WELLINGTON – On Thursday, a New Zealand court cleared the Australian diplomat’s husband of a conviction after he admitted to assaulting a teenager by spitting during a drunken incident following a rugby match in Wellington. The decision comes months after his guilty plea.
The court granted the man permanent name suppression. Judge Paul Mabey at the Wellington District Court expressed skepticism about the man’s claims regarding potential personal harms that might warrant his discharge, yet acknowledged that an assault conviction and revealing his identity could negatively affect his wife’s diplomatic career.
The judge noted that a conviction might prevent the man from accompanying his wife on international assignments, potentially leading to a family separation if the Australian High Commission determined his presence in New Zealand was detrimental to diplomatic relations between the two nations.
The charges arose after an episode last September after the man attended a rugby match between New Zealand and Australia in the capital. He was drunk when he arrived at Wellington’s main nightlife area, where he approached a group of teenagers and became aggressive when they didn’t want to engage with him, the judge said.
A member of the group punched the man, who responded by spitting on a young woman. He was arrested by police officers who happened to be passing.
The case has provoked widespread news coverage in New Zealand and Australia along with cell phone footage of the man’s arrest, in which he verbally abused a police officer and claimed he had diplomatic immunity. He had such immunity, conferred by protocol to the partners of senior envoys to New Zealand, which he later waived voluntarily.
He pleaded guilty to New Zealand’s lowest level of assault charge in January. It is punishable by up to six months in jail and a fine of up to 4,000 New Zealand dollars ($2,400).
“For the avoidance of any doubt at all, he is not here to be sentenced for abusing the police or rashly claiming diplomatic immunity,” Judge Mabey said.
“He was right to say he had that immunity,” the judge added. “He was completely stupid to say it at all.”
But the magistrate said he would discharge the man because of his wife’s suggestion that the Australian diplomatic service would be unable to ignore the husband’s conviction and the widely-distributed cell phone video of his arrest when considering her future.
“If I were not to suppress his name, his offending would be inextricably linked to his wife and she would suffer considerably,” the judge said.
He rejected a bid by the man’s lawyer to suppress the country his wife represented in New Zealand.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
