Pee Kay
No Minister
Meet Claire Charters, an Auckland University law professor who has spent years climbing the ranks of the academic and bureaucratic elite.
She has bounced from an advisor to the president of the UN General Assembly to a stint as an “indigenous governance adviser” for the Human Rights Commission. But don’t let the fancy titles fool you – Charters has built her career on ideas that many everyday New Zealanders find completely out of touch.
As the lead author of the controversial He Puapua report, Charters is a driving force behind the push for co-governance and Māori sovereignty. When she was at the Human Rights Commission, she helped churn out “fact sheets” claiming that parallel systems are the only way to fix inequality, completely brushing aside the concept of personal responsibility.
That ‘fact sheet’ stated – Co-governance arrangements, which enable Māori to manage issues and be involved in making decisions that affect Māori, can help to address entrenched inequalities Māori experience across numerous areas, including health, justice, employment, housing, and income.
To back up her claims, she loves to point to overseas examples like Finland’s indigenous parliament. What she conveniently leaves out, though, is that those European bodies answer to the national parliament and were actually voted on by regular citizens – not imposed from the top down.
Charters maintains, “…without transformative change, New Zealand’s constitution will continue to perpetuate the fundamental injustice of colonial subjugation of Māori”.
“The Crown’s claim to sovereignty in this country is built on myth and assumption, not on the rule of law.”
Now, Charters is taking her philosophies from the classroom to the bookstore. In her lecture halls at Auckland University, she holds a massive megaphone, using her position as a law professor to shape the minds of the next generation of lawyers and judges, steering them toward the belief that Māori hold a separate, legal sovereignty.
She has doubled down on this in her new book, Sovereignty: The Case for Constitutional Transformation. In it, she boldly claims that New Zealand’s actual sovereignty is just a “myth” and that our legal foundations are illegal and unjust.
Even worse, she mocks the idea of everyone being equal under the law, calling universal equality a colonial “fairy tale”. While she fast-tracks her vision to enshrine Māori sovereignty into law, any clear thinking New Zealander can easily discern her radical blueprint would completely dismantle New Zealand’s democracy, replacing equal rights for all citizens with a divided system based on race.
An ETHNOCRACY!
Geoff Parker gives his views on Charters’ book here – https://breakingviewsnz.blogspot.com/2026/10/geoff-parker-claire-charters.html
And the Anglo Saxon, now back on deck, could not let her outlandish claims go unanswered here – https://youtu.be/SryotCJRDao
This article was originally published by No Minister.
