Access to Justice | 2026 Triennial Review: Or Is It Just a Can of Worms?
FORMAL SUBMISSION: 2026 LEGAL AID TRIENNIAL REVIEW
ATTENTION: Hon. Paul Goldsmith, Minister of Justice RE: Systemic Failures in Access to Justice and Digital Record Integrity
For nine years as a self-litigant in Watkins vs Highmark Homes, I have fought for justice against a narrative cemented in the NZ Court decision database—a digital stain I cannot remove. This has been a classic David and Goliath battle. Throughout the High Court and Court of Appeal, the New Zealand Judiciary has 'defended' every previously published decision and provided a narrative to Google AI that the case has been rigorously tested.
As a submission to the Legal Aid Review Committee I bring the Watkins vs Highmark Homes case to your attention in the hope that it will reveal some heavy roadblocks for both the Legal Aid Lawyers and the Litigants, and that it will highlight the technological aspects for reform so that along with Government Initiatives there is also a culture shift within the NZ Judicial System and the Ministry of Justice.
Reform is a staff training exercise and organisational culture always starts at the top with legislative reform as the document. Currently there is a major conflict between what seemed to be New Age thinking applied to the Employment Relations Act 2000 and its true intent, and the NZ Judiciary fighting tooth and nail against it.
The Watkins vs Highmark Homes employment-related dispute has been buried in technicality, with the High Court and the Employment Court ignoring the intent of the Employment Relations Act 2000.
Court of Appeal Decision regarding removal of a harmful digital communication
These high level courts have never 'tested' the accuracy of District Court endorsement of a Disputes Tribunal opinion against the true sworn facts, nor have they tested the law to identify how the ERA’s determinations directly contradict their legislative mandate.
My blog is my honest opinion and serves as a publicly available record of where the High Court and the Court of Appeal Panel had their blinkers on. If the Chief Justice is fully aware of and has seen the problem of no access to Legal Aid and No Access to Justice building over time and waving that flag then why is the culture in the NZ Judiciary of loathing self litigants still alive and well? Various articles on mainstream NZ news media outlets will vouch for that fact but nothing is ever done. www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/350522159/judges-bullying-and-a-secretive-ineffective-and-broken-complaints-system
Complaining about a judge as a self ligant falls into the same category as complaining as an advocate, no matter what court.
The protection of eager young law graduates to be recruited into this job against the sword fight of wit and intimidation of their superiors is a must in order to keep them in the Legal Aid pool, and not to beat them into the group we have there now of “I used to do legal aid but the pay is no good for the amount of work it involves” or “I don’t want to annoy that judge”. https://www.thelawyermag.com/nz/news/general/new-lawyers-organisation-formed-to-address-judicial-bullying: The larger legal organisations designed to protect lawyers facing unfair treatment.
Instead
The Judiciary have refused to challenge previous judicial decisions for fear it would unravel the mess created by their peers. The result, a narrative by AI of public record of damning court decisions against Watkins which block the truth. A character assassination and Judicial Bias. No matter how many complaints I have lodged over the years of Judges endorsing other Judges without acknowledging sworn evidence no investigations were done. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/is-this-justice/452026/judges-bullying-and-a-broken-complaints-system
Saving Face At Any Cost - Irony of the High Court
The High Court’s dismissal of my application ordering the removal of the Mike Ross blog posted upon my bankruptcy to Google - despite being alerted to the identity theft of an academic’s credentials—reveals a disturbing hierarchy of priorities. The Judiciary would rather ‘save face’ by upholding every prior flawed decision than admit a single administrative error. By protecting the 'Mike Ross' narrative, they are not protecting the law; they are protecting their own colleagues from the 'can of worms' that a finding in my favour and exposure of the truth would represent. Countless emails to Hon Judith Collins but nothing has happened. Just more news articles https://lawnews.nz/featured/zero-tolerance-for-courtroom-bullies-attorney-general-says/Neil Sands What We Want To Know
No legal aid lawyer would dare touch my case for fairly well documented and obvious reasons so they politely used the excuse of the broken Legal Aid system. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/sasha-borissenko-judge-dread-bullying-and-harassment-from-the-bench. What we know from 2018 forward for fear of consequences.
