That MP was John Tamihere. By the time the next election rolled around, that new, separate Māori Party was very much alive – so alive that Tamihere would lose his electorate to its candidate, Pita Sharples.
Twenty years later, he finds himself the party’s president. Labour still preaches the virtues of a Māori voice within main parties, but Tamihere is now saying the opposite. Until a few months ago, Tamihere’s argument for a separate Māori party was so strong that it looked like it might wipe Labour from the Māori seats completely. This year’s byelection in his old seat, Tāmaki Makaurau, humiliated Labour.
But then things unravelled.
Months after winning the byelection, the party has lost a third of its caucus and is in the midst of an existential crisis.
So deep is the valley into which the party has fallen since returning to Parliament in 2020, it’s worth reflecting on that Auckland victory to remind oneself of the peaks it previously scaled.
In 2020, no one won against the Labour Party. Act lifted its vote, but only thanks to National collapsing. The Greens did too, but that was mainly because it came off an exceptionally poor performance in 2017.
Te Pāti Māori took on Labour on its own turf and won – and for five years it kept on winning, all the way up to the party’s barnstorming victory in the Tamaki Makaurau byelection in September.
Tensions the party had kept private for months burst into the open. Most parties in distress grumble quietly for a few months before spectacularly imploding in a matter of days.
What’s remarkable about Te Pāti Māori’s implosion is just how long and sustained it’s been. Most parties can only burn at that white-hot intensity for a few days before flaming out. Te Pāti Māori has been blazing for months without showing any signs of stopping.
As of this week, Mariameno Kapa-Kingi and Tākuta Ferris are sitting as independents. They could be joined soon by Orinii Kaipara, who seems to be mulling a move from the caucus she joined only a couple of months ago.
The scrap has bled to the party infrastructure in local electorates, with the party declaring one, Te Tai Tokerau, dysfunctional (probably because it is loyal to its now-ousted MP).
The matter is nearly but not quite existential. The party’s dysfunction has become such an established fact that Labour stands a very good shot of retaking many of the seats next year.
Labour won the party vote in all seven Māori seats in 2023 and held six of the seven as recently as 2023 and all seven as recently as 2020. Vote splitting has been a feature of the seats for some time. Clearly, a residual affection for Labour remains.
There are further risks for Te Pāti Māori. Kapa-Kingi and Ferris and whoever Te Pāti Māori run against them risk splitting the vote in their electorates, allowing a Labour candidate to come through the middle. Both MPs have tiny majorities; Kapa-Kingi’s is 517 and Ferris’ is 2824.
The Northland electorate of Te Tai Tokerau could be especially interesting, with Green MP Hūhana Lyndon, who placed a distant third in 2023, likely to do better in 2026. Locals say she’s been very visible. Labour’s Kelvin Davis, since retired from Parliament, will be replaced by Willow-Jean Prime, who is likely to do well.
The wild card is whether Te Pāti Māori will be able to select Hone Harawira, as the very persistent Wellington rumour suggests. Harawira held the seat for Te Pāti Māori (then better known as the Māori Party) and Mana, after he split off, citing his colleagues’ proximity to the Key Government.
Te Pāti Māori MPs before the party’s split. Photo / Mark Mitchell
It would be quite the homecoming, completing a story that in many ways began when Harawira split off in 2011. He was right. The Māori Party’s proximity to National ultimately destroyed it. What has been reborn as Te Pāti Māori is closer in many ways to Mana than the Māori Party Harawira left.
The other big question that hangs over the party is what happens to Hana Rawhiti-Maipi Clark, its great hope for the future, and the holder of the one electorate Labour is most doubtful it can win back. She has a future in Parliament, for sure, but with whom? She’s a talent, but she’s still learning the ropes. Let’s not forget the bizarre ram raid that wasn’t a ram raid of the 2023 campaign – you can get away with a stunt like that once, but not twice.
The party feels unlikely to crash out of Parliament completely. If it were to come close, you can imagine voters coming back to keep the party alive, much like they did when the Greens flirted with the 5% threshold in 2017.
There’s a small chance a test of the party’s popularity could come very soon indeed. The party hasn’t quite made up its mind whether it wants to trigger the waka-jumping law, forcing Kapa-Kingi and Ferris from Parliament and triggering byelections in their seats.
Nothing like that has yet been seen in MMP politics: it would mean two byelections occurring simultaneously in two of the largest electorates in the country, which together make up more than half of its inhabited land mass. Just one of those electorates, Te Tai Tonga, covers four islands: Wellington in the North Island, the Chatham Islands, Stewart Island/Rakiura and the entire South Island.
The party seems split on whether such a fight is worth having. It would cost a small fortune for the now independent Kapa-Kingi and Ferris to fight such an election, lacking as they do any real infrastructure. But Te Pāti Māori isn’t flush with cash either, having lost some bulk funding after expelling the two MPs. Labour, which does have the money (but would rather spend it on other things), would probably come through the middle.
The future of the party hangs in the balance. There’s a move to topple Tamihere at next month’s party conference in Rotorua, but his Tammany Hall-style of politics, in which he, his family, and allies weave themselves into every layer of a party’s bureaucracy, means his position in the party is probably safe. You simply cannot extract him from the party and the wider Waipareira network of entities he has built around himself.
Takuta Ferris and Mariameno Kapa-Kingi, back in House as independents. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Founding member Amokura Panoho has called on Tamihere to resign and go quietly (there’s a glorious symmetry to this: when Panoho was founding the Māori Party in the 2000s, she resigned from her job at the Labour Department after Tamihere, then a minister, alleged she used Labour Department equipment for Māori Party work). But Panoho surely knows he won’t go like that.
The party remaining unchanged won’t work – and risks serious losses at the next election.
The euphoric mood that carried it through from the Treaty Principles Bill protests all the way to September’s byelection has abated. The co-leaders seem exhausted and almost unhappy.
The attacks made by National, Act and NZ First, that the party is all theatrics and no substance, and that its MPs never bother spending much time in Parliament, have begun to land – even Labour leader Chris Hipkins this week was explicit that he wanted to see the leadership in Parliament more.
Proverbial chickens have come home to roost. The party has placed too much emphasis on style, social media, and assorted theatrics, at the expense of policy and hard graft in Parliament. On its worst days, it’s a party of influencers. As a result, it has almost nothing to show for the past five years in Parliament beyond changing the parliamentary dress code (a change that may soon be reversed).
In the social media age, a modern party needs a flair for influence and online content creation, and parties have, since the dawn of mass media, needed theatrics – but no party has survived on presentation alone; somewhere in the party, preferably in the caucus, there’s got to be some policy substance.
To build this party, a compromise of some kind needs to be found. Tamihere needs to find a way to hold on to the broad movement the party has built. To do that, however, he will need to give up at least some of the control he and his family have in the party, and end a civil war he cannot win.
He’ll need to do something he’s never done before: de-escalate.