Tauranga ‘unsafe’ for Ma¯ori Party aspirant
The Ma¯ori Party (Te Pa¯ti Ma¯ori) will not put forward a candidate for the Tauranga byelection for safety reasons and concerns about white supremacist hate speech, it says.
But the stance has been rubbished by a former Ma¯ori Tauranga MP who says the move is an insult to voters.
Te Pa¯ti Ma¯ori president Che Wilson yesterday quoted a Department of Internal Affairs report from April that said hate speech from white supremacists on social media was the largest form of hate speech in this country.“Tauranga is a hotspot,” he said.
“The first hate-speech conviction and the belittling of te reo Ma¯ori at a public event took place in Tauranga, Tauranga residents have been subjected to white supremacist leaflet drops, and even our co-leaders have been the recipient of threats and hate speech by Tauranga residents.”
He said the party wanted a more just and Tiriti-centric Aotearoa.
“By standing in the byelection, we would be consciously sending our people into an unsafe environment and can only imagine how hard this is for our whanaunga and iwi of Tauranga Moana.”
But Leader of New Zealand First and former Tauranga MP Winston Peters said that the Ma¯ori Party’s stance was “a ridiculous insult to the voters and just plain wrong”.
“The Ma¯ori Party accusing Tauranga residents as being racist is the ‘pot calling the kettle white’,” Peters said.
Much of the concerns raised by the Ma¯ori Party come from events that happened within recent years, after Peters moved on from Tauranga.
Peters said Tauranga had an MP of Ma¯ori ancestry for 35 out of the past 38 years and the Ma¯ori Party “racebaiting” was something New Zealanders were growing sick and tired of.
The byelection has been prompted by the resignation of Simon Bridges, who was contacted for comment.