Judge Elizabeth (Ema) Aitken has been restored to her District Court throne and is back dispensing her version of justice. I’ve been covering this sorry saga:
NEW ZEALAND JUDICIARY CONTINUES TO CIRCLE THE WAGONS
In November 2024, District Court Judge “Ema” Aitken, her former-doctor husband David Galler and King’s Counsel Michael Reed KC gate-crashed a private function at Auckland city’s Northern Club. The function was a Christmas get together of the New Zealand First political party. Aitken’s real name is Elizabeth Margaret Aitken. “Ema” appears to be a truncat…
Queen Aitken’s restoration comes after a Judicial Conduct Panel decided in April 2026 that her conduct at Auckland’s Northern Club on the evening of 22 November 2024 fell short of warranting termination of Her Majesty’s Judgeship.
The Judicial Conduct Panel comprised King’s Counsel Brendan Brown KC (Chair), Court of Appeal Judge Jill Mallon and Sir Jerry Mateparae. Mateparae is New Zealand’s former Governor General and Defence Force Chief. He’s a competent, honourable man but was on the Panel purely as window dressing. In practice, the Panel’s decision was Brown’s and Mallon’s alone.
Brown’s and Mallon’s crucial exculpatory finding was that, when Aitken was sounding off at what NZ First leader Winston Peters was saying (on a microphone, from a lectern, in front of a NZ First gathering), she had no idea whatsoever that it was Peters who was speaking. If Aitken was found to have known it was Peters she was railing against then, even with the greatest of leniency and desire for her to remain a judge, her number would’ve been up.
According to the Panel’s decision, the legal test for misbehavior justifying removal of Aitken as a judge is as follows:
Was Aitken’s conduct so manifestly and totally contrary to the impartiality, integrity and independence of the judiciary that the confidence of individuals appearing before the judge, or of the public in its justice system, would be undermined, rendering the judge incapable of performing her duties?
In a fast paced world, events quickly disappear over the rear horizon; in these exciting and turbulent times, we must keep moving. So let me wrap the Aitken Affair up by setting out the version of events that Brown and Mallon tried to force us to believe, the crock of excrement that they would have us swallow, the fiction on the basis of which they let Aitken off the hook (with one of my thoughts in bold italics)…
Aitken did not comprehend, when she entered the Northern Club on that fateful evening, that a New Zealand First Party function was being held at the Club, at the same time as the function Aitken was attending - a Christmas and farewell function for Auckland District Court Judges. Her ignorance was despite the fact there was a placard clearly specifying all functions being held at the Club that evening, including the NZ First function, immediately inside the Club’s front door.
Returning from the bathroom, by pure accident Aitken found herself standing on stairs directly outside the Wintergarden room where the NZ First function was being held. She simply did not notice a two-metre high NZ First banner directly outside that room.
Positioned there, on the stairs, she clearly heard Winston Peters say to his audience, in his well-known voice from the podium, that law schools are teaching students that tikanga Māori “law” overrides New Zealand’s common law Westminster system. But she didn’t recognise that the words she was hearing were coming from Peters. The voice she heard was completely disembodied and anonymous, despite Peters being in her direct line of sight through a large, open doorway that was right in front of her.
Aitken’s tirade started with “he’s lying” (without having a clue, of course, who “he” was) followed by words to the following effect:
“This is lies, you don’t know what you’re talking about”
“How can you be listening to this?”
“This is lies”
“There is a room full of Judges who might have a different view”
Aitken only realised it was Peters who was the subject of her undignified ranting when, after she’d ended her diatribe and for reasons that remain entirely unclear, she just happened to turn around as she was walking away, look through a different, much smaller, doorway into the NZ First function room and, for the first time, see Peters. In the words of the Panel’s decision, “If the Judge did not see Mr Peters through Doorway One and did not recognise his voice [as the Panel pretended to conclude], then catching sight of Mr Peters before departing the anteroom was the only logical explanation for the Judge’s statement about Mr Peters a few moments later to those at her table in the Dining Room.” Of course, the “only logical explanation” is that Judge Aitken knew full well it was Winston Raymond Peters about whom she was spewing her errant invective.
On her return to her fellow Judges, she boasted, “I’ve just called Winston Peters a liar”.
This whole saga has myriad disconcerting features. On all the objective evidence, Aitken is a politically partisan, self-serving liar with no impulse control who’s continuation as a judge is untenable and who had to be – and clearly should have been - removed as a judge.
