Te Pati Maori AGM: JT’s stalemate and a Kotahitanga pact

Ask the Te Pati Maori members present today in Rotorua for the AGM to write on a piece of paper a name. If they wanted one party member to resign for the sake of Kotahitanga who would that one person be? What person – regardless of actual or perceived responsibility or personal likes or dislikes – for the sake of unity of all wings and all electorates of the party should tender their resignation to the AGM? What result would you expect? What name, or initials, would you expect to be overwhelmingly present on those bits of paper if they were collected up?

My intuition is that even JT’s supporters would write in JT just to cut the Gordian knot and be done with the grinding soap opera it has become. Let’s put it this way: if people were given two names to oust from the party they would probably write JT twice just to make sure.

JT going is the simplest answer, but the hardest to achieve. He isn’t worth the drama to the party membership – that point of net loss occurred some time ago and is now compounding with each opinion poll. His enduring value proposition is his connection with Labour, but that seems less relevant if the cost of it is a diminished TPM caucus before the election even happens.

Making a more blatant appeal to appease Labour (as Debbie has been at pains to do since the crisis began) in the hope this overt “moderate” messaging – as against Takuta Ferris’s supposedly “radical” messaging – will convince Labour that TPM are serious about having ministers in the next government is a fool’s errand when her and Rawiri’s leadership has been so dismally unprofessional. The clumsy approach to linking cosying up to Labour and trying to jettison Meno and Doc further renders the exercise counter-productive.

Maori voters ask themselves: what is the point of a Maori Party if the official line of the Maori party is they can’t criticise the Pakeha-majority and immigrant-fixated Labour Party for being inherently unable to prioritise Maori. It’s simply a fact that Labour cannot do right by Maori because they are compromised by the Pakeha/settler/immigrant membership that outnumbers Maori – it’s just a fact that was proven by the Foreshore and Seabed confiscation that started the Maori Party in the first place! Nothing has changed – nothing.

It has the most unfortunate appearance: Debbie and Rawiri’s willingness to sacrifice a third of the caucus to satisfy Labour will gain them ministerial positions. Not just selling out, but pre-selling out. Folding. Crumpling. Throwing it all away. How is it any different than the trajectory of kupapa-ocracy set by the former Maori Party leader Te Ururoa Flavell when he orchestrated the ousting of Hone Harawira to gain the leadership and then was so thoroughly owned he wound up at fundraising dinners at the Northern Club for donors arranged by John Key. That silver service sell-out moment is where Debbie and Rawiri’s hikoi of kupapadom leads.

Just as Labour got their arse kicked in the Tamaki Makaurau by-election by playing super nice nice with big warm huggy hug hugs with TPM, so too playing nice by TPM with Labour will similarly end up destroying the TPM vote. The Greens may be able to profitably harvest pitiful, flaky, white weakness election after election, but the merciless Maori are fickle and as quick to punish as they were to rally. The electoral backlash could be quite brutal.

The High Court’s interim injunction ruling on Friday afternoon came as no surprise to me: in this exciting episode Meno gets her patch back! Although Justice Radich has indicated that JT is going to get his arse handed to him at the full hearing in February, JT is still the smartest man in the room. The others, Doc, Meno, Eru et al, they are cretinous ingenui in comparison, with nowhere near any level of experience that JT has – and it shows.

Kapa-Kingi got her membership back, but JT got the judge to agree to certain “assurances” about the AGM – all of which are actually JT shutting down any threats of him being removed by limiting the AGM to reports only. A shabby tactic for sure, but her KC lawyer hadn’t seemed to have understood it or else they would have offered some rebuttal of which none is recorded. The AGM would be the one logical place and the right moment to release all the tension by resolving the leadership positions democratically. The male Vice President is vacant and so should be elected at the AGM, but the “assurances” means this potential avenue to challenge JT’s grip is kiboshed. JT even promises not to chair it! The President of the party not being able to preside over the AGM of the party is untenable one would have thought. Alas, all the big brains missed what JT was up to and he ran rings around them.

The ruling means the stalemate continues however until February. The interesting points from reading it were that TPM is not incorporated and just how mickey mouse TPM organisation is: the 2024 AGM that “affirmed” JT and the others in their roles was not per the constitution at all. The secretary is also the Treasurer. Not mentioned was the links to Waipareira Trust that most of the leading characters have – that would have made it all look much worse.

