Bob Edin: The columnist who is bothered by bickering.....

.....and blind to the breadth of beliefs among Maori politicians

Stuff columnist Joel Maxwell has bemused us again in a post-election article headed

A movement was happening, but Māori leaders chose to bicker instead

Which Maori leaders – you might wonder – is he talking about?

Winston Peters? Shane Jones? David Seymour?

Nope. He is writing about the Maori Party.

That’s a party with a race-based agenda which is unabashedly committed to promoting the interests of Maori.

New Zealand First leader Winston Peters has often been vilifed, however, because of his public stances on Treaty-based issues such as co-governance and his questioning whether Maori are indigenous.

While his commitment to Maoridom has been challenged, his ethnicity has not, presumably thanks to his fluent te reo Māori, deep roots in Northland, and status as New Zealand’s first Māori Deputy Prime Minister.

Other politicians of Māori descent—inevitably from centre-right and libertarian parties— have not been spared challenges to their cultural identity.

Labour’s Willie Jackson has –

• Referred to ACT Leader David Seymour —who has Ngāpuhi whakapapa—as a “useless Māori” and criticised what he said was a lack of advocacy for Māori.
• Told Parliament that Paula Bennett (former National Party leader) “doesn’t know if she’s a Māori. Some days she does and some days she doesn’t”. Bennett described the remark as a “racist taunt” and said she had been accused of being “not Māori enough” because she does not speak te reo Māori.

ACT’s Karen Chhour has been accused (by Labour’s Kelvin Davis) of seeing the world through “a vanilla lens” and advised to move “into the Māori world”, while ACT’s Nicole McKee has said she was “sick of being told I’m not Māori enough” or being called a “plastic Māori”;

It seems fair to suppose from the thrust of his arguments that Joel Maxwell is in the Jackson-Davis camp.

He writes:

Since we’re all just stuck waiting around for an actual election result, it’s probably a good time for me to have a moan about the Māori problem.

And:

Nobody can 100% predict the outcome after special votes are announced on November 27, but I can’t help but wonder what might have been if some of our Māori leadership hadn’t self-destructed.

Maxwell proceeds to reveal he is bothered fundamentally about disunity within the Maori Party.

Because of the party’s infighting, he laments, the movement that grew throughout the Treaty Principles Bill “ordeal” lost its focus.

Even this year, we had Maori Party MP for Tāmaki Makaurau, Oriini Kaipara and then-Labour candidate Kerrin Leonie arguing over gangs in a televised debate – Kaipara accusing Leonie of visiting a gang pad, which she denied.

Days of campaigning were spent focused on an ugly onscreen spat between Māori candidates. And in the end, Leonie was gone.

Maxwell notes the Māori Party held on to five of its six seats (including Kaipara’s).

Then he recognises the grim reality of the dearth of party support for his team:

… as I write this TPM has a party vote of .57%. Yes, that number starts with a decimal point. It got about 14,000 party votes – down from 87,973 in 2023!

Instead of growing, it stalled, rolling into Parliament on fumes.

He further notes that in two of the Māori electorates, Te Tai Tonga and Te Tai Tokerau, NZ First beat TPM in party votes.

Yep. That’s the party led by Peters and Shane Jones, although they are not Maori leaders in his book.

But whoa there.

Maxwell then asks:

What do I want from Māori leaders?

His answer is ambiguous:

I don’t expect them to be all the same,

[which surely means they can include leaders from New Zealand First and ACT]

… but much like that Pacific hui I was at, I do want them to work together.

Maxwell then returns to his default position.

The election campaign was nasty enough for Māori people without adding to the pain ourselves. Enough with the bitterness. Enough with the superficiality. Enough with the egotism. Subtract out all the background noise, don’t add to it.

If the parties on the right form the next government we face a rough term, worse than the last probably.

The Spinoff reports there will be 37 Māori MPs (28%) in the new Parliament (subject to the final count).

Breaking it down to caucuses, Te Pāti Māori’s caucus is, unsurprisingly, 100% Māori, the Greens’ and NZ First’s are 50% Māori, Act’s is 23%, Labour’s 22% and National’s 14%.

The effect of what Maxwell has written, when he says “we face a rough term”, is to culturally and ethnically disown the Maori MPs in the centre-right parties. The Maori who voted for them – presumably in the expectation a right-leaning government will be better for the country than a left-leaning one – have been disowned, too.

Bob Edlin is a veteran journalist and editor for the Point of Order blog HERE.