The election is on a knife edge.
On one side is a coalition that wants to encourage people to get ahead through lower taxes, less regulation, stronger economic growth, and more freedom. On the other side are parties that want to penalise success.
Labour, which proved itself to be not only incompetent at managing our country but downright destructive, wants to tax us more. Not content with having the power to control what we earn through income tax, they now want to get their hands on our assets as well. And while they claim their 28 percent Capital Gains Tax (CGT) will only affect investment property – including baches – history suggests that once such a tax is in place a government’s insatiable need for more money will invariably see the rules being “tweaked” and with the stroke of a pen family homes, farms, shares, or any other assets could be captured in the tax net as well.
That’s why New Zealanders have always had a deep-seated distrust of a CGT, rejecting repeated attempts to introduce one – with former Prime Minister David Lange once describing it as the sort of tax you introduce if you want to lose not just one election but the next three!
Then there’s the Greens. While they originated within the environmental movement, they have now morphed into a communist party in all but name. They feed on the politics of “envy and greed”, with their major ‘Tax the Rich’ election platform attempting to generate a victim mentality amongst voters to provoke hatred towards anyone doing well. According to their warped mindset, middle class families are rich oppressor-types, who deserve penalising through punitive taxes: a top income tax rate of 45 percent, a 2.5 percent wealth tax, a 33 percent inheritance tax, an extension of the “bright-line” tax on residential investment property from 2 to 10 years, the removal of tax deductibility on investment property, a rise in company tax to 33 percent, and a 5 percent withholding tax on offshore profits.
The Maori Party also favours an increase in the top tax rate – to 48 percent, a 2.5 percent wealth tax, an increase in company tax to 33 percent, an additional 5 percent foreign company tax, a land banking tax of 33 percent, a ‘batch and vacant home’ tax of 2 percent, and a 5 percent Stamp Duty.
At the most extreme end of the race towards totalitarianism is The Opportunity Party. TOP doesn’t just want to penalise anyone trying to get ahead through tax, it wants to control their lives. Their objective is to scrap the lowest rates of income tax, introduce a new tax on the land a family owns, and pay people a “universal benefit” so everyone becomes dependent on the State.
It’s important to also remember that at this election the family home isn’t just under threat from tax: both the Maori Party and the Greens have indicated they want private land opened up for a new round of Treaty settlements!
While Labour is currently saying ‘no’ to the new tax demands of coalition partners, it cannot be forgotten that this is the same party that once embraced the Orwellian ‘single source of truth’ mantra — a chilling reminder that their guarantees ultimately meant nothing, making it impossible to take any assurances they offer at face value.
If it’s the difference between Chris Hipkins becoming Prime Minister or remaining Leader of the Opposition, we all know how easy it would be for pre-election promises to be conveniently forgotten.
What also seems to be being forgotten this election is the diabolical mess Labour made of running the country when they were last in government.
There’s possibly a good reason for this.
Virtually the whole time Labour held the Treasury benches, they were not subjected to proper scrutiny by the mainstream media. Jacinda Ardern was, after all, their protégé – the new party leader they’d helped become Prime Minister through their relentlessly positive coverage. As a result, their treatment of the PM and Labour was kind, in sharp contrast to the approach they’ve taken with the current government.
In reality, the Coalition has been subjected to almost 3 years of unrelenting attack – which is a scandal in itself since the media are meant to be objective and balanced in their reporting.
Whether this is in any way related to the fact that around half of the country’s journalists are members of an activist union that’s affiliated to the Labour Party – giving them direct influence over policy development, candidate selection, list rankings, Party leadership and so on – is difficult to tell, but at face value media bias in favour of the left is unmistakable.
So, faced with a barrage of media negativity about the Coalition and a fading memory of Labour’s actual incompetence, it’s easy to see why voters might be persuaded to pin their hopes on a “new” government, especially when the much-vaunted economic recovery has been slow to materialise.
As if an orchestrated attempt by the media to influence the election is not bad enough, a new rort has now emerged.
The Maori Party intends gaming the 2026 election by using their Maori seats to gerrymander a change in government.
We’ve seen attempts to use the Maori Seats to bring down the government before.
In 2014, Mana Party leader Hone Harawira tried to use his Te Tai Tokerau Maori seat to piggyback Kim Dotcom’s Internet Party into Parliament. It was a textbook attempt to game the system – a $3 million campaign to sidestep the 5‑percent MMP threshold, with Internet-Mana agreeing to split and operate independently once elected.
But the public rejected their anti-democratic rort: Hone Harawira lost his seat and the Internet Party failed to make it into Parliament.
The Maori Party’s manipulative plan involves convincing supporters to split their vote to support Maori Party candidates in the electorates while giving their party votes to either Labour or the Greens.
Their plan is to create a massive overhang in Parliament of six or seven seats, which they know is likely to swing the election outcome in favour of a Labour-led government.
