Toitū Te Tiriti protest reaches parliament. (Photo: RNZ)

Te Pāti Māori’s turmoil is part of a larger story — the challenge of building movements strong enough to hold their own contradictions, writes Sacha McMeeking.

If you spend enough time around kaupapa Māori politics, a familiar rhythm emerges.  Periods of unity and momentum give way to bursts of fracture and infighting. The recent turbulence within Te Pāti Māori (and the public fascination with who’s up, who’s down, and who’s to blame) is only the latest chapter in that cycle.

Eventually, we regroup, re-gather, and try again, only to repeat the pattern.

Of course I’m interested in who’s right and who’s wrong in the latest situation. We all are. But if that’s where our attention stops, it distracts us from the deeper work we collectively need to do, which is design for tension so that disagreements like this don’t keep knocking us off course.

Every movement that changes the world depends on two kinds of energy. One pushes from the outside, demanding transformation and refusing to compromise on principle. The other works from the inside, turning vision into practical steps, policies, and institutions.

In social movement theory, these are recognised as equally valid strategies, known somewhat opaquely as contentious and institutional approaches.

They’re often caricatured as opposites or rivals. But political movements, both here and around the world, show us that they are mutually dependent. We need both, and we need them to travel together.

The radicals and outsiders create urgency and expand what’s politically imaginable. This is what theorists call “shifting the Overton window”, or expanding the range of ideas the public sees as acceptable or realistic. The insiders, with their pragmatic bent, then turn that momentum into laws, resources, and structures that last.

We see this pattern across history. The civil rights movement needed both Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X. Māori resurgence required both the street politics of Ngā Tamatoa and the painstaking legal work of the Treaty settlement era.

Within parliament, Te Pāti Māori have been most effective when they understand themselves as part of a wider ecosystem that needs both firebrands and deal-makers. We’ve seen this in action recently when they worked alongside Toitū Te Tiriti as a hoa haere.

Together, these two forces form a kind of pincer tactic, where pressure from outside is combined with translation from inside. That’s how movements win.

The problem is what happens next. Once a movement succeeds — once the outsider cause becomes an insider institution — the productive tension that powered change often turns inward. The two forces which once depended on each other begin to collide. Radicals accuse insiders of selling out. Insiders dismiss radicals as unrealistic.

Because our organisations are designed to deliver services or policy, not to host paradox, there’s nowhere for this tension to go. We lack structures and processes to hold deep strategic differences in generative ways. So the tension leaks out as factionalism, personality politics, and public infighting. It saps energy, fractures movements, and gifts ammunition to those who would rather see us divided.

This is not unique to Te Pāti Māori. Iwi authorities face the same challenge as they navigate their post-settlement roles. Kaupapa Māori organisations wrestle with it as they decide whether to disrupt the state or partner with it. Social justice movements everywhere grapple with the same dynamic.

The irony is that our own ancestral knowledge tells us this tension is not a flaw, it’s a positive force.

Our pūrākau teach us that tension is necessary. They are filled with conflict, contradiction, and creative struggle. Tāwhirimātea and his siblings’ debate over separating Ranginui and Papatūānuku is a story about competing visions of the future. Māui’s relentless challenging of norms is a lesson in the necessity, and cost, of disruption. Even the primal separation of sky and earth is an act of paradox: tearing apart what is loved to make space for what is needed.

Our stories don’t tell us to fear tension. They tell us to expect it, invite it, and use it. When we design our institutions as though harmony is the natural state, we betray that wisdom. And when we fail to build ways to host paradox, we guarantee that the forces that once fuelled change will eventually turn on one another.

The sign of a mature movement isn’t the absence of disagreement, it’s the ability to harness its generative power rather than letting it tear us apart.

Designing for tension means normalising principled difference and creating deliberate spaces for debate. It means institutionalising “pressure valves” by developing structured, tikanga-anchored processes where radical and reformist impulses can interrogate, sharpen, and challenge one another. It means building governance architectures that expect paradox and are strong enough to hold it.

Without those designs, we will keep oscillating between cohesion and collapse — united then fractured, united then fractured — wasting energy that should be spent building futures.

And we need to be honest about how we behave when the tension surfaces.

Too often we turn our fire on one another. Instead of contesting ideas, we wound reputations and undermine integrity. It’s undignified and corrosive. It squanders talent, heart, and commitment, and it forgets that our success depends utterly on the full spectrum showing up.

We need radicals and reformers, insiders and outsiders, strategists and agitators alike. If we want to build durable movements, we can’t keep indulging in these pseudo-cannibalistic cycles of internal harm.

This conversation is bigger than one party or one moment. But the stakes are illustrated in the present. Tariana Turia built two enduring pillars that reshaped our political landscape: Whānau Ora and Te Pāti Māori. One is already being suffocated by a government that has re-coded its investment logic beyond recognition. The other risks being eroded by our own inability to manage internal tension with care and curiosity.

It’s less than a year since Dame Tariana’s passing — we can’t allow both pillars of her legacy to crumble. It would be irresponsible. And it would betray the kaupapa she devoted her life to.

We can’t keep mistaking inevitable, necessary tension for crisis. We can’t keep oscillating between cohesion and collapse because we’re unwilling to do the harder work of institutional design. The question isn’t whether this push and pull exists. It always will. The question is whether we’re ready to evolve as movements, to build structures that can host paradox, and to hold the full spectrum of our collective energy inside one waka.

If we can do that, the future won’t belong only to those who shout from the barricades or those who negotiate behind closed doors. It will belong to all of us — moving, sometimes uneasily but always forward, toward the world our tūpuna imagined and our mokopuna deserve.

Sacha McMeeking (Photo supplied)

Sacha McMeeking (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Mutunga) is an academic and practitioner working at the intersection of policy, design, and social change. Her writing explores how Indigenous knowledge can lift collective wellbeing.

E-Tangata, 2025