Every new scandal in New Zealand public life is treated as a public relations exercise. The right spin can lead to redemption, but a poorly executed strategy will make things worse. Everything Hallwright did made things worse. He blundered this way and that, struck entirely the wrong attitude. He transgressed the social contract by never saying sorry, never entirely accepting fault. As well, he couldn’t catch a break the whole way through. He got hung out to dry, pursued by everyone from right-wing blog Whaleoil to the Auckland Council for Civil Liberties. A judge came out in his defence and he really shouldn’t have; the comments were provocative, and made things even worser.
Hallwright raved in the Employment Court about that ‘quarter of a second’, how everything would have been different if only he hadn’t had a moment of panic on Mt Eden Road that Wednesday, 8 September 2010. ‘A second. Not even that. Half a second. Quarter of a second . . .’ He leaned forward, hunched and neurotic, gabbling, as though he were reaching out to try to reclaim the moment that changed the entire course of his life.
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Hallwright grew up in Karori, Wellington, a doctor’s son. His father was a cardiologist. He left his family when Guy was about six, and remarried. One of the last times I spoke with Hallwright was when he’d arrived in Wellington to visit his stepmother in a rest home. He took the bus; he had been suspended from driving for 18 months.
He said his father was something of an eccentric, collecting 1970s New Zealand pottery, and idly penning persistent, complaining letters to the editor. Sample: ‘It amuses me to hear Maori constantly complaining that Pakeha keep using the “race card”. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.’ And: ‘Am I alone in being fed up to the back teeth with TV advertisements saying, “97 per cent fat-free”? If they mean, “It has only 3 per cent fat”, why don’t they say just that? Quite simply, it is pseudo-science. It is a con, claptrap.’
Hallwright has a gentler, rather less strident nature. Friends describe him as shy, sensitive, cultured. After boarding at Palmerston North Boys’ High School, he studied literature and sociology at Victoria University. Tutor and poet Bill Manhire took him for Old Norse. He said, ‘I basically remember Guy as an intelligent and genuinely nice human being. Hard-working, too — you had to be to get by in Old Norse! I was surprised when he turned up in the media a few years later as a business guru, or whatever the term is.’
The term is ‘investment analyst’. Hallwright came to finance late in life, at 35. He married radio journalist Juliet Robieson in 1982, and they moved to England. Hallwright studied for an MBA, and later worked for investment firms First NZ Capital in Wellington and Credit Suisse in Sydney. The years in Australia, when he and Juliet raised their son and two daughters in elegant Mosman, were his highest paying, and also the highest pressure.
He took a pay cut to come back to New Zealand and join Forsyth Barr. A former colleague said that the firm headhunted Hallwright. ‘There were a number of key appointments made at that time, and he was one of those. It was a fledgling broking business. It’s an important player now and it’s because of people like Guy, who had a high reputation and standing. He was definitely an important part of the company’s growth and consolidation.’
Hallwright dealt with clients from big firms, such as AMP and Guinness Peat Group, and became one of those rent-a-quote experts in the media, relaying his opinion on financial markets to business journalists at Morning Report, The National Business Review, and elsewhere. He was an expert in telecommunications, and the retail sector. On top of his salary, he also took home a bonus of about $101,000 every six months.
He bought a big house in Parnell. It was two doors down from the Prime Minister’s mansion. It hogged an entire corner, and had a pool, nikau palms, polished wooden floors. The Hallwrights were Friends of the Auckland Art Gallery. Juliet stayed home and wrote fiction. Their younger daughter, Issie, wrote songs, and became close friends with John Key’s daughter, Stephie. Hallwright had got to know finance minister Bill English, and attended a music recital given by English’s daughter. It was held at a private house; there were about 20 people, and nice sandwiches.
And then the life he knew was taken away. It disappeared, the last seconds of it spent sitting at the lights at the intersection of Symonds Street and Khyber Pass Road, when Sung Jin Kim drove up behind him.
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Their versions of what happened are very similar. That is, both agree it was about 10am. Otherwise, they’re wildly different narratives, and they don’t even share the same cast; Hallwright says his teenage daughter, Issie, was in the passenger seat, but Kim believes it was an older woman, that there was something suspicious going on.
It was a Wednesday. Hallwright said he was taking Issie to a studio to record a song she’d written. ‘I was going to play a bit of guitar on it.’
The driver behind him honked his horn at him, thinking that he’d waited at a green light. Hallwright claims the driver misunderstood, that the green light was for the bus in the bus lane next to him.
‘When I did get the green light, I drove away. This guy followed me around the corner into Mt Eden Road, and kept honking his horn at me. So I pulled into that carpark, the Galbraith’s carpark, and he goes past and — and this is the unwise thing that I did, and it’s probably a bit of a lesson, I suppose — I gave him the finger. He screeches to a halt in the middle of the road. I thought, “Oh shit, this is going to be a confrontation of some sort.” I didn’t want him coming over
