A new way forward?
A renewed Māori Party is promising to push a Labour-led government in a more radical direction. But can it make it back into Parliament? Thomas Manch reports.
Debbie Ngarewa-Packer lives on land that was once stolen from her ancestors. Halfway between Hawera and Patea in South Taranaki, she shares an eight-acre block with three generations of her family, including two grandchildren, a teenage son who threatens to move out every Saturday night, and a 12-strong flock of chickens.
Don’t mind the clucking of the chooks, she says over the phone. Or the desire to blow open decades worth of Treaty of Waitangi settlements and open up privately held land for dispute.
‘‘Nothing scary, nothing to send the grandparents out of retirement,’’ she says.
Ngarewa-Packer is currently the sole candidate for the Mā ori Party, running in what was its former stronghold: the Mā ori electorate of Te Tai Hauā uru.
The seat was formerly held by party founder Dame Tariana Turia, and Ngarewa-Packer presents a credible prospect of claiming the seat. And therefore a pathway for the Mā ori Party to return to Parliament.
It has been a ‘‘humbling’’ three years in the wilderness, she says. Mā ori voters resoundingly booted the party out in 2017, a signal that more than a decade of supporting a National government had worn their patience thin.
The message that September was defiant. ‘‘They’ve gone back like a beaten wife to the abuser who has abused our people over and over again,’’ then co-leader Marama Fox said.
But now the party, founded on tino rangatiratanga (Mā ori sovereignty), is plotting its own path back to the ‘‘abuser’’ – the Labour-led Government. The party is renewed, trying to grow within the cracks in Māori-Crown relations, and hoping to achieve the near-impossible.
Only Winston Peters and NZ First have ever returned to Parliament after being voted out. But could the Mā ori Party be the resurgent force some political pundits are touting?
Ngarewa-Packer is confident she has the political track record to make it happen.
You could say she’s acquainted with Wellington. For the past decade she’s worked as an iwi chief executive, a deputy mayor of South Taranaki, an environmental activist fighting to end seabed mining, and a lobbyist for Mā ori trying to draw resources from government.
But lately, she says, no-one’s been listening. Not even Labour’s Mā ori caucus.
‘‘It’s become really evident that it’s harder because we just don’t have anyone representing us in central Government. It’s just a huge gap.
‘‘It would take someone extremely removed not to see the grievance between the Mā ori community, our whā nau, and Labour . . . why everything Mā ori is delayed, why everything is reviewed to death, why it’s audited to death and there are still no problems.’’
This is the rub the Mā ori Party still exists to resolve. The party says it’s neither left nor right but stands for Mā ori sovereignty, as the mainstream parties – particularly Labour – are seen as incapable of governing for Mā ori.
This was a stance first taken by Turia, who formed the party after resigning from Labour over the Foreshore and Seabed Act in 2004, and which led her to work with a National government for six years until 2014.
National supported some of the party’s key policies, such as Whā nau Ora, which put more money straight into the hands of Mā ori health organisations instead of state agencies.
Turia continues to advise the party on its political state, but declined to be interviewed for this article.
Now, there appears to be little appetite for working with National and leader Simon Bridges, who is seen as taking a more populist, tough-on-crime (and therefore tough on Mā ori) approach than his predecessors.
‘‘It’s a different era now, it’s a different time,’’ Ngarewa-Packer says. She talks about the two options for the Mā ori Party: push a Labour government further down the tino rangatiratanga path, or hold it to account for its failures from the Opposition benches.
The first would require the removal of NZ First and Deputy
Prime Minister Winston Peters, who has long stood against the Treaty settlement process, from any coalition government.
And it would require Labour’s acceptance of more radical policies, such as an overhaul of the settlement process. ‘‘There’s some big mahi [work] to be done . . . There’s this belief in the Government that everything stops at settlement. It doesn’t,’’ Ngarewa-Packer says.
‘‘Why has private land been taken off the agenda?’’
Māori Party president Che Wilson says an overhaul of the Treaty process is high on the party’s to-do list.
He says land taken under the Public Works Act, land owned by local governments, and land privately held after being taken from Māori should all be up for inclusion in settlements.
The implication is millions of hectares to be settled, for millions of dollars.
But privately held ancestral land, like the land that NgarewaPacker has bought, won’t necessarily be up for grabs. And Wilson doesn’t envision Ihumā tao-style occupations on farmland across the country.
‘‘It’s either a yes, that private person wants to sell it, or it’s a no . . . It’s that simple, you have to protect property rights,’’ he says.
‘‘There shouldn’t be any compulsion, we don’t want to do what was done to us.’’
The policy may speak to a new generation of Ma¯ ori activists. But it would be unpalatable to National, and certainly to NZ First. Wilson also has little confidence Labour will support it, unless the Ma¯ ori Party has the numbers on election night.
‘‘If we have the right numbers, we can bargain anything. It’s no different from Winston.’’
For Wilson, the right number is three MPs. He is aiming to win 3 per cent of the party vote – more than the 2.39 per cent won by the party at its peak in 2008.
That means winning an electorate seat will be essential to earning a place in the House. He says the party will focus on two seats it narrowly lost last election – Ta Tai Hauā uru and Waiariki – and possibly Tā maki Makaurau.
Much may depend on who leads the party, which will be announced at the end of February.
Rumours have circulated that former Labour MP for Tā maki Makaurau John Tamihere, a recent Auckland mayoralty candidate, is interested.
Wilson says Tamihere is yet to enter the process for selection at the electorate’s branch.
Tamihere, speaking to Stuff on Wednesday, provided only vague answers. ‘‘You never say no,’’ he says.
Outspoken Northland doctor Lance O’Sullivan is another leadership prospect, after promising to run for the Mā ori Party after the 2017 election.
Wilson says he has not spoken to O’Sullivan since then, and O’Sullivan could not be reached for comment.
Pania Newton, Ihumā tao occupier and founder of Save Our Unique Landscape, is another prospect with a high profile and political momentum.
She has told Stuff she has no interest in entering politics.
Ngarewa-Packer says she will likely contend for co-leadership, and believes she could work with Tamihere.
Whoever leads the party will face stiff competition from Labour, which may again take an all-or-nothing approach to the Māori electorates.
Meka Whaitiri, the co-chair of Labour’s Mā ori caucus, has left open the option of keeping Labour’s seven Mā ori electorates off the party list in September.
The party used the strategy in 2017 to force the hand of voters in the Māori seats, many of whom had been splitting their votes, giving Māori Party MPs an electorate vote, while giving Labour a party vote.
‘‘To be honest, that was a clear strategy around forcing the hand of Mā ori voters,’’ Whaitiri says. The strategy worked – Labour snapped up all seven of the Mā ori seats in that election.
NZ First minister Shane Jones dismisses the Māori Party charge that his party is denying Māori interests in the coalition Government.
If you’re looking for a contest over the Mā ori vote, he says, NZ First’s ‘‘garden variety’’ Mā ori supporters are a larger cohort.
‘‘The Mā ori Party, I can understand they’re wanting to shift the narrative of New Zealand politics further to the Left, but I don’t think there’s a market for that type of thinking any longer.’’
Bridges, who says his party won’t contest the Mā ori electorates, was also making warm noises about working with the Mā ori Party at Rā tana, just over a week ago.
‘‘They’re about ensuring not Government state control, but Mā ori determining their own destiny and being in the driving seat. Well, that’s a kaupapa that works pretty well for the National Party.’’
But the idea of opening up the Treaty settlement process? ‘‘It will not fly with the National Party in any shape or form.’’