UNA JAGOSE…DANGEROUS GOOSE ON THE LOOSE

Prosecuting a bellicose dose of…Critical Race Theory

Una Jagose is New Zealand’s current Solicitor-General. She has held that position since 2016 when former National Government Minister Christopher Finlayson appointed her.

Solicitor-General is New Zealand’s second ranking Government lawyer, behind Attorney-General, the position currently held by Government Minister Judith Collins. Collins is Jagose’s boss.

Solicitor-General is a powerful role which includes being chief executive of the Crown Law Office. That Office comprises swathes of lawyers employed to represent the New Zealand State, including criminal prosecutors.

In 2016, Jagose acted as Director of New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau, New Zealand’s most power spy agency. In 2020, Jagose won the public policy category of the Stuff-Westpac 2020 Women of Influence Awards. The supreme winner that year was Dr Siouxsie Wiles.

Jagose’s new Prosecution Guidelines

On 1 October 2024, Jagose issued new Solicitor-General’s Prosecution Guidelines. These Guidelines prescribe how all New Zealand lawyer prosecutors should make decisions on prosecuting (or not) the crimes allegedly committed by New Zealanders.

The Guidelines are Jagose’s document and it’s readily apparent from them that Jagose is more than Solicitor-General. She is a political activist. More particularly, Jagose is an ideological operative using her position as Solicitor-General to personally imbed Critical Race Theory in New Zealand’s judicial system.

Critical Race Theory, to which Jagose is clearly deeply and proudly wedded, holds that racial bias is inherent in western societies such as New Zealand, especially in its legal and social institutions, because such institutions have allegedly been primarily designed for and implemented by people with whitish skin. (Jagose’s father was ethnic Indian. Her mother was Irish.)

It's no exaggeration that the Guidelines fixate on how New Zealand’s criminal justice system must positively discriminate in favour of New Zealanders with Māori ancestry. Jagose’s Guidelines include the following:

From Jagose’s personal Introduction…

It is well documented that the criminal justice system delivers disproportionately adverse results for Māori, who are overrepresented as both victims and defendants…We specifically reviewed the guidelines to understand whether and how prosecutorial decision-making may contribute to the disproportionate criminal justice outcomes for Māori.

The guidelines ask prosecutors to think carefully about particular decisions where a person (whether the victim or the defendant) is Māori...This does not promote different treatment based on ethnicity or membership of a particular group.

Being Māori could correlate with deprivation or trauma that may be relevant to a specific decision although this does not mean that decision must be made in a particular way. The guidelines refer to Māori specifically because they are tangata whenua to whom the Crown has obligations under the Treaty of Waitangi | Te Tiriti o Waitangi. This reflects the Crown’s duties under the Treaty | Te Tiriti.

From the rest of the content of the Guidelines…

Because prosecutors have an influential part to play in the criminal justice system, they should recognise their decisions may contribute to the well-documented disproportionately adverse system impacts, for Māori in particular.

Bias can impact all population groups but the overrepresentation of Māori in the criminal justice system as both victims and defendants suggests Māori may be more likely to be harmed by adverse biases.

It’s important to emphasise that the new Guidelines relate to whether to prosecute people with Māori ancestry, and not just sentencing following conviction. Sentencing of Māori got caught up in the controversy surrounding the lucrative “culture reports” industry. Positive prosecutorial discrimination in favour of Māori is far more drastic.

Prosecutorial bias in favour of Māori means that, all else being equal, a person with Māori ancestry will (under the new Guidelines) be less likely to be prosecuted for a crime than a person without such ancestry, in otherwise exactly the same circumstances. The Guidelines are a loud and proud rejection of traditional notions of equality before the law and that “Justice is blind” (including colour blind) i.e., that the legal system ought to be objective and unbiased.

Wrong, wrong, wrong…

The race bias hard-wired into the Guidelines is wrong on so many levels it could be the subject of a book. It’s so flabbergasting and instinctively appalling that it’s important to take a deep breath and distill the main, most egregious flaws.

• The Guidelines are racist in the true, traditional sense of judging and treating people based on racial ancestry. Under the Guidelines, all individuals with any Māori ancestry are regarded as necessarily underprivileged and deserving of special treatment. This is two-tiered justice based on race, involving racial stereotyping of the first order. It’s a throw-back to racist Victorian ideas that the “noble savage”, whose ancestors lived simple (entirely imagined) lives in perfect harmony with nature and each other, now deserves a good old leg up. It’s patronizing and horrid and completely ignores that all humans have ancestors who have, not so long ago, been on the receiving end of history. Utopian dreams are actually dystopian nightmares. What the colonists did to Māori, in war and by way of land dispossession, pales by comparison to what Māori did to each other before the civilizing influence of colonization.

• The Guidelines treat Crown prosecutors as social engineers whose role it is to transform New Zealand society into Jagose’s personal conception of a better place. Prosecutors’ role is not to apply the law, it’s to selectively use the law as a tool in transforming society. Jagose is not about equality of opportunity; her passion is to engineer her own conception of equality of societal outcomes. Our Solicitor-General exhibits the same sort of savior complex as Authoritarian Ardern. Does John Tamihere really deserve to get off Scot free, because his Scottish ancestry is mixed with Māori? Perhaps his murdering brother David should’ve got off too?

• Completely ignored is the awkward but entirely valid question of who might legitimately be regarded as “Māori”, thereby deserving of special treatment under the Guidelines. There is simply no way of telling, by genetic marker or otherwise, whether an individual has any Māori ancestry. I’ve covered this in a previous Substack.

• The race components of the Guidelines come with all the dishonest Gaslighting that characterizes much Wokery. Jagose instructs prosecutors to criminally charge Māori less than non- Māori – to address alleged past injustices and honor Te Tiriti - but in the same breath asserts that “This does not promote different treatment based on ethnicity”.  Get lost Jagose. We didn’t come down in the last shower.

Who guided the Guidelines?

Jagose has paid special tribute to a charity called Ināia Tonu Nei for that outfit’s help in guiding the Guidelines. Ināia Tonu Nei’s website includes all sorts of poisonous titbits…

Jagose’s selective fairness

Jagose has gone long on pursuing her conception of fairness for anyone with Māori ancestry. But she wasn’t so fair to falsely-imprisoned Allan Hall, keeping that unfortunate Pakeha man in the Can knowing full well he was innocent…

Lone wolf Jagose

Nothing has emerged so far to indicate that Jagose consulted her boss Judith Collins before publishing Jagose’s new Guidelines. It’s time the current Government did something about Jagose and her fanatical, fantasist fellow travelers.