The dramatic decision to oust a third of its caucus marks a collapse of unity within a party once hailed for its strength and purpose, writes Catherine McGregor in today’s extract from The Bulletin.
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Internal strife ends in combustion
Te Pāti Māori’s civil war burst into full view on Monday as the party’s national council voted to expel Te Tai Tokerau MP Mariameno Kapa-Kingi and Te Tai Tonga MP Tākuta Ferris for unspecified “breaches” of its kawa, or constitution. The five-hour Sunday meeting of the council – called without notice to the MPs themselves – ended with a unanimous vote, minus abstentions from Hauraki-Waikato and Te Tai Tonga. Co-leaders Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi announced the expulsions at a tense Wellington press conference, refusing to say what exactly the pair had done wrong. Both MPs rejected the decision as unconstitutional and said they will make a formal appeal, potentially at the party’s hui on December 7.
A clash of personalities
RNZ’s Craig McCulloch notes that just a year ago, the party was “riding a wave of unity and purpose” as a driving force behind the Toitū Te Tiriti hīkoi and with a record-high six MPs. But the party’s electoral success was causing strain behind the scenes, he writes, as the co-leaders went from a self-contained “dynamic duo” to “overseeing a more assertive caucus and competing egos”. Both party president John Tamihere and the co-leaders are strong personalities accustomed to getting their own way, McCulloch says. The expelled MPs, on the other hand, “regard themselves as electorate MPs first, answerable to their own people, not to the central hierarchy. Add in the whānau ties on either side, and the conflict shifts from political to personal.”
Ferris expulsion raises eyebrows
The expulsion of Ferris underlines how personal the dispute has become, with The Post’s Henry Cooke (paywalled) observing that his “main problem at this point seems to be not agreeing with the co-leaders enough.” While Ferris’s Instagram posts criticising the ethnic make-up of Labour campaign volunteers may have played a role, The Spinoff’s Lyric Waiwiri-Smith suggests this morning that his true offence may have simply been “being a bit hōhā”. More seriously, the most likely deciding factor was the alleged coup Ferris and Kapa-Kingi were said to have plotted against Waititi and Ngarewa-Packer – a plot reportedly discussed with iwi leaders in their electorates. As Waiwiri-Smith wryly notes: “Organising a coup without a definite kill shot is always a surefire way of being blacklisted, as political history has shown.”
The waka-jumping question
Attention now turns to whether the party will invoke the “waka-jumping” law to eject the pair from parliament altogether. The law allows a leader to have an MP’s seat declared vacant if their continued presence would distort Parliament’s proportionality. Waititi has said the party is not considering employing the legislation at this stage, and any consideration would be for the National Council.
Complicating matters is the parliamentary overhang. This was created by Te Pāti Māori’s success in 2023 – it won more electorate seats than its vote share provided for – and means parliament currently has 123 MPs instead of the usual 120. Because Ferris and Kapa-Kingi now sit as independents, some argue that proportionality has in fact been restored, not distorted, “and Te Pāti Māori may struggle to convince the speaker otherwise,” writes Waiwiri-Smith.
A blow for iwi mediators
While not the most pressing issue, the failure of the Iwi Chairs Forum to calm the storm is nonetheless striking, writes Glen McConnell in Stuff. The influential body, representing 88 iwi nationwide, had spent the past week shuttling between factions in an attempt to broker a truce. Chair Bayden Barber said he had asked the co-leaders to delay any “constitutional stuff” until after a hui planned for Wednesday. Yet the party moved ahead anyway, effectively rendering the forum’s intervention meaningless. Barber said the expulsion came as a surprise and questioned how the party could claim to speak for Māori unity while rejecting iwi pleas for restraint. As Cooke concluded in The Post: “This decision utterly humiliates them. Will they take it lying down too?”
Read more:
- Glen McConnell: Does anyone really know what the two MPs did to get booted from Te Pāti Māori? (Stuff)
- Marc Daalder: Once a rising political star, Te Pāti Māori collapses in on itself (Newsroom)
