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 Maori 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 Maori 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 Maori 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
Pee Kay writes he is from a generation where common sense, standards, integrity and honesty are fundamental attributes. This article was first published HERE
8 comments:
Democracy has indeed become a fairy tale when meritocracy is overturned and people are awarded high positions on the basis of their race and/or sex.
"While she fast-tracks her vision to enshrine Maori 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."
In other words APARTHEID !!!! Welcome to New Zimbabwe !!
No nation has ever succeeded with a race based governance.
Can Charters look ahead a few more generations to realize that Maori bloodlines will be even more dilute, and that segregation based on less than 1% Maori DNA is ludicrous ?
In the 1981 census, when to claim to be Maori you had to have 50% plus Maori ancestry, there were 279,252 "real Maori" in NZ.
Projected forward using known birth rates that would give a maximum of 512,000 "real Maori' now.
The fact that almost 1 million people are now claiming to be Maori leads to an interesting hypothesis.
At the current rate of growth in 'discovering your Maoriness' continues, then by 2050 we'll all be classified as Maori and the problem of separation disappears.
Charters may well be right that New Zealand’s democratic Parliament is a ‘fairy tale’ and you need look no further back than the Constitution Act 1986 to find at least one reason why. By that Act, Parliament divorced themselves from the British Crown and empowered themselves.
Here is what academic lawyer Philip A. Joseph, in his text Constitutional and Administrative Law in New Zealand, 3rd Edition, has to say about that:
“13.6.1 Severing the branch
“The Constitution Act 1986 invites two analogies. First, an axeman, perched on the branch of a tree, severs the limb at the trunk. Does the axeman fall to the ground with the branch? Or can he defy gravity and remain suspended, though he has lost his means of support? The Constitution Act 1986 revoked New Zealand’s sources of legislative power (namely the New Zealand Constitution Act 1852 (UK), the Statute of Westminster 1931 (UK) and the New Zealand Constitution (Amendment) Act 1947 (UK)), yet declared: “The Parliament of New Zealand continues to have full power to make laws.” Like the axeman who loses his only means of support, do Parliament’s power likewise fall to the ground? Can there exist, in law, a power without a source? To declare the continuance of powers does not constitute or create them. Such declaration premises their existence and, perforce, their source. Perhaps, on this view, the Constitution Act 1986 is New Zealand’s ultimate proclamation of autochthony? Though itself a product of New Zealand’s legislative autonomy gifted by the Westminster Parliament, it repudiated the source of that autonomy and denied the gift was ever made. Parliament’s legislative powers may now have factual rather than legal force.”
That is a rather obvious point: Parliament cannot write rules to empower themselves; that power must come from somewhere else and the only other possible source is We the People.
For our Parliament to be legitimate, the Constitution Act 1986 would need to have been agreed by We the People in a referendum. Parliament must have a mandate from the people.
As it is, they are merely a bunch of blow-hard pretenders who have not represented us with respect of the Waitangi Tribunal and instead have allowed the Tribunal to effectively act in a co-governance arrangement. Note the silence on co-governance issues in the run-up to the election. Our representative Parliament are too frightened to say anything and the press have obliged them in that.
I expect that Charters is aware of this situation and is playing it for all that she can, and fair enough too. If you cannot get off your chuff and demand your democratic rights regarding referenda such as for the Constitution Act and the TPB, then you deserve what you are about to get.
Yes, in the vein of the comments above, Charters needs to look in the mirror. She is the purveyor of fairy tales and it starts with what she calls this country. She sees herself (and fellow travellers) as Sneetches, and creates considerable mischief in her division seeking privelege. As a seditionist, she has no business being in higher education.
Charters is completely beyond the pale. And it's the Sami parliament not the Finnish parliament. The Sami / Lapps have their traditional reindeer herding lands across Arctic Scandinvia and it is territorial autonomy. They do NOT claim Oslo Fjord which was never their land. Charters never explains this - the arrangement is not comparable when we have Maori claiming the entirety of NZ - land, water and sea
And Charters needs to go to the same tanning salon as Ngarewa-Packer. She is mainly European
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