Steve Braunias: The punishment of Liz Gunn

OPINION

The verdict in the case of Liz Gunn – leader of a political party, a voice for the disgruntled and a threat to the gruntled – was due to be heard in
courtroom 10 at the Manukau District Court on Tuesday afternoon at 3.45. I arrived early to stay one step ahead of the Deep State. But the registrar said there was a change in plan, and to go to downstairs to courtroom 7. I got lost and took the elevator. Security at courtroom 7 said no, actually, it had been decreed the verdict would be heard in courtroom 10. I went back upstairs and waited with a thermos of coffee and my novel Return Load, a 1977 action thriller set in the confines of a Man V10 truck. It was hurtling to a dramatic climax: “There came a crash as the massive bumpers struck the gates, ripping the bolt from its anchorage and wrenching the hinges from the walls.”

Security staff then said to go back downstairs to courtroom 7.

“The Man burst through, its headlights shattered and windscreen crazed.”

On my way back down the stairs, security staff said to go back up to courtroom 10.

“The laminated glass wrap-around screen had resisted the impact.”

What was the Deep State playing at? Upstairs, downstairs, a change of venue, a change of plan – here was a very clear metaphor of bureaucracy as a maze, designed to confuse and tire the citizenry. There was another metaphor for what was about to happen. It loomed over the flatlands of downtown Manukau: the Corkscrew Coaster and Stratosfear rides at the Rainbow’s End theme park. Rollercoasters of emotion lay in store at the district court on Tuesday afternoon. There would be screams in the district court. They would not be screams of joy.

Two years ago, NZ Loyal Party leader Liz Gunn was arrested at Auckland International Airport and charged with trespass, resisting police, and assault. Her trial was held a fortnight ago. I attended the trial – held in courtroom 10, although there was a preamble about it in courtroom 7 – and viewed it in all seriousness as a terrible farce and a complete waste of time, that both the airport and police should be ashamed of themselves.

I headlined the story, “The persecutions of Liz Gunn.” This made me quite popular with a number of her supporters as we gathered at the Manukau District Court on Tuesday to hear the verdict. But I was already accepted into the fold by my appearance: same age, same race. All old Pākehā look the same.

Security guards from every corner of the district court assembled at courtroom 10 to keep a close eye on the 30 supporters as the clock on the wall ticked towards 3.45pm. Clearly, the old Pākehā mob represented a high risk. The Deep State was taking no chances. Communications were relayed back and forth between all corners of the courthouse. Security needed to guarantee the safety of Judge Janey Forrest. The minutes ticked by. The supporters fell quiet. Too quiet.

Finally, the judge swept in at 3.52pm, and immediately got down to business. It was clear that she wanted to remain in courtroom 10 for as short a time as possible, and in that spirit she declared that although she had written a 12-page judgment, she would not be reading it out loud. The motor of justice was running; she only had three words to say before racing off to plant her foot to the floor. On the charge of resisting police: “Not guilty.” Happiness spread through the public gallery. It was at the top of the ride. On the charge of assault: “Guilty.” The time for screams had come.

*

“Shame!”, screamed the public gallery. And again: “Shame!” Once more: “Shame!” One supporter added the classic term of disapproval and outrage, heard in every sports stadium in the world but only reserved in courts of law when something has gone terribly, terribly wrong: “Boo!”

Fair call. It was seemingly a pathetic decision, in keeping with an overtly pathetic case. The events of February 25, 2023, were more or less as follows. Liz Gunn waited at Auckland International Airport arrivals to greet a flight from the Pacific containing a family whom she deemed heroic because they had refused the Pfizer vaccine. As a conspiracy hobbyist, Gunn wanted to document the moment these apostles of freedom had set foot back in New Zealand. She held a microphone and one of her supporters, Jonathan Clark, held a large video camera. This aroused the interest of airport security, who wished to apply rules about filming at the airport; an argument broke out, and then the police stepped in, apprehending the villains with maximum force and, for Gunn, lasting injury.

