Chapter 5
Falling down: Guy Hallwright
1
It would have taken, oh, say maybe three minutes for former Forsyth Barr investment advisor turned New Zealand’s most vilified road-rage wretch Guy Hallwright to start showing signs of something resembling a nervous collapse during cross-examination in an upstairs office in downtown Auckland. Employment Court proceedings have a unique kind of dismalness. The worst thing that can happen to you in the criminal courts is that a roll of the judicial dice — a jury’s whim, a judge’s discretion — will send you directly to jail. Yes, quite bad, but Employment Court offers another misery, and the anguish of it is as personal as if you took your ex-partner to court to say that their decision to dump you was unfair. You tell the judge: they shouldn’t have done that. You argue: they broke my heart without, you know, due process. You might also beg: please, for the love of God, make them take me back.
It’s a humiliating ordeal, pitiful, almost indecent. I sat next to journalist Matt Nippert during Hallwright’s cross-examination at his three-day Employment Court hearing, and after a while — oh, say maybe four minutes — the two of us couldn’t look at him any more. We averted our eyes. We whispered to each other: ‘Jesus Christ.’ The poor devil was torn apart by Peter Churchman QC. He stammered and raved and sweated and reddened, all for want of his job. Churchman rather enjoyed it; a tall, severe character, he turned to Matt and myself at one point, and winked.
Hallwright had driven over an angry Korean, and been sacked. He said it happened outside of work, and wanted his job back. ‘There’s no impediment that I can see,’ he said. Churchman counted the impediments. He told Hallwright that he was remorseless, feckless, useless, more or less a completely hopeless case. ‘You’re damaged goods,’ said Churchman. At least that last remark seemed fair, and when I later met with Hallwright in his old neck of the woods, at a café upstairs in Hotel DeBrett, just around the corner from the Forsyth Barr tower on Shortland Street in downtown Auckland, I asked him, ‘Are you a mess?’
Tall, elegant, thin-lipped, he said, ‘Am I a mess? No, I don’t think I’m a mess. No. But, you know, it is all very upsetting. For everyone involved. Not just me.’ He looked like a mess. He was a furtive, gaunt presence, twitchy and bristly — maybe he just needed a shave. But I thought back to a photo of him that is still rattling around online, taken before his public shaming, from when he was in his pomp as a blameless and successful financier. He is at a business function with a man who really is called Paul Hamburger. Hallwright looks overweight, florid, with a glass in his hand while he chews the fat with Hamburger; he’s perfectly at ease, untroubled and benign, just another rich Parnell schnook on the after-work drinks circuit. The 61-year-old twitching over his latte in a corner of DeBretts Kitchen was a kind of ghost.
He sometimes took sleeping pills to knock himself out, and also to avoid waking up at whatever dark o’clock of the soul where he would inevitably replay the two or three minutes — a second would have made all the difference, even a quarter of a second — when his whole life changed and collapsed. Oh, and when someone else’s life changed and collapsed, too, and Hallwright’s sorry about that, but he never really altered his position from the comment he gave at the time of the ‘mishap’, of the ‘incident’, when he told a reporter, ‘I did not instigate the incident. The other guy did.’
On a sunny morning in spring in 2010, on a busy intersection in central Auckland, Hallwright got into an argument with another driver, Sung Jin Kim. It ended when Hallwright ran him over in his Saab. Kim suffered terrible physical pain. Hallwright was accused of road rage. Worse, he was accused of never saying sorry, of not showing remorse or contrition or the faintest bit of sympathy. In the media, he was held up as a wealthy and arrogant asshole. In court, a jury found him guilty of reckless driving. In his professional life, Forsyth Barr viewed him with extreme distaste, and got rid of him, wordlessly handing him a letter of termination as he sat at his desk.
He took Forsyth Barr to the Employment Relations Authority. It ruled that his dismissal was fair. He appealed to the Employment Court. It ruled that his dismissal was fair.
At first blush, it felt as though Hallwright didn’t have a prayer with his appeal, that he was once again dragging it out — always crashing in the same car. His dispute was an exercise in gall, delusion, greed. His conditions were that he wanted his job, a modest $10,000 for emotional hurt, and his not-very-modest $100,000 bonus. As well, he wanted immediate reimbursement of his salary, $275,000; he tried to make it sound generous, and forgiving, when he said he’d settle for half. Crazy, but he had reasonable grounds to challenge Forsyth Barr’s claim that he’d brought them into disrepute.
Much of the court hearing turned on the head of a pin, or not even that; it turned on an abstraction. It was all about perception, the fear of what people might think. Absurdly, Forsyth Barr called on PR trout Bill Ralston to back them up. It reinforced the notion that Hallwright’s whole saga was some sort of media game that he had no idea how to