My court submissions are not an attempt at re-litigating old arguments - an accusation repeatedly used by the Judiciary to throw out my applications. High Court refusing to order the removal of a blog written by a random fake blogger "Mike Ross" who is not a real person is bizarre. Mike Ross blog "bio" states:
Introduction: Mike Ross spent nearly thirty years teaching all aspects of commercial law to business students and almost as many years writing variously for The New Zealand Herald, The National Business Review and The Chartered Accountants' Journal. He authored two books on legal principles governing business reconstructions. Mike Ross holds degrees in both law and economics from the University of Auckland.
But the problem is that while a real person with the name "Mike Ross" once held these credentials, the author of the Mike Ross blog is not the academic and lawyer described in the bio. As a legitimate authority on this case, he does not exist; he is a digital persona using a retired academic's resume to give a defamatory blog the weight of law. The fact that the Bio is a digital "rip-off" to gain cred with google and that the High Court decision ruled in favour of keeping it up online is ironic and bizarre in a case where perjury is at the heart of it.
The blog key words, description and instruction to google AI for the search engine to find it are targeted at Nicola Watkins but not at Highmark Homes. The blog’s metadata—including keywords and descriptions—is specifically engineered to instruct Google’s AI to associate my name with defamatory content while shielding Highmark Homes from similar scrutiny. This SEO is the 'assassin hidden behind the bushes'; it ensures the digital narrative is weaponized against me personally. This link to my article on Mike Ross blogger details how he uses targeted SEO to defame me, but the High Court overlooked it and did not recognise he is not an official government information source.
Mike Ross Defamatory Blog Article
The High Court Auckland did not consider that under the Harmful Digital Communications Act that my application to have the Mike Ross Blog removed raised the point that it was an unnecessary attack on my privacy. The Judiciary had formerly decided my case was not considered a Matter of Public Interest. My application to have the blog removed was declined and added another win on the Highmark Homes defamation scoreboard. Their main goal throughout this proceeding has been to silence and discredit me while protecting their company brand from being tarnished by the breaches of the employment act they deny, failing to protect employees from harmful digital content infiltrating their business systems and failing to react promptly, acting in bad faith and constructing my dismissal then committing perjury.
An astute KC would have identified in the first instance the blog writer Mike Ross is using a fake bio and his blog is not an official court record but AI generated content manipulated by a blog platform user who has to manually load the SEO, and index the page with google on the search console, provide it with a site map and give it instructions in order for the blog to show up on page 1. The loading of metadata and tags specifically for my name ranking page 1 but not for a search result ranking page 1 for Highmark Homes is a manual task, it doesn’t happen by magic.
This article demonstrates how even today the company demonstrates a foundation of dishonesty.
The Judges in question being KC "acquaintances" who allowed the perjury to pass should not have had to be told why that was an important turning point. Alongside having my defamation claim thrown out against Highmark Homes in the High Court Tauranga, accepting blindly what they were told by Highmark Homes counsel opposing the removal of public records, the High Court allowed the Mike Ross Blog to remain being a total slam dunk for Highmark Homes.
Given the IT topics included in the original Employment Dispute and the very reason I was stood down, there is a thread with Highmark Homes about the use and mis-use of data causing harm. The Judiciary should have noted that I was an integral part of the Highmark Homes Marketing team and for three and a half years administered their email system, dealt with their IT companies and webmaster, and prior to my constructive dismissal helped them design the material for their new website as a Business Development Manager co-signing Marketing spending initiatives for the Highmark Homes Licencing Group alongside the Managing Director Ryan Hunt. Google AI Bots would have been crawling all over these facts and brought them to the front if they were assistant to the High Court Judge. Clearly Highmark Homes and Mike Ross blogger have tried to "pull the wool over" and they have succeeded so far through 6 courts, with the final stop being my appeal to the Supreme Court Wellington for a full judicial review of Watkins vs Highmark Homes.
The general public, family members, Ministry of Justice, ERA staff and members of the Judiciary clicking on the Mike Ross blog article has only helped the bots keep him on page 1 giving him "cred" as an "authority". Not to mention the back-links he created, no decent blogger misses that tool out when they want to be on top. The High Court completely missed the point.
