Once a rising political star, Te Pāti Māori collapses in on itself
On September 6, Te Pāti Māori was on top of the world. In just two months, it all came crashing down.
Back then, the party had just turned a 42-vote lead in the Tāmaki Makaurau electorate at the 2023 election into a stonking 33 percentage point margin in Oriini Kaipara’s win in the by-election. The result was a stunning entrenchment of the party’s position in a seat which has been the country’s first or second-most competitive Māori seat in four of the past five elections.
Te Pāti Māori was polling well too – down slightly from the highs of 7 percent earlier in the year, but comfortably above its 2023 party vote result and threatening to surpass the 5 percent threshold.
Yes, the campaign had been marred by Te Tai Tonga MP Tākuta Ferris’ social media post saying “Indians, Asians, Black and Pakeha” were assisting Labour in taking a Māori seat away from Māori. But co-leaders Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi had shut Ferris down, assuring Labour leader Chris Hipkins that his views were not shared by the party.
Behind the scenes, though, all was not well.
At a time when te Pati Māori should be soaring, with the investigations of corruption all floundering and their amazing by-election win, some decided to plot against the leadership.
Glenn doesn’t understand…
Does anyone really know what the two MPs did to get booted from Te Pāti Māori?
When Te Pāti Māori co-leaders Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi tried to put an end to the sorry saga of infighting that has embroiled their party, they were unable to answer the most simple question.
On Monday, after a hush-hush hui of the Pāti Māori council on Sunday night, the co-leaders announced the party would suspend a third of its caucus. They said that Te Tai Tokerau MP Mariameno Kapa-Kingi and Te Tai Tonga MP Tākuta Ferris were being kicked out of the party.
Both MPs, at this stage, would stay in Parliament as independent MPs – to avoid further complications and two costly by-elections for Te Pāti Māori.
Expulsion is a serious and rarely used punishment.
…and Glenn is not alone.
No one really understood what the bloody hell this has all been about and the focus has been on the process and blaming John Tamihere, Debbie and Rawiri.
But the timeline that has been established listed now shows that this was all about an attempted Leadership spill in July to replace Debbie and Rawiri with Mariameno and Doc.
Once JT was alerted to this attempt he confronted Mariameno directly telling her that she had to have an actual reason to topple the leadership and that she couldn’t;t do it for shits and giggles.
Shortly after that in August, Mariameno’s overspending was discovered, Doc started opining about Māori only and Mariameno’s son Eru started his public campaign against the leadership.
Ostensibly the move against Debbie and Rawiri was because they weren’t ‘tikanga enough’, which is the same pure temple politics nonsense that plagued the Greens last year with a clique who wanted to challenge the Green leadership because they weren’t ‘woke enough’.
The expulsion has been criticised as lacking tikanga, but attempting to destabilise the party for your own aspirations doesn’t seem particularly tikanga either.
Glenn finally acknowledges this leadership challenge at the end of his column…
Waititi vouched for Tamihere and said the two MPs had launched an attempted coup against him and Ngarewa-Packer. Neither Ferris nor Kapa-Kingi denied that they tried to topple the co-leaders.
In the end, was the threat against their leadership the real reason why two MPs were kicked out of their own party? In a small party, with just six MPs, two conspiring MPs don’t need much more support to replace their leaders.
…the bewildering self sabotage and self mutilation of te Pati Maori is a gasp inducing, heads held in hands, cavalcade of own goals that is as shocking as it is impossible to stop watching.
It’s not just a train wreck, it’s a train carrying toxic chemicals colliding with a full school bus that explodes into a pet shop for disabled kittens.
The Māpro Party generating an overhang was one of the best hopes the Left had of making this a 1 term Government, watching them destroy themselves is depressing beyond belief.
Sean Plunkett, Don Brash, Mike Hosking, the Taxpayers’ Union, the Atlas Network, Federated Farmers, the Banks, the Supermarket Duopoly and David Seymour are laughing all the way to the ballot box.
Debbie and Rawiri deserved loyalty, they didn’t deserve plotting.
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