Ma¯ori league’s ‘torrid’ fight
Leadership fears $100k legal bill, Craig Hoyle reports.
A Ma¯ori welfare charity faces a sixfigure legal bill over a bitter fight in which members are seeking to oust the group’s president.
Prue Kapua claims she is the target of ‘‘torrid’’ personal attacks against her leadership of the Ma¯ori Women’s Welfare League, and said the court action was arrogant and self-indulgent.
Meanwhile, her opponents say she has created a culture of fear at the organisation.
Kapua acknowledged the High Court bill could run to $100,000 – a cost that would be shouldered by the league – but said the challenge made her ‘‘more determined to just continue on’’.
Pauline Rewiti, an O¯ tara social worker and league member who launched the case, said she believed Kapua was an illegitimate president.
‘‘I will not withdraw this case until Prue Kapua steps down, says sorry to the league, and we have a new election,’’ Rewiti said.
The case centres around whether Kapua, who is married to Labour MP Louisa Wall, was eligible to stand last year for a second term as president.
It has its roots in a similar debacle from 2011, when Destiny Church co-founder Hannah Tamaki controversially ran for president.
In that case, the High Court ruled Tamaki had stacked the league with extra branches.
Following Tamaki’s failed takeover bid the league launched a review of its constitution.
Kapua was one of six members of the constitutional review panel, and legal proceedings allege that in 2013 she removed a clause from the constitution limiting presidents to one three-year term.
She successfully ran for president the following year, and was re-elected in 2017.
I’d rather they just came around and we had a ding-dong row, and they could get it all out of their system. Prue Kapua
Rewiti said many league members were unaware the term limit had been removed from the constitution until it was too late.
‘‘The process wasn’t done right, and we weren’t notified,’’ she said. ‘‘It’s a disrespect of the tikanga.’’
Kapua rejected that allegation and said the changes to the constitution had gone through a ‘‘pretty robust process’’.
She claimed Rewiti was acting with the support of Materoa Dodd, her opponent in the 2017 presidential race.
‘‘Materoa and her partner Ripeka Evans staged a campaign against me not standing,’’ Kapua said, adding it was disappointing Rewiti had decided to put her name to the case.
Rewiti said she was insulted by that suggestion.
‘‘That is just downright sad,’’ she said.
‘‘Ripeka and Materoa had nothing to do with this.’’
Rewiti said she had launched legal action because she believed in the league and wanted to honour the memory of her mother, Ofa Tuhimareikura Vahaakolo, an early member of the group.
Evans, a former adviser at the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, also rejected Kapua’s allegation.
AUT Ma¯ori historian Paul Moon warned the ongoing stoush could detract from the valuable work done by the league.
‘‘It’s good to have these differences, but if the arguments dominate everything else, then the organisation becomes a venue to argue and that doesn’t help anyone,’’ he said.
Kapua extended an offer for her detractors to settle the matter outside of court.
‘‘I’d rather they just came around and we had a ding-dong row, and they could get it all out of their system,’’ she said.
A hearing is expected in July.
This weekend, an excellent group called Choice Biking organised a mass cycle in opposition to mandatory helmet laws.
These lycra-clad champions of liberty want the freedom to feel the wind in their hair and the asphalt on their cheeks.
To advance their cause, they, and the legion of anti-helmet fanatics, are making some pretty dubious claims about the effectiveness of helmet safety laws.
The cause is noble but their argument is misguided.
Back in 1989, an influential US study examined 99 cyclists with serious brain injuries. Only 4 per cent were wearing helmets.
This study propelled a lot of the regulation that blights the enjoyment of cyclists today and considerable effort has gone into discrediting this and similar studies.
The most popular argument says helmets deter people from riding bikes, which leads to them getting fat and dying.
Another favourite is the idea that if pedestrians wore helmets they would suffer fewer head injuries, so why do law makers focus on bikes?
There is even an often-cited 2007 study by an academic who discovered that if he didn’t wear a helmet cars gave him wider berth. Likewise, if he wore a wig drivers gave him more leeway.
This, it must be stressed, was based on the observations of a single cyclist who was also the researcher. And, almost certainly, an idiot.
If safety rules mean fewer people engage in risky behaviour, be it riding without a helmet or attending a Labour youth camp, then the rules have been a success.
If you break a fall with your skull you will suffer something even worse than a brain injury: admission into our public health system. Prudent cyclists wear helmets.
Yet I do not. Like all prophylactics, bike helmets reduce the experience and as my number of days above ground slowly decreases I care less and less about the accidental risks of premature matriculation from this world.
Being a self-employed liquidator and occasional columnist, a head injury is most unlikely to have any discernible effect on my career and as an adult I, and only I, should be the one to assess those risks.
The anti-helmet league is making the wrong argument. The debate should not be over what policy produces the lower death toll, because we will all be on horseback if that was the criteria. It should be over the very right of the state to mandate supposedly free citizens on their choice of headwear.
We trade convenience for risk. Each person knows their own profile and is able to make their own assessment and should bear the cost of their decisions.