Here are the case citations to those decisions which makes it crystal clear to the google algorithm I should be banished to the naughty corner:
High Court Decision:
Highmark Homes Limited v Watkins [2023] NZHC 353 Court of Appeal Decision:
Watkins v Highmark Homes Ltd [2025] NZCA 173
If the High Court won't accept Exhibit J, the Jurisdictional Errors and the Chaos of the ERA over 6 years (the same ERA that has a 3 month mandate) then why are they allowing the Mike Ross Blog to stay online? Clearly they have no interest in the nuances of digital marketing technologies in relation to defamation of a person targeted with SEO or how that correlates to The Bill of Rights Act. Perhaps they don’t care so much to critique applications to the court by self litigants that are limited to 10 pages in double spacing as much as they enjoy reading wordy but authoritative articles by their esteemed colleagues for example Justice Susan Glazebrook discussing The Challenges and Possibilities of Common Law Constitutionalism
I remain steadfast in fighting back against the reputational damage I am caused in public records, and in the court of public opinion using AI tools to assess my societal worth. Highmark Homes lied in court, submitted false testimonies knowingly and recruited 5 lawyers while being supported by their professional trustee, business partners and family friend law firm Lyon O’Neale Arnold for 9 years so far. Not one affidavit from them just coaching but it counts as 4 more academic heads in support of their cause.
The official court decisions available online omit two ERA decisions which should alert the astute reader that we have a real problem.
Online Court Decisions that both the judiciary and AI search engine tools use to analyse a person's character are not able to rigorously test the common law principles against the rule of the law if official documents balancing the argument are omitted and false testimony is recorded as the truth. In my case the two missing ERA decisions deleted from their website cast some doubt on whether the High Court was fully informed.
Law students and lawyers researching case law to recycle for their own arguments—and even humiliated family members—can now access AI-generated legal summaries which they can also convert to a character reference at the speed of an instruction to Google Gemini. They use and accept these records as correct regardless of whether they are riddled with factual errors or opinions based on a manipulation of the truth, misleading statements or even dare I say it perjury.
The Judiciary system has effectively fed the AI digital defamation machine and endorsed "Mike Ross" the blogger, while the authorities recuse themselves of their statutory duty.
Would it not have been much simpler for the Judiciary to read the affidavits or did they use an internal AI system to perform their analysis?
The police say they simply do not have time to deal with it; regardless of the perjury manual on their website, the head CIB detective in Auckland quietly states it shouldn't be their mandate and that the Justice System is a Rabbit Warren. Minister Goldsmith and Minister Mitchell no doubt will stand back and wait for someone else to figure
The Evidence: Exhibit J and the ERA Online Records
The "smoking gun" in this case is Exhibit J: an email from Highmark Homes’ counsel dated November 2017.
The Fact: This email proves a pre-planned ultimatum—I was told to pay an alleged debt and resign, or face a pre-determined dismissal.
The Law: Under the Employment Relations Act, su
ch an ultimatum constitutes Constructive Dismissal. The Failure: I have provided this email in sworn, hard-copy affidavits to the Distr
ict Court, High Court, Employment Court and Court of Appeal. To date, no judge has addressed this document in a written ruling. They have consistently ignored this physical evidence to protect a flawed digital narrative.
The Erased Records: ERA 467 and 632
The Employment Relations Authority (ERA) has sanitized the digital record by removing determinations that contain their own submission I raised my personal grievances at the same time and within the required time period to accept a personal grievance claim.
The Timeline of Admissions:
Contemporaneous Filing: In 2017, I raised both an Unjustified Disadvantage claim and a Constructive Dismissal claim. These were par
t of the same sequence of events and documented in the same email evidence. The Timeliness Admission: In [2020] NZERA 467 at [
46], the Authority formally ruled that I did raise the personal grievance for unjustified disadvantage within the 90-day statutory timefram e. The Merits Admission: In [2022] NZERA 632 at [18], the Au
thority admitted: "The information Ms Watkins filed... describe her dismissal as a constructive dismissal."
The "Case-Splitting" Tool and the EMPC Cost Barrier:
Despite these admissions, the ERA assigned the constructive dismissal a different case number. They used this administrative separation to claim the dismissal was "out of time," eve
When this was challenged, the Employment Court (EMPC) refused to conduct a hearing
ERA Admin
The courts have penalized me for "administrative failures" that belong entirely to the state.
- The Admission: On 11 August 2022, ERA Support Manager Debbie de Jong admitted via email that the ERA did not have a functioning document list for my file, telling me to "check my own emails" to find missing documents.
