The new Knight who made a career out of listening to others
Monday, 1 June 2026
There is something disarming about being welcomed into Sir Peter Boshier’s home with its colourful wallpaper and two friendly dogs, before sitting down to discuss fairness, transparency and one of the country’s highest honours.
The newly appointed Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, who received the award for his services to the state and the judiciary, spent decades as the Principal Family Court judge, Law Commissioner and later Chief Ombudsman.
Now two years into retirement (and enjoying it) he speaks gently and thoughtfully ‒ more inclined to credit others, particularly his family and work colleagues, than dwell on his own achievements.
“I’m immensely honoured by it, because it’s a big honour, and it’s one that I have with deep appreciation.”
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As Chief Ombudsman, his focus was on a faster and more effective resolution of Official Information Act (OIA) and other complaints, working with government agencies to improve their practices and strengthening his team’s investigation and monitoring of prisons, secure aged care and public mental health facilities, and a much greater prevalence of agencies proactively disclosing a range of information on their websites.
He considered more than 14,000 OIA complaints and conducted 37 proactive investigations of the official information practices of central government agencies. He was active in the International Ombudsman Institute (IOI), serving between 2019 and 2022 as President of the Australasia and Pacific Region and then as Second Vice President of the IOI. He was elected President of the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts in the United States of America, the only New Zealander to hold that position.
Even now, he still sounds faintly astonished by the knighthood itself.
“I’m still overwhelmed by the fact the first media person rang up and said, ‘You’re going to be knighted’ … I would have loved my parents to have seen this.”
Then his thoughts drift home ‒ back to Gisborne, where he grew up with his two older siblings.
“Our parents were not wealthy, but they believed in hard work and wanted us to succeed,” he says.
Much of Boshier’s career has centred on fairness ‒ particularly for people at their most vulnerable. He talks often about listening, patience and transparency, not as lofty legal concepts but as deeply human obligations.
“I think judges succeed when they lead people to the view that they are being listened to,” he says.
“You can give a decision that doesn’t go the way someone wants it to, in a way that they still feel they’ve had justice.”
One of the achievements he is proudest of was helping open up the Family Court to greater scrutiny during reforms to the Care of Children Act.
The challenge, he says, was balancing privacy with accountability.
“The compromise we came to was that media would, as of right, be able to come into the court and be the eyes and ears for the public.”
Transparency, he believes, ultimately strengthens trust.
“I think people have got the right to know,” he says.
“What’s driven me strongly is fairness, and I don’t like it when people are treated in a way which is unfair. The good thing about transparency is it makes decision-makers do their job properly.”
But one of the most defining moments of his career came not in a courtroom, but during a terrifying ordeal in Fiji.
While on secondment in Suva in the early 2000s, training judges across the Pacific, Boshier and his wife were victims of a violent home invasion. Robbed at knifepoint, he suffered a severe eye injury and feared they would not survive.
The experience fundamentally changed the way he viewed victims in court.
“When you are a victim in the middle of a crime, it’s survival,” he says.
“You’re not necessarily looking for the person’s shirt colour and the colour of their shoes.”
When police later questioned him, he realised he could barely remember details about the attackers at all.
“In those moments between life and death, you freeze.”
Back in New Zealand courtrooms, he began intervening when lawyers aggressively challenged witnesses over imperfect memories.
“I used to stop lawyers in their tracks after that,” he says.
“I’d say, ‘you can ask, but not as harshly. I don’t want you doing that ‒ that’s not fair’.”
The lesson stayed with him long after Fiji.
“Sometimes someone’s in such turmoil that it’s easy to write them off as eccentric or mischievous.
“But it’s the state they’re in. They just can’t quite articulate, and they’ve got the right to have us exercise patience and listen.”
For all the titles accumulated across a lifetime in public service, Boshier still speaks with the enthusiasm of the Gisborne Boys’ High School student who discovered he loved debating and public speaking.
“I knew I was never going to be a scientist or mathematician,” he laughs.
“But by the time I left school, I could debate, and I liked it.”
Joining Boshier as new Knights are Dr Paul Baker, New Zealand’s leading authority on airway management and a foundation consultant anaesthetist at Starship Children’s Hospital, Sir James Chapman, for his contributions to literacy teaching, particularly in learning disabilities and dyslexia research, and Sir David Ellis, who has been recognised for his services to the thoroughbred industry and to philanthropy.
There two new Dames. Susan Hassall, for her work with Hamilton Boys’ High School and the University of Waikato, supporting community development projects and charities through her involvement with Momentum Waikato, Hospice Waikato Trust, and the Association of Boys’ Schools of New Zealand, and Professor Elizabeth Rata, a foundation member of Kura Kaupapa Māori in the 1980s, is recognised internationally for her work developing bilingual and immersion curriculum.