The New Zealand Law Association is doing an admirable job enabling subversive, activist lawyers to expose themselves. The Association is a divine reincarnation of the former Auckland District Law Society. Unlike the New Zealand Law Society, the NZ Law Assn has no statutory authority and doesn’t try to hound un-Woke lawyers out of the legal profession. I’ve previously covered the Law Society’s brutal, unlawful hounding of heterodox lawyers:
The Law Association’s latest coup was to allow former Solicitor-General Una Jagose to reveal her true self at a breakfast meeting hosted by the Association on Thursday, 2 July. Jagose’s central thesis was ostensibly that New Zealand is at risk of “sleepwalking” into a collapse of its constitutional separation of powers – between the legislature, executive and judiciary – and its rule of law.
New Zealand is certainly at risk of a collapse of its democratic checks and balances. However, the reasons for that risk are diametrically opposite to those that snotty-nosed Jagose proposed.
Jagose blamed the threat to New Zealand’s rule of law on its democratically elected Parliamentarians doing what they supposed to do – simply passing laws. Her spiel included these verbatim, revelatory morsels:
“[Parliamentary supremacy] is a foundational principle, but it has its own rules and conventions [and] operating model [of] how it works that defines and confines its authority.”
“Can Parliament conclusively define, without Māori, the meaning of that Treaty [of Waitangi] that occupies the foundational place in our constitution…Do you see limits to constitutional legitimacy there? Because I do…These sorts of questions…illuminate the limits to our democracy and to parliamentary supremacy.”
“I bridle at the suggestion that courts are seizing new authority and straining at their legitimate boundaries when they respond to New Zealand customs and values.”
“We should all care deeply and talk about the separation of powers, the independence of the three branches, the legitimacy of all three of them and the connections between all three of them.”
“[Tikanga] has long been present in our UK-imported legal system, sometimes explicitly and sometimes hidden in plain sight.”
“[In reference to the Ellis case, where the Supreme Court radically injected Tikanga into a case that had nothing whatsoever to do with anything Māori] I don’t think we’re seeing revolution or illegitimate action… We’re seeing a familiar common law method.”
What can we make of these utterances out of Una, oracular high priestess of Woketearoa?
Transparently, she’s shooting to join her brother as a senior New Zealand judge. She’s also giving us all a gaslighting Nothing-To-See-Here concerning the New Zealand judiciary’s radical use of amorphous and undefinable Māori customs (Tikanga) as a Trojan horse to re-invent NZ’s common law to suit the judiciary’s critical ideological agendas.
Jagose’s notion that Parliament’s powers are limited by “Māori” interpretations of the Treaty of Waitangi is a direct pump for a particularly crazed neo-Marxist aspiration. It’s the anti-democratic nut-job notion that the Waitangi Tribunal should be formally enshrined as New Zealand’s supreme constitutional court and unelected legislative chamber.
Jagose purported to support New Zealand’s separation of powers. But her real hope is for New Zealand’s Courts to invoke Tikanga to ride roughshod over Parliament i.e., undermine and override the black-letter words of democratically enacted legislation.
In her self-righteous/serving lecture, Jagose selectively referenced a 2025 “survey” by The Helen Clark Foundation. The survey purported to “find” that only 30% of New Zealanders trust their government to do the right thing most of the time and that 34% believe government leaders abuse their power most of the time. Of course, nothing that Harridan Helen’s Foundation produces can be trusted because Helen’s pet podium is an overtly politically-biased charity that, under any credible charities regime, should have been deregistered long ago.
But assuming Clark’s foundational creation can be trusted, Jagose conveniently ignores the HC Foundation’s other finding that only 43% of New Zealanders believe that our courts make fair, impartial decisions based on the available evidence, falling to 31% for those struggling financially and 35% for respondents aged under 30. That’s what you get, with Jagose’s brand of extreme judicial inventiveness. No sane person trusts activist Courts when they routinely decide contrary to established law. It’s Jagose and her Identitarian Ilk who have destroyed faith in the Government, Crown Law, the judiciary and the legal system in general.
On 12 December 2024, Una Jagose, as Solicitor-General, volunteered to be interviewed by Sean Plunket on The Platform. The interview came in the wake of controversy surrounding Jagose writing, in her foreword to her mid-October 2024 proposed new prosecution guidelines, that prosecutors should “think carefully” before prosecuting individuals with Māori ancestry or who are “disproportionately impacted” by New Zealand’s justice system. Jagose was looking to “front” the controversy on The Platform, but it didn’t go well for her. When Plunket asked her directly whether she’s a Critical Race Theorist, she didn’t answer. So we know the answer.
Jagose’s father is an ethnic Indian from India. Her mother is from Ireland. Because her skin is a bit brown, Una thinks she both oppressed and at the same time qualitatively better and more deserving than people with pink skin. That’s her guiding principle.
And that’s where her principles end. In November 2024, Jagose apologised on behalf of Crown Law to the myriads of New Zealanders who have suffered abuse in State “care”. Such sufferers rightly called upon Jagose to resign, following the formal inquiry into the abuse. Suffers pointed out that, in cases brought against the Crown by surviving claimants, Solicitor-General Jagose was personally complicit in withholding evidence from the Police, used aggressive and re-traumatizing lines of questioning, and suggested - as a legal strategy - the use of psychological stress against claimants.
More of Jagose’s malfeasance in public office is connected to a current criminal case. Two policemen are being prosecuted for deliberately doctoring evidence presented to the Court in order to secure the false conviction of Alan Hall. I’ve covered this shocking miscarriage of justice, including Jagose’s role in it:
Specifically, when Crown Law’s role in keeping innocent Hall in jail became transparently clear in 2022, S-G Jagose feigned surprise and outrage. In doing so, she studiously evaded the inconvenient truth that by 2018 she knew full well, from investigative journalist Mike Wesley-Smith, the incontrovertible fact that Hall had been deliberately and falsely jailed - an inconvenient truth she tried to bury.
Jagose shouldn’t ever be a judge. But if there’s a Labour-led government after the next election, she almost certainly will be.