Wellington court reporter
The Post
July 2, 2024
Former Gloriavale “slaves” are preparing to sue the Crown for not protecting them at the closed community.
The case has yet to begin but the intended plaintiff wants details about an inter-departmental committee set up nine years ago to look at the remote community on the West Coast.
After a win in the Employment Court where six women raised at Gloriavale were found to have been employees, and not just working as part of their commitment to the Christian community, their lawyer Brian Henry was seeking information he said was needed to file documents to start the next case.
Associate Judge Andrew Skelton reserved his decision at the High Court in Wellington on Tuesday.
Henry said it was thought there would be about 46 former Gloriavale members to make the claim. They needed to identify public servants who were negligent and then they could sue. The aim was to make the Crown liable for the actions of the public servants.
The Crown had evidence that the first intended plaintiff, Anna Courage, and others who would join her were in slavery and that Gloriavale was a slave camp, Henry said.
They were trying to identify the public servants who knew people were enslaved and didn’t protect them, Henry said.
Identifying details of the public servants who might be involved have been suppressed, as has some other information.
During the hearing the judge was shown a segment about Gloriavale that had screened on the TVNZ Sunday programme in 2015. Sunday was recently cut to save money at TVNZ.
Henry said the programme seemed to have triggered setting up the committee that he now wants information about.
However, he said government officials had knowledge ‒ or were reckless if they didn’t know ‒ as early as 1996 that should have prompted them to act to protect Gloriavale children.
Gloriavale was a business, profit-centric, without any labour costs and the leaders in charge of the money. Members were fed and clothed on $39 each a week government grant, he said.
“We want to see what they did in this committee, surely someone had the sense to say, What’s going on here?” he said.
The community’s founding document, “What we believe”, needed to have been analysed because it was a charter for slavery, Henry said.
However, the Crown said the intended plaintiff was using the wrong process and there were other ways to find out the names.
Lawyer Aedeen Boadita-Cormican said they were not seeking to diminish the experience of the intended plaintiffs but there were clear legal rules.
Some documents had been provided where possible but in future a draft claim should be prepared and discussed with the Crown, she said.
Information could only be supplied if it was relevant and the Crown needed to know who the intended plaintiffs were before they could decide what was relevant, Boadita-Cormican said.
Some of the information had high privacy concerns, she said.
The process of seeking information could not be used in the hope that the basis of a claim might be found, and it could not be “speculative fishing”, Boadita-Cormican said.
Nothing suggested bad faith by any of the public servants and in the absence of bad faith the individuals had immunity from being sued, she said.
It wasn’t enough to say, these things happened so someone must be to blame, someone must have dropped the ball, Boadita-Cormican said.
https://www.thepost.co.nz/nz-news/350328817/former-gloriavale-members-prepare-sue-government
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