Poor show, and it only got poorer with Gunn and Clark being dragged through the courts on criminal charges. At their trial, Judge Forrest dismissed the charge of trespass. Good. “The defendants,” she ruled, “did not have a reasonable opportunity to leave.” She acquitted them of the charge of resisting arrest at Tuesday’s verdict. Also good. “I am by no means uncritical of the police,” she wrote in her judgment, but such tough talk instantly fizzled out; her only criticism was that “the very rapid escalation of events…may have been avoided had the police engaged in constructive communication”. Yes, as opposed to kneeling on top of them on the floor. From Tuesday’s judgment: “Ms Gunn was informed she was under arrest at the time that Constable [Erich] Postlewaight took hold of her hand and ‘put her into an arm lock to gain control of her’.” Gunn told the court that her ligaments were torn, and she continued to suffer pain: “I can’t do my own bra up.” She is 64 years of age.

Two charges, dropped; that left the assault charge. Gunn placed her hand on the arm of a woman from airport security for approximately one second. Video was shown of the incident at trial. It was shown over and over, and gave everyone in court the opportunity to study the incident and to assess what exactly happened. What exactly happened is that Gunn placed her hand on the arm of a woman from airport security for approximately one second. Some cultures describe this as touch. The law is its own culture. It applies a set of codes that make lawyers rich and maddens everyone else. Judge Forrest ran the legal test of what constitutes assault: “It is accepted law that the slightest application of force is sufficient.” Liz Gunn’s application of force appeared to be very, very, very, very, very slight – I could add a few more veries, but even an infinite number of veries have no bearing that what happened was legally sufficient to constitute assault.

The judge also referred to Adams on Criminal Law (loose-leaf edition, $5976 plus GST): “If the circumstances show that that there was not in fact consent, even quite trivial force might not be justified, or excused.“

The issue, then, was consent. Gunn clearly did not have the woman’s consent to touch her. To focus merely and entirely on the application of “quite trivial force” is to ignore the context, the feeling, the sense of what it was like for the woman from airport security to confront Liz Gunn in the wild. The touch was insufficient to cause harm but the confrontation, as viewed on the CCTV footage played in court, made it equally clear that Gunn was in the woman’s face, was banging on at her, was performing in such a way that the woman would have been well within reason to consider it untrivial.

Judge Forrest put it another way. She put it in writing in her judgment. You can see why she elected not to read it out loud. It would have caused a riot. The judge wrote, “In summary, Ms Gunn was arrogant, rude, overbearing and offensive in her manner.” (She also called her “domineering” and called her out for making “racist comments”). In that context, within that feeling and that sense of a confrontation with Liz Gunn in the wild, the touching of the arm was, ruled the judge, “a hostile act”.

Fair call.

*

At trial, when Gunn gave evidence, police cross-examination pretty much revealed her as arrogant, rude, overbearing and offensive in her manner. But so did her own lawyer, Matthew Hague. Gunn could not stop talking. At best, she was a total bore; at worst, it was like being put in the airport security coordinator’s shoes at the airport. She caused the most damage to her own defence. Hague had performed superbly well in trial; his insistence that the trespass charge should be dismissed was successful, and he made the two arresting police officers, Constables Postlewaight and Robett Luong, look like clods. He opened strongly and closed strongly. A shame that in between he called his client as a witness.

Another of his witnesses behaved absurdly. Former police officer Ray Cobb was called as an expert witness to pass comment on Gunn’s arrest. From the judgment on Tuesday: “Last week I received correspondence from Mr Cobb. Because of the way the delivery was addressed (handwritten and marked personal and confidential) I was cautious in opening this…I regard it as highly inappropriate that a witness has attempted to communicate with me after the hearing and prior to my judgment. This is particularly concerning given as a [former] Police officer he should simply know better.”

I imagined that Cobb’s “handwritten” message was in screaming caps, the lingua franca of conspiracy hobbyists and other political theorists close to reason.

After the verdict was delivered, and the angry court was cleared, one of Gunn’s supporters screamed at a reporter from Stuff: “YOU LACK INTEGRITY! YOU LACK EMPATHY! READ THE GUIDELINES! READ THE GUIDELINES! READ THE GUIDELINES!”