Judges must routinely assess credibility and regularly decide that people appearing before them are lying. But a liar judge labelling others liars is of course a brazen hypocrite who brings the judiciary and the legal “profession” in general into disrepute. Which squarely meets the legal test for “misbehavior” justifying removal. It is untenable for a judge who is a compulsive, self-serving, political activist liar to remain a judge.
Aitken’s lie, which she repeated ad infinitum, both personally and through her legal representatives as the investigations and Court proceedings regarding her conduct unfolded, is that she had no idea it was Peters she was chastising. Many repetitions of her lie were on oath. There’s a name for this sort of lying. The crime is called “perjury”. Judge Aitken has repeatedly perjured herself. Yet this perjurer judge is back sitting in judgment of her fellow citizens, including other perjurers. In any orderly, civilised judicial system, this ought to be untenable.
Panelists Brown and Mallon employed all manner of tactics and ruses in their determination to exonerate Aitken. They compartmentalized her conduct and confined the scope of their examination essentially to what happened at the Northern Club, ignoring all of Aitkens other awful antics in the wake of her brazenly inappropriate behaviour that evening.
The exonerating duo of Aitken’s comrade lawyers also cunningly found Aitken guilty of various other non-hanging “offences”. This is classic deflection. Their mock admonishments included the following, with my thoughts in bold italics:
“It became apparent in the course of our inquiry that the Judge had a poor understanding of the constraints upon a serving judge, and hence a significant lack of appreciation of the seriousness of her actions. This poor understanding was of concern to the Panel because our focus must be on public confidence in the judge and the justice system. Nevertheless, the Judge’s poor understanding of the constraints on a serving judge is capable of ready rectification through education. We have no reason to doubt that such education will be effective and this process will itself have been educative.” Loud mouth Woke old leopardesses like Aitken never change their spots. She stridently recanted her initial apology to NZ First in which she had “apologise[d] unreservedly for the disruption” she caused to their function, describing her own comments as “rude, uncalled for, and inappropriate”. She also expressed her disappointment to the Panel about the Chief District Court Judge’s written apology to NZ First in which he stated the obvious, that the Aitken’s behaviour was entirely inappropriate and that he had made clear to her that what had occurred that evening was an unacceptable series of events. All the evidence is that, to this day, Aitken is absolutely adamant she’s done nothing wrong.
“[W]e consider the Judge’s actions were a serious breach of comity. While serious, it was spontaneous and brief and, consequent on our findings of fact, it was made in ignorance of the fact that it was a New Zealand First function.” Comity is the constitutional convention that the legislative and judicial branches of government must act towards each other with mutual respect and restraint, each recognising the other’s proper sphere of influence. Aitken’s conduct was about as UNCOMITY as it gets. But over and above that, she’s an inveterate liar, devoid of capacity for self-reflection.
I could go on. But let me end my cathartic rant by pointing out that what Peter said is not only defensible, it’s for all practical purposes true. Law schools throughout New Zealand are indeed teaching and promoting a subversive notion that there is an emergent and evolving common law Māori tikanga that has primacy over other common law and Parliament’s statutes.
The law schools are working in lockstep with the Courts and the New Zealand Law Society in this regard. Tai Ahu, President of the Māori Law Society, claims “Tikanga Māori has long been a source of New Zealand law”.
Leftie activists’ overt attempt to employ tikanga to undermine Parliamentary sovereignty and subvert traditional common law principles, while at same time denying they are doing so, is classic postmodernist gaslighting.
Ema Aitken’s tenure as a judge is currently set to end on 5 February 2027. Perhaps there’ll be a Judgy farewell function, but not at the Northern Club. That august Club has rightly banned her, along with her odious husband and idiotic Michael Reed KC, who each personally invaded the NZ First function.
Once she’s out of New Zealand’s Judgery, Aitken will be a free citizen, unconstrained by judicial strictures, fully at liberty to spread as much antidemocratic, Woke rot as she wants.
John, I bet she will remain in the ranks of being an on call judge, just as dozens of others do due to its extremely lucrative rewards for part time “ work.”
The fact that she is an inveterate liar is why her colleagues circled the wagons to protect the system.
Generally speaking our judiciary are more concerned with activism and ignoring government law and edicts.
Time for a wholesale clean out.
No one is above the law, even judges, whose job it is to interpret the law and hand down rulings and sentences on others. As such they are rightly held to a higher standard of conduct, in their public capacity, including political neutrality. Interjecting at a private function with confrontational remarks aimed at the Leader of a major political Party whilst he is delivering a speech is outrageous, and brings the reputation of the profession into disrepute. The fact that the disciplinary outcome has been no more than a slap on the wrist seems to send the message, one rule for thee, and another for me.