- The Failure: The ERA destroyed my original paper evidence. When they attempted to return my files by sending broken IT file download links, they eventually resorted to couriered reams of "jumbled" submissions printed in no semblance of order. I was forced to recreate and re-swear my affidavits for the High Court. They admitted they had no filing structure for my documents and without notice had destroyed all my paper evidence even with the knowledge I intended to appeal the ERA decisions.
- The Narrative: Despite this admitted chaos, the judiciary continues to claim the case was "rigorously handled" to justify dismissing my appeals.
The
The foundation of this nine-year-old dispute is the lack of authority of the Disputes Tribunal to hear a matter over which it had no legal jurisdiction. This original error was "rubber-stamped" by the District Court and has been used as a shield by ever
The Outcome: A State-Sanctioned Bankruptcy
The outcome o
Because my case is so complicated, I could not find a suitably qualified person to t
Summary: The "Can of Worms"
Nearly a decade of ERA and Ministry of Justice procedural failures have now been codified into a flawed digital record. I call upon the Review Board and the Ministry to address my current situation, give me some fair options that don’t include giving up, and provide certainty on how they are going to handle the preventative measures the Judiciary puts up against self-represented litigants when they have already not been able to access suitably qualified legal aid. What tools does the Triennial Review Board have in their toolbox to ensure a plan can be executed to provide access to justice for all. Does it require more Bills to be passed through and what is the timeline - will I be able to benefit from any revelation that may occur pre or post election? Or am I stuck with it?
The Evide
nce Act 2006: Upon an official enquiry will there ever be an admission that the Judges failed their mandatory duty to consider valid, sworn affidavits? Section 157, Employment Relations Act: Will there ever be an admission the ERA prioritized technicalities over merits and used case-splitting to ignore contemporaneous grievances.
Natural Justice: A Court ordered investigation into why core legal determinations were deleted, why evidence was passed over and why Jurisdiction was ignored creating a "Digital Echo Chamber", could create a real opportunity for Justice and a learning and training opportunity in an institution that refuses to acknowledge when they made a mistake and will never apologise for it no matter how devastating the outcome. It should not take 20 years to say you are sorry.
The system is not testing the truth; rather, it has become a mechanism for defending institutional mistakes. This has created a convoluted administrative knot—a 'spaghetti bolognese' of conflicting records that may be a challenge for the Judiciary to untangle, but is exactly the kind of complexity AI is designed to audit.
Will a reform to the Legal Aid system be about simply adding more money, or will it include technology to help Judiciary staff show them how to find their own errors? We must move toward a landscape of fairness and humility that aligns with New Age Common Law.
The NZ Judiciary and Highmark Homes may hope my case will 'compost away,' as it went through the paper shredder at the ERA a long time ago. But, as my counsellor recently told me, throughout this testing journey I have grown a 'titanium spine.' Metal doesn’t compost. When the ashes have blown away, the truth remains. If the queue for Justice continues to grow, trust in the NZ Government will continue to wane, the NZ Police and the Ministry of Justice will lose the respect of the people. Then you really have problems.
I will continue to lobby for fairness and access to justice as a self litigant while the system remains the same. It would be a privilege to be one of the recipients of the change and to see the 2026 Triennial Review lead by Hon Minister of Justice Paul Goldsmith outcomes shift the landscape of the NZ Justice System for the betterment of all New Zealanders.
For more insight into this article please read: The Truth, The Whole Truth and Nothing But The Truth
Read my open letter to the Chief Justice and Ministers of Parliament. Note that the NZ Law Society has recommended I lobby to Parliament as they can not provide me any assistance. David Hayes counsel article pointed to in my blog is on their website:
Open Letter to the Chief Justice and Ministers of Parliament
Further reading on the Systemic Culture Problem in our NZ Judiciary System:
Mike Ross Blogex: NZ Public Report on Google Guidelines Breach and Judicial Ignorance
CA685/2024 [2025] NZCA 281 and CA855/2024
https://watkinsvshighmarkhomes-nzjustice.blogspot.com/2026/03/mike-ross-blogex-nz-public-report.html
Highmark Homes v. Watkins: When Justice is not seen to be done and the "Mike Ross" Factor
https://watkinsvshighmarkhomes-nzjustice.blogspot.com/2026/03/mike-ross-law-blog-is-fake.html
