Te Pāti Māori co-leaders Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer. (Photo RNZ / Samuel Rillstone)

In choosing public self-immolation, Te Pāti Māori has handed the coalition a gift, writes veteran journalist Aaron Smale.

Here’s a bit of free advice to Te Pāti Māori: If you don’t like the media picking on you, stop giving them reasons to do so. And stop turning the party’s internal chaos into a regular feature.

Case in point: “I will fucking knock you out.” That’s the kind of line you might hear outside a pub late on a Saturday night when someone’s getting obnoxious after downing a few too many.

But that was the language activist Eru Kapa-Kingi allegedly offloaded on a couple of security guards at parliament when he wouldn’t show his security pass. And he only had a pass because he worked for his mother, Te Pāti Māori MP Mariameno Kapa-Kingi.

If the information leaching out in the media is true — and it hasn’t been publicly refuted — then he behaved badly. Still, the incident might have stayed within party walls if Eru hadn’t accused the leadership of being dictatorial.

The retaliatory airing of the security incident has detonated a whole lot of trouble for Te Pāti Māori that it’s hard to see them fully recovering from.

The leadership is now floundering. Debbie and Rawiri fronted the media to announce a “reset” and answer questions, and then promptly gapped it when the questions got too pointed.

Ngarewa-Packer said that she was being “crucified by the media . . . without a right of reply”, while she was literally being given that right, which she then walked away from. But then she was quite happy to throw one of her own MPs under the media bus, who happened to be the mother of Eru Kapa-Kingi. So the media came in quite handy there.

You can’t blame the media when you’re conducting internal disputes in public. And if you can’t build a functional relationship with media when you’re in opposition and they’re at their most friendly, then you’re going to have a rough time if you ever get near government when the scrutiny intensifies dramatically. Ask Luxon. He still hasn’t worked it out.

Putting aside the ugly timeline of who in the party did what and when, the far more serious charge to be answered is how any of this serves Māori.

The current government is both arrogant and clueless. They’re sliding in the polls when they’re only in their first term. That’s an incredibly dangerous combination for Māori.

The coalition’s attitude to Māori swings between outright hostility and pretending they don’t exist. They’ve been laser-focused on erasing Māori rights and interests in law as one path to shoring up votes.

They continue to offer a host of targets for all opposition parties, and particularly Te Pāti Māori. But all three opposition parties have been missing in action because they’re either bogged down in their own internal chaos, or they can’t muster a coherent policy agenda or productive critique of the incumbent.

The very week Te Pāti Māori were publicly imploding, the government was shunting through another bill damaging to their constituents — the Marine and Coastal Area (MACA) Amendment Bill. The bill is tyrannical. It overturns seven recent court decisions lawfully secured by iwi after years of toil. It makes a mockery of the judiciary and the very notion of law and order.

Surely this is the dictatorship-level behaviour that TPM and Toitū Te Tiriti should be focused on?

This is just one example of the many issues where the current government should be getting walloped by the opposition. Instead, they’re getting a free pass and using it to go on a legislative blitz.

I’ve covered the abuse of children in the custody of the state for the last nine years, and one of the things that has disappointed me immensely is the failure of Māori leadership, both iwi and political, to seriously step up and support victims and hold the government to account.

Something like 80 percent of the hundreds of thousands of victims that went through the welfare system were Māori. Furthermore, this issue touches on a raft of other issues, including institutional racism, the child welfare system, incarceration, mental health, housing, education, and so on.

Despite a Royal Commission of Inquiry and an official apology, this government is not only continuing to treat survivors appallingly, it’s failing to hold anyone accountable for the cover-up — and children are still being abused. For all its talk about getting tough on crime, the crime the government is most lenient on is the Crown’s mass crimes of the abuse and torture of children.

Māori leadership should be making a lot more noise about this. But I’ve never heard anything from them directly or in their public utterances to convince me they’re seriously interested in this issue, which tells me they’re completely out of touch.

Instead, it’s being left to the government’s mates to inflict the damage. Corporate executives, not to mention Roger Douglas, came out and gave both Luxon and Nicola Willis an absolute towelling recently. The fact that their own friends and former party founders think they’re rubbish gave the opposition a chance to not only slam the government’s economic performance but to question the self-centred priorities of the corporate sector and lump them together.

Then there’s Te Pāti Māori’s potentially strongest point of difference — the demographic opportunity. The Māori population is overwhelmingly young, and they’re a growing proportion of all New Zealanders. Whatever is good for young Māori is good for the country. The party is missing the opportunity to make that argument, and failing not only Māori but the rest of the country in the process. It’s a demographic they should monopolise as the other parties chase the old Pākehā vote.

But instead of presenting young people with a compelling vision and fighting their corner — while also piling bad headlines on the coalition — Te Pāti Māori gave the government the gift of piling bad headlines on themselves. They sucked all the oxygen out of the room with a media conflagration.

The government’s media advisors must be delighted to have such a reliable distraction from the government’s rubbish performance.

There’s probably enough blame to go around, but it comes back to leadership, and not just the MPs out the front.

Party president John Tamihere was an MP in Labour for some time and should have learned the value of party discipline. Whatever else you can say about Helen Clark, she ran a tight ship. But Tamihere always seemed to have a bit of a discipline problem himself, which was often related to his ego. Is that the problem here?

Over recent years, I’ve heard more than a few rumblings about his leadership of Te Pāti Māori that seem more serious than the usual disagreements that happen within any political organisation. Tamihere’s slowness to respond publicly in the face of this latest debacle is a statement on its own.

In the end, it was up to him, along with Debbie and Rawiri, to address the concerns raised by Eru and Mariameno and others, and get on top of the ill-discipline before it broke into the public arena and bit them all in the proverbial. Leadership is about risk management at the front end, so you don’t have to clean up a mess later.

In other breaking news, Māori are lagging in every social and economic indicator, and the rest of the country seems to think that’s an acceptable status quo. But you won’t read about it when Te Pāti Māori are busy hogging the headlines, inflicting damage on themselves.

Aaron Smale (Ngāti Porou, Ngāpuhi, Pākehā) is an award-winning freelance investigative journalist and photographer.

E-Tangata, 2025