Sasha Borissenko: The legal winners and losers of 2022

Massey University staff on strike at the Albany campus last year. Photo / Alex Burton

OPINION:

With every year there are winners and losers. Deciding to renovate a kitchen during an inflation crisis and with a freelance media salary was a loss, for example. And yet, surviving said renovation without committing murder was a win.

I could go on about the trials and tribulations of realising that no, gibbing and tiling in-house was not a good idea but instead let’s look at some of the legal winners and losers of 2022.

ACC modelling suggests about 60 per cent of the 47,000 maternal births each year will now be covered under the new Maternal Birth Injury (and Other Matters) Amendment Act.

Physical injury ‘down there’ - a nod to my Catholic schooling roots, if you will - affects around 85 per cent of women who give birth vaginally.

Mental trauma is also included, so long as it stems from a physical injury. The move is a far cry from ACC’s roots, which once used “housewives” in the legislative drafting.

But sadly, the act is only a win for those birthing after October 1, 2022 as the legislation is not retrospective.

Tangentially, and contrary to popular belief, lying on your back to give birth decreases the dimensions and space between the pelvic outlet between bones, rendering birth to be more difficult.

The practice took off thanks to King Louis XIV of France, who commanded the construction of a viewing table so that he could have a better view of the birth of his mistress’ child. Women have been suffering perineal tears ever since.

Moving on, Siouxsie Wiles gets the next award for sticking it to the proverbial man.

Together with physicist and modeller Professor Shaun Hendy, they filed complaints against the University of Auckland in 2022 alleging their employer hadn’t taken enough steps to protect them against “a small but venomous sector of the public” that had become increasingly “unhinged”.

The Employment Relations Authority agreed that a review of their concerns should be fast-tracked to the Employment Court, despite the university’s objections.

In October, a university spokesperson told the Herald: “The university cannot comment on this for reasons of privacy and because this is a case before the courts.”

The University of Auckland is one of New Zealand’s six universities that had a rough year in 2022.

In October more than 7000 university staff from around the country walked off the job in support of a Tertiary Education Union claim for an 8 per cent pay rise to match the rising costs of living.

Unions also came out on top for re-establishing themselves as forces to be reckoned with, despite a long history of disenfranchisement brought on by neoliberalism in the 1980s.

Nurses, journalists, court staff, public servants, firefighters, allied health workers, bus drivers, and even toilet paper producers either striked or threatened to strike in the last 12 months.

In Victoria University of Wellington’s defence, it gets brownie points for being the first university to prohibit intimate relationships between staff and students.

The policy came into effect in September and represented “the university’s commitment to ensuring it has safeguards in place to prevent conflicts of interest, abuses of power, and sexual harassment”. In other words, creeps will have to keep their creeping to a minimum.

Tova O’Brien gets the award for proving there’s life after the press gallery and talking frankly about bearing the brunt of a breach of contract when she moved on from Newshub to headline her own breakfast talk radio show on Today FM.

The Employment Relations Authority ordered O’Brien to pay $2000 for providing MediaWorks with comment and images while still under contract.

In an interview, O’Brien described the move as “chilling for the industry” as it set a precedent that if you’re in the media, you’re in competition with everybody. Together with Helen White’s Employment Relations (Restraint of Trade) Amendment Bill, they’ve shone a light on nasty restraint of trade clauses in 2022.

The last award goes to season two of The White Lotus, for releasing a banger of a title theme song - who knew a harpsichord, a turkey, and techno could work?

The show also highlighted the power of prenuptial agreements, and that incest and murder are not ever okay, even if done in an Idyllic Sicilian setting. Tenuous legal link aside, apologies for the cryptic spoiler.

Speaking of marriage, same-sex couples won the right to marry across the entire US in December, as a divided Supreme Court delivered a 5-4 decision ending same-sex marriage bans in 14 states in the process.

The divided nature of the ruling is of course a worry but a win’s a win.

While obvious losers would include the Roe v Wade and Depp v Heard decisions, the failures of international law regarding Ukraine, and Corrections displacing prisoners, for example, but the tragic nature of the world would leave anyone with existential dread.

Here’s to the rollercoaster that was 2022 - and for a better 2023. Happy New Year.