Maori-Mana deal paves way for Hone

Prime Minister Bill English may make a decent fist of shearing, but when it comes to kicking for touch his style is more hack-it-and-see.

Faced with queries about the impact of the Maori-Mana nonaggression pact, he punted for the distant future.

Would National continue its long-standing policy of not fielding candidates in the Maori seats?

‘‘There is likely to be some discussion about that. We haven’t come to a conclusion but we didn’t stand last time.’’

Every election was a bit different. He hadn’t thought about in great detail.

Well then, what about the policy of abolishing the Maori seats?

Hmm. If it was ‘‘on the books’’, it was not being actively pursuing but he would need to check. (Yes, it is on the books, but pursuing it would nix Maori Party support.)

It all sounded as clear as mud and as weak as dishwater compared to John Key’s unequivocal answer before the 2014 election.

Even if he had the numbers in the House, Key said, he would not go there. Because if he did, there would be ‘‘hikois from hell’’.

It would be a mistake to assume there is a change of policy in the wind on either score. More likely it is English’s instinctive default to caution.

It is the same caution that has him refusing to discuss steering National supporters towards the Maori Party in those seats (‘‘if we were going to do that, we wouldn’t be looking at that till later in the year’’) or any other deal, accommodation or prime ministerial nod and wink.

Unless, that is, you count explicitly ruling out English jobsharing with NZ First leader Winston Peters. (Interestingly, while Labour’s Andrew Little has reserved the finance portfolio for Grant Robertson, English would not rule out Peters even in that role.)

So, silly to ask if Mana’s Hone Harawira would have a place in his Government if the Mana-Maori Party deal delivered him Te Tai Tokerau?

You guessed it, English wouldn’t want to speculate on that, and it was not clear if the deal would make any difference ... but it was (drum roll) ‘‘unlikely’’.

Yet these are all questions the prime minister will have to confront before September 23.

As he himself said, ‘‘one or two seats will matter quite a bit in our MMP elections’’ and stripping from Labour one or two of its six Maori electorates could be crucial.

Sunday’s One News-Colmar Brunton poll sent a reminder to National – if one was needed – how tight the election race is.

Even on 46 per cent, and with three or even four viable allies, there was still a majority out against the current Government.

Together, Labour, Green and NZ First totalled 52 per cent support. And they will all be in the next Parliament.

So it is inconceivable that National would drop cup-of-tea deals with allies, run candidates in the Maori seats, or campaign to abolish them.

It’s the deal-making season for politicians. The latest is the proposed marriage between Mana’s Hone Harawira and the Maori Party, the group he divorced with such biting acrimony back in 2011. This arrangement does invite a certain cynicism. Harawira and the Maori Party split over the question of the Maori Party’s relationship with National. All the evidence suggests that the small party will persist with National (or as National’s ‘‘poodle’’, as Harawira used to say).

So the same problem that broke the first marriage will trouble the second. Why should the voters think the outcome will be any different?

Well, Harawira says he has learned how to get on better with others. Perhaps that is true, although Harawira has always been an odd mixture of rational political animal and tantrum artist. Has the leopard changed its spots?

The real reason for the alliance is pure self-interest. If the Maori Party doesn’t stand in Te Tai Tokerau, Harawira stands more chance of winning back the seat that he lost to Labour’s Kelvin Davis in 2014. The Maori Party won 2500 votes then, far more than Davis’s 743-vote majority.

The Maori Party also likes the deal because it won’t face vote-splitting from Mana candidates in other seats, especially co-leader Te Ururoa Flavell’s Waiariki. Flavell will also have to somehow disown the insults he hurled at Harawira during the 2011 bust-up.

Many voters think of Harawira as damaged goods, especially since his disastrous 2014 alliance with the German tycoon Kim Dotcom. Some will see him as a defunct opportunist who thinks deal-making is the only way back from political oblivion.

Nobody knows how many of the voters of Te Tai Tokerau think this way. Harawira and the Maori Party are playing the Maori card against Davis and Labour, saying a Maori-based party is more reliable. But the only power the Maori Party has is through its relationship with the overwhelmingly Pakeha party National. And Flavell’s argument that this deal has led to stunning gains for Maori generally is controversial, to put it mildly.

The brute fact is that there is no such thing as the Maori vote, any more than there is a Pakeha vote. There is no single ‘‘Maori interest’’. Maori interests vary, just as Pakeha interests do.

That is the basic illusion built into the structure of the Maori Party: that Maori have a common interest that will override the class, gender, regional, tribal and personal allegiances of actual and individual Maori voters.

There is now a ferment among Maori voters, and a fever of deal-making. This is wholly positive. Ancient loyalties, such as Labour’s long partnership with Maori, have long since disappeared, and good riddance. Labour’s arrangement produced generations of time-serving and often weak Maori politicians who toed the party line and did little else.

In 2014, Labour managed to win most of the Maori seats, but their loyalty can’t be taken for granted. Nowadays Maori votes are contested and Maori politicians have to prove their worth, not just their party credentials. So let the battle continue.

Harawira hopes the deal will bring him back from the grave.