Keas are smart birds. They will watch you and judge you. In fact every smart creature does that, especially humans. Everyone judges everyone else all the time. This leads to most of the world’s problems, because each of us are constantly judging others. We create our own version of the truth, and we use that to compare how we’re treated.

When our truth is not believed, or when someone or something else acts in a way that doesn’t fit our version of the truth, we feel that it is unfair.

Let’s face it: we’ve all felt life’s been unfair at times. Being bullied, suffering abuse, getting cancer, losing a loved one, not getting that Play Station for Christmas. Sometimes it’s a big deal, sometimes not so much. Justice is different from fairness.

Justice is a way of smoothing out everyone’s own personal version of the truth and coming up with a compromise that helps most of society.​

When you go through the justice system, your opinion on what is fair is not so important… what’s important is what is equitable to all the people in New Zealand.

It’s hard to make that better, but there are lots of things you can do to make it worse! And this is why a lawyer can help… they guide you through this weird, alien world of Justice.

Justice isn’t fairness and no matter how loudly you complain or cry about this, it will not change anything. If you have a good lawyer, and listen to them, and can just forget about fairness for a while (it’s hard, we know), then you are more likely to feel like you have been treated justly by the system.

​You can trust Portia to know how to get through this.