*

I spoke with her after the verdict. She was a sweet person who spoke in perfectly reasonable lower case, and she explained why she was shaking: Parkinson’s. As for her anger at one of my colleagues in the legacy news media racket, she said, “I try not to go down that emotional path.”

I said, “You went a long way down that path.”

“I’m actually very level-headed,” she said. “I’m very analytical.”

I asked, “What is your analysis of the guilty verdict?”

She said, “Do you know, I wish I could say I was surprised. I really do. But I cannot. This is what they do, isn’t it?”

We stood outside the court. It was getting towards dusk, and the temperature of the late-autumn afternoon was falling. Liz Gunn had already left: this was the first time in living memory that she missed the opportunity to address her supporters and issue some statement of defiance or togetherness.

I spoke with her co-accused Jonathan Clark, and asked, “How is Liz?”

He said, “She wasn’t in a good mood. I’ll be seeing her tonight. Is there a message you’d like to pass on?”

“Not really,” I said. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m a bit shocked. Very shocked! It’s all a bit surreal. Have you met Barry?”

He motioned to a man with white whiskers.

“This is Barry Young,” he said. “Would you like to know how we first met?”

“Not really,” I said. I was vaguely aware of the name and later read that Young was the former public servant recently charged with dishonestly taking health agency data and spreading it online. Young believes the Pfizer vaccine is “a killer”.

Clark started talking about how they first met. I said, “I don’t really care.”

Young said, “Well, I can see how this story is shaping up!”

He said something else quite unintelligible. I said, “What is your accent?”

He said, “I’m from Newcastle.”

That explained it. Geordie accents only sometimes resemble English. Young followed me around the courtyard for a few minutes while I asked other supporters for their response to the verdict.

“It’s a sign that justice is broken in New Zealand,” said a man with white whiskers. Our interview was filmed by a supporter on his phone. “They had to get Liz. She was becoming a dangerous person.”

I approached a woman standing nearby with very long grey hair. The cameraman followed. “The system is corrupt,” she said. “It is the undoing of God’s law.”

A stout individual claimed to have mutual connections, via Facebook, with the judge.

“We have two friends in common. And they are both,” he said, leaning closer, “trade unionists.”

I said, “Hang on. How come you have two friends who are trade unionists? Are you a Communist?”

“I used to be very active in the unions,” he said. “But I’ve changed.”

The woman with long grey hair reappeared at my side. “God will win,” she said. We were interrupted by a man who was following me around and wanting to speak about the Marsden Point oil refinery. He handed me a document. It shouted, ‘’WHY SHOULD THE NATION MISS POIT ON THE GUARANTEE DPROGOTS OF REFINING NEW ZEALAND OIL?” I turned to the woman, who said, “The ultimate authority is God’s will.”

I moved fast and got away from her, and the oil man, and even the persistent cameraman, to speak to a man with white whiskers. “New Zealand is descending down a slippery road where the rights of the individual are slowly being eroded,” he said. “Liz is fighting back. Most people don’t know what leadership looks like. But I do. It looks like her. People don’t like Liz for her emotion. Her brain. Her spine. Her passion. But this constitutes a true leader.”

Everyone I spoke to thought the verdict would only strengthen her support, that it would grow and prosper. The mood was still angry, and contemptuous. They were shaken by their experience of the New Zealand Police vs Elizabeth Jane Cooney (Liz Gunn) criminal file of CRI-2023-092-002164. And yet they were also all very determined. There was laughter, bonding, good cheer.

I approached a man in a black hat. “I write too,” he said. His byline is Snoopman. Snoopman chronicled the trial, and would chronicle the verdict, too. I asked him for a preview, and Snoopman said, “Once the train of institutional momentum starts up, it’s hard to stop. And it didn’t stop today. It just ploughed on through the station, and took Liz with it.”

Dusk was falling. The traffic was already jammed. (The ending of Douglas Rutherford’s Return Load, one of the best novels set inside a truck: “The throaty rumble of its exhaust echoed back from the opposite side of the valley.”) The last few supporters headed for their homes, clutching at their grievances, their distrusts, their convictions. The sentencing of Liz Gunn is set for September. They will return to rally around her once more.