JT seems hell-bent on keeping control of TPM after stacking everything so precisely, so I must be pessimistic about the prospects of him withdrawing from this match. I see why they don’t want a chief-of-staff position for two main reasons: JT doesn’t want to dilute his own power and that of his nepotistic network, and the MPs are too selfish to allocate any of their own funds to collectively pay for it from parliamentary services funding (which is how I presume they do it in other parties). Or are they too incompetent to even realise its necessity? Debbie and Rawiri desperately need that sort of managerial support – the High Court made comment of the pair not acting on things they must have known. They sounded rather useless the way the judge described it.

What I cannot fathom is Doc’s position. Not joining the High Court action and not wanting to include himself in reinstatement of membership either shows he is as much of a clueless dummy as the rest of them, or he is wanting to engineer a way out to become independent. I say that because he used the word “independent” unprompted in his assessment of the situation, He advocated for a large overhang in the Maori seats, but once again in a gross way and still under the (wrong) impression that Labour will somehow agree not to stand in Maori seats because it somehow wasn’t in their interests based on overhang alone. He is technically correct of course, but it shows a lack of understanding to argue this way – Labour will always stand in those seats and to implore them not to is futile and so very weak. If you look at the Maori Electorates in the table Doc’s electorate has by far the lowest TPM party vote (23%) as against Rawiri’s Waiariki electorate on 38% party voting TPM, so of all the electorates his is the one on paper that would best suit an independent so it has merits at least in his case.

Doc’s pronouncements on overhangs should be tempered by reality – it has to be backed by the voters. In this respect look at the two scenarios from the Electoral Commission’s seat calculator. Both show a 48% Left block with a 49% Right block. If TPM get 3% party vote (they got slightly more than that last time) and win 5 electorates like right now and Doc wins as an independent there’s a 122 parliament and the Left have a majority with 62; and if 4 are independent and make it back as well as Rawiri and Debbie as TPM the 3% will add 2 off the list for TPM and the parliament is 124 with a majority of 64 seats. In these scenarios the Right’s 49% can only get them 60 and not enough – it will take about a 2% clear gap for the Right to have a chance to win. The advantage in the offing is tantalising, but ultimately relies on the voters backing solid candidates, they won’t back a mere tactical gimmick.

If Doc is on his lonely and the others are still wobbly as long as JT and his cronies are running the show then Hone Harawira’s wish list of reconciliation cannot be met and another plan needs to be considered. As with all Maori disputes which are inherently familicidal the rolling mauls to and fro across the atea and across social media are Coronation Street meets Battle of Stalingrad. And so wearying – who has the energy for this? We need something along the lines of a managed cease-fire, or non-aggression pact – and since Rawiri was publicly hoping for “Kotahitanga” – a Kotahitanga pact. A mutual restraint of trade and neutrality until the election so the membership doesn’t tear itself apart.

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Kotahitanga Pact

The TPM MPs elected at the 2023 election having found themselves honouring the same Kaupapa but in a new political arrangement and wishing to preserve their good relations and not compete to the detriment of one another at the next general election in 2026 so as to achieve the defeat this anti-Maori right-wing coalition government agree and the TPM National Council concur in the following pact made for the remainder of this parliamentary term:

1. TPM MPs and the independent MP(s) acknowledge and respect the mana of each other, strive not to disparage one another, and agree to generally co-operate and seek to agree where possible in the business of the House and its committees.

2. TPM will not select or stand candidates in electorates where the TPM MPs have become independent MPs and nor will TPM support or endorse any other candidates in those electorates other than those independent MPs.

3. TPM MPs who have become independent MPs will continue to be independent (ie. not join as a member or caucus with any other party) for the remainder of this parliamentary term and they will not register a political party for the party list and will not support or endorse any other candidates in those electorates held by TPM MPs other than those TPM MPs. 

4. TPM branches and electorate committees in electorates where the MP is independent will continue to function as normal under the TPM constitution (but without that MP as that office is vacant), and will focus on the TPM party vote in the campaign, and those members wishing to also support the independent MP will be able to do so without leave or penalty.

5. TPM MPs and the independent MPs will caucus weekly when the House is sitting as the Maori Electorates Caucus – hosted on a rotating basis with consensus decision-making – the 7 Maori Electorate MPs only (no other MPs or staff). This forum shall be the mechanism to raise and settle any dispute as to this pact. This caucus is open to the Labour MP in Ikaroa-Rawhiti to participate.

6. This pact expires the day after the final results of the general election are declared.

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