Te Pāti Māori members pictured in July 2023, at the launch of its election campaign. (Photo: RNZ / Rayssa Almeida)

Te Pāti Māori’s expulsions reveal a deeper fracture in how Māori organisations exercise authority, writes Sacha McMeeking

Te Pāti Māori’s decision to expel two of its MPs has triggered a flood of commentary. Some are celebrating discipline, others condemn the process, and many are simply bewildered.

But beneath the shock sits a much older, recurring issue across Māori organisations: Who actually has the mandate to make decisions that alter the shape of a collective?

On paper, the answer appears clear-cut: decision-making sits within constitutions, boards, and national councils.

But in practice, the answer is far more uncomfortable.

Most Māori organisations operate with constitutions that blend tikanga with western legal forms. Tikanga usually includes things like guidance on kanohi kitea (face-to-face dialogue), expectations of whānau engagement, and the values that frame deliberation.

But these are often front-end processes. When decisions become contentious, the backstops to resolve conflict tend to be drawn from western practices, and include things like a reliance on centralised authority, closed-door meetings, and formal votes.

These override the tikanga layer and shift the mandate from the people to the boardroom, creating exactly the tension we’re seeing now.

We pretend these are neutral governance choices, but they’re not. They privilege a top-down power model, inherited from corporate and parliamentary systems, over the bottom-up power model embedded in tikanga.

So yes, decisions like expelling elected representatives may have a formal mandate. But a formal mandate is only half the story. The moral mandate of any Māori organisation comes from the willingness of its people to recognise its authority — and that recognition is grounded in identity.

People don’t grant legitimacy simply because a constitution says they should. They grant legitimacy because the organisation aligns with who they are, how they belong, and what they stand for. When that alignment fractures, the moral mandate fractures too.

And once the moral mandate is weakened, no amount of procedural correctness can restore belonging.

The deeper issue here isn’t governance, it’s identity. Identity sits so close to why these tensions arise that we almost avoid talking about it.

We talk about constitutions and authority structures, but rarely about the fact that people experience collective decisions through their own sense of who they are, where they belong, and what it means to stand with a kaupapa.

In academic terms, this is called identification: the process through which people weave a collective into their own sense of self.

For anyone, identification has cognitive, emotional, and relational dimensions. But within te ao Māori, those dimensions sit inside a wider whakapapa frame and are layered with whenua, whānau, reo, tikanga, and intergenerational aspiration.

The stakes of identification are therefore felt more deeply, and ruptures are experienced not only as political disagreement but as disturbances to identity itself.

When a collective acts in ways that align with someone’s values, identification deepens. But when its actions contradict those values, identification becomes strained. People feel torn and unsettled, and eventually, if they’re unable to reconcile the rupture, they will step back to protect themselves and their sense of identity.

This isn’t confined to politics. The power of Māori movements, iwi authorities, and kaupapa organisations rests entirely on people choosing to identify with them. Identification isn’t automatic — it’s earned, sustained, and repaired through relationships and transparent, tikanga-based processes.

Over the past 18 months, we’ve seen a remarkable lift in Māori political participation and expression, much of it activated by Toitū Te Tiriti and Te Pāti Māori. The record shift of voters to the Māori roll was an expression of pride and belonging.

So when something jars against that uplift, people naturally begin rethinking their connection. Some lean in, some lean out, and others hover in between, waiting for clarity, accountability, or a tikanga process that acknowledges their identity strain.

And this is where constitutional power hits a hard limit. You can’t proceduralise people back into belonging.

Belonging isn’t a matter of votes or clauses. It’s a matter of identity, trust, and moral mandate. Without processes that honour those, the formal mandate may stand, but the human mandate will not. This fracture is highly visible now, but it’s not an isolated occurrence.

The same identity processes are triggered every time a hapū representative votes contrary to hapū direction and refuses to explain their divergence, citing confidentiality clauses, every time an iwi organisation makes a commercial decision that sits uneasily in the puku of its people, and every time a national position is signed that contradicts long-held community views.

And that seemingly pōrangi aunty or uncle challenging decisions at a hui-ā-tau? They’re doing identity work on behalf of all of us — refusing to let a single decision weaken their identification with the collective, for our collective benefit.

Māori institutions can’t rely on formal mandates alone. If we want legitimacy that endures, we need to design institutions that reflect our own power dynamics, which are bottom-up, accountable, respectful of relationships, and aware of the importance of identity.

How do we do this? 

We use processes based on dialogue, not just procedure. Decisions about representation, identity, or belonging aren’t operational. Proceduralism can have its place for operational matters, but deep challenges need their own processes designed with wānanga at the heart, not efficiency.

We build governance architectures that honour bottom-up power. Mandate must be earned continuously through engagement and accountability, rather than assumed through constitutional authority. The idea of cultivating a “living mandate” is something our rangatira of old knew and practised, but it seems to be something our modern organisations are less adept at, to their, and our, detriment.

We recognise that identity is inseparable from collective authority. If decisions repeatedly unsettle people’s identities, the movement or collective’s legitimacy will always be fragile.  Perhaps more importantly, the scale of active participation will shift: the more resonant practices are with peoples identities, the more fulsome will be our front lines.

We create institutional humility. We need a willingness to acknowledge when a process is procedurally correct but morally incomplete, and to return to our communities for a mandate.

Te Pāti Māori has signalled that it’s committed to doing the deeper work from here, and that commitment matters. But this moment is bigger than one party. It’s an invitation for all of us — iwi, hapū, movements, kaupapa organisations — to reimagine how we design our institutions.

If moral mandate rests on identity, then our futures depend on cultivating belonging, not assuming it. We need governance processes that honour how identity actually works, not how constitutions assume it should.

The strength of our movements will not come from procedural certainty, but from institutions that grow connection, protect dignity, and keep our people close — especially when decisions are hard.

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