An overhang, of course, is created when a party wins more electorate seats than its share of the party vote entitles it to. Since they keep the extra seats, Parliament becomes larger and more disproportionate.
The Parliamentary overhang was designed to deal with an occasional awkward result thrown up by voters. It was never envisioned to become a mechanism to deliberately undermine democracy and MMP.
Maori Party co-leader Rawiri Waititi is already claiming victory: “This is the very first time the Maori roll will be determining who the next prime minister is. If Te Pati Maori is able to win the seven Maori seats, the Greens hold on to their 12-13% and Labour holds on to their 34%, we’ve got a change in government.”
This week’s NZCPR Guest Commentator, public law expert Liam Hehir explains how the Maori Party’s attempt to game the election could backfire spectacularly and result in the abolition of the Maori seats:
“All electoral systems can be gamed to a greater or lesser extent.
“What Te Pati Maori wants to do now, however, is a serious escalation. At its own campaign launch, the party has asked supporters not to give it their party vote. It is campaigning for electorate votes only. The obvious potential effect is to create an overhang that could give it disproportionate influence in the next Parliament…
“But if the quirks of MMP are purposely used to provide extra MPs to support a Labour-led Government that would otherwise have fallen short, all bets would be off. Millions of voters could easily be persuaded that a feature of the electoral system intended to guarantee Maori representation was now being used as a weapon to circumvent the democratic will of the people.
“For my money, I think it is more likely that the result would be the abolition of the reserved Maori electorates.”
The need to abolish the Maori seats is no longer a matter that can be swept under the carpet.
The distortionary impact these seats are having on Parliament is too significant: Maori now make up a record 27 percent of Parliament’s MPs, far exceeding their 17 percent share of the population. The argument being used that Maori seats are needed to ensure Maori have a voice in Parliament is now so ridiculous that even if all seven reserved seats are removed, Maori would still be overrepresented with 21 percent of the seats.
But there’s a deeper reason the Maori seats must go: they are now being used to radicalise the machinery of government. What was once an historical concession has been weaponised to undermine Parliamentary sovereignty and advance a model of governance in which tribal authorities are exerting power over our public institutions.
The consequences are everywhere. Long-settled historic Treaty claims have been re-opened to deliver fresh rounds of multi-million-dollar payments. Wealthy tribal corporations are being handed invaluable public assets including the Urewera National Park, the Waikato River, Mount Taranaki, Auckland’s volcanic cones – and, potentially, control of New Zealand’s entire foreshore and seabed.
The Maori seats were central to the adoption of the radical United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples – and the introduction of the subversive He Puapua plan for tribal control by 2040.
In fact, the Maori seats are no longer about representation — they have become the gateway through which tribal power is being embedded deep into the apparatus of state, at the expense of equal citizenship and democratic accountability.
If New Zealand cares about democracy, the Maori seats cannot remain.
But if they do, what’s next? Maori ownership of freshwater? Or perhaps it will be a brand-new Treaty-based constitution to give those wealthy tribal corporations full control over New Zealand.
When the 1986 Royal Commission on the Electoral System proposed MMP, they warned the Maori seats would distort the core principle of proportionality and they recommended their abolition: “In the form of Maori representation we have proposed for MMP, there would be no separate Maori constituency or list seats, no Maori roll, and no Maori option. All New Zealanders would vote in the same way for the party they wish to govern, and for a constituency MP.”
In a comprehensive clinical analysis of the Maori seats in 2008, leading Constitutional Lawyer and Professor of Law at Canterbury University Dr Philp Joseph KC concluded, “There are four reasons why the Maori seats should be abolished: they are anachronistic, they institutionalise Maori separatism, they represent a form of reverse discrimination and they threaten to manipulate MMP electoral outcomes through ‘overhang’.”
So here we are in 2026, facing a significant overhang threat from the Maori seats that could result in a government being imposed on New Zealand that voters specifically rejected.
The Maori Party’s attempt to use the Maori seats to rig the election should be the final nail in their coffin – an attack on democracy, stability, and Parliamentary Sovereignty, that the Coalition can no longer ignore.
They now need to promise that if they are re-elected, a referendum on the Maori Seats will be held as a matter of urgency.
One of the best aspects of Kiwi culture is our instinctive desire to give everyone a fair go. But the flipside is that we have little tolerance for anyone attempting to play dirty.
That’s exactly what the Maori Party is now aiming to do – they want to use their special reserve Maori seats to engineer an election outcome that serves their self-interest rather than the will of the people.
Whether enough voters on the Maori roll will reject their attempt to game the election remains to be seen, but in the interest of democracy and New Zealand’s future, the Coalition now needs to give Kiwis the opportunity to decide whether the Maori seats should stay or go.
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THIS WEEK’S POLL ASKS:
*Should the Coalition announce that if re-elected, a referendum on the Maori Seats will be held as a matter of urgency?
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