Ombudsman's office and was told that they had not received my email. A series of phone calls and test emails followed, and I went in person to the office and handed in a paper copy of my email, receiving a stamped and signed copy as a receipt. Everyone I saw and spoke to was female, and the new Chief Ombudsman is the died-in-the wool man-hater, Peter Boshier, who was on the Law Commission at the time that the man-hating study was being carried out!

Since the Ombudsman is an officer of Parliament and apparently uses the same internet servers, I emailed the office of the Speaker of Parliament on 2nd June 2016 as follows:

Dear sir/Madam,

Over the last two days (Tuesday and Wednesday of this week), the Office of the Ombudsman has said that it has not received emails which I sent to it -- both to info@ombudsman.parliament.co.nz and to one particular person's email at that office.

I have never before had any problems emailing that office.

Could you please see if my emails are being blocked by your email server @parliament.nz or in some other manner?

Thank you in advance.

Yours sincerely,

Peter Zohrab

What I later heard from both the Speaker's office and the Ombudsman's office was that the Ombudsman's office had been having email/internet problems.

In due course, I received the following substantive reply from the Ombudsman:

I replied to the Ombudsman as follows:

Dear Mr. Donnelly,

I am very disappointed by your emailed letter dated 16 September 2016.

The crux of your message is that "the Commission and the Committee are separate statutory entities, in which not all information held by the Commitee is necessarily held by the Commission." However, the phrase "necessarily held" does not occur in the Official Information Act 1982, as far as I know. The usual interpretation, as far as I am aware, is that the information which is subject to the Official Information Act 1982 is information which is in fact held by the entity concerned. You seem to have effectively imported the phrase "necessarily held" into the Official Information Act 1982 for the purpose of allowing some women to thwart the constitutional purpose of the Official Information Act 1982 to ensure that Governmnet is as open as it is practical to make it. I intend to write to the Health Quality and Safety Commissionand ask it for details as to exactly when it has acquired copies of the 17 reviews, when it has ceased holding copies (if applicable), and the reasons for its acquiring or not acquiring or ceasing to hold such copies.

If you look at the page https://www.hqsc.govt.nz/our-programmes/mrc/fvdrc/about-us/terms-of-reference/ you will see that the Family Violence Death Review Committee has just four official functions, of which two refer to the Health Quality and Safety Commission. These two read as follows:

1. review and report to the HQSC on family violence deaths with a view to reducing family violence deaths; and

2. advise on any other matters related to family violence that the HQSC specifies in writing.

In addition, the members of the Family Violence Death Review Committee are appointed by the Health Quality and Safety Commission.

If the Family Violence Death Review Committee has to report to the Health Quality and Safety Commission, that clearly implies that the latter has to assess the work of the former -- otherwise the phrase "report to" is devoid of meaning and the Family Violence Death Review Committee might as well just publish its findings to the population at large and leave it at that. As part of its assessment of the Committee's work, one would expect that the Commission might well investigate the actual data on which the Committee bases its conclusions. That is the scientific and professional way of carrying out such assessments. A Commission can't just let a Committee get away with (potentially) making up fictitious data, or basing itself on logically irrelevant data, for example. In addition, the Commission surely has to monitor the work of the Committee so as to be able to make informed personnel decisions. How can the Commission make professional decisions about appointments to the Committee otherwise? If -- on the other hand -- the Commission is behaving in an unprofessional, slack or irresponsible manner, then I want to find out about it and report it to the relevant Minister and to the voting public!

Therefore I urge you to reverse your decision and pursue your investigation along the lines indicated above.

Yours sincerely,

Peter Zohrab

I also wrote to the Health Quality and Safety Commission as follows:

Dear sir/Madam,

Under the Official Information Act, could you please send me documents which contain details as to exactly:-

1. when you have acquired copies of the 17 regional reviews carried out by the Family Violence Death Review Committee;

2. when you have ceased holding such copies (if applicable); and

3. the reasons for your acquiring, or not acquiring, or ceasing to hold such copies (wherever applicable).

Thank you in advance.

Yours sincerely,

Peter Zohrab

In due course, I received the following reply from the Health Quality and Safety Commission:

I then wrote to the Ombudsman as follows (slightly edited):

Dear Mr. Donnelly,

In relation to my earlier reply to your letter of 16 September 2016, I have written to the Health Quality & Safety Commission, and it has confirmed that it has never held a copy of the 17 Regional Reviews which were the only actual evidence on the basis of which the Family Violence Death Review Committee and the Law Commission have drawn far-reaching conclusions.

Given that the Family Violence Death Review Committee reports to the Health Quality and Safety Commission, I am absolutely disgusted that the latter has supposedly never seen fit to examine this evidence.

However, as regards the investigation that you have kindly carried out for me, that brings this matter to a close, and I now agree with you that it would be appropriate for you to close your file on this matter.

Thank you.

Yours sincerely,

Peter Zohrab

However, I intend to pursue this matter in other ways.

• Open Letter to Principal Family Court Judge Peter Boshier

• Two Sexist White Ribbon Bullies Bite the Dust!

• Court Falls for Old Philosophical Trick

• Submission on the Crimes (Provocation Repeal) Amendment Bill

• Review: "The Battered Woman" by Lenore E. Walker and

• Feminazi Conspiracy and Family Violence Homicides

• Minister, Stop Assaulting Me!

• Trade and Domestic Violence

• Being Scientific about Domestic Violence

• Complexity of Family Violence

• Member of Parliament Testifies to Mother's Abuse of Father

• Influence of Non-Legal Research on Legal Approaches to Ex Parte Domestic Violence Protection Orders

• Incompetence, Predetermination, Freedom of Expression, Conflict of Interest and Equality Before the Law

• Another Taxpayer-Funded Man-Hater

• Female Violence and Domestic Violence Policy

• How the Media, the Police and the Universities Murder New Zealand Men

• Three Feminist Domestic Violence Conspiracies

• Minister of Justice Acts Unfairly and in Secret

• Legal Profession’s Scientific Incompetence