Analysis: At the last election, Te Pāti Māori won six of the seven Māori electorates.
Other stories dominated the 2023 election, of course – the change of government and the negotiations that shaped the incoming National-Act-New Zealand First coalition.
But winning six of seven seats was a triumph. A party born, in 2004, out of Labour MP Tariana Turia’s protest against her own government’s Foreshore and Seabed Bill, a party that had largely survived the tides that might have been expected to swamp it once that galvanising purpose had gone, and a party that had renewed itself in opposition to what would become the coalition government’s Treaty Principles Bill.
Just two years on, and less than three months after defeating Labour by two votes to one in the Tāmaki Makaurau by-election (another triumph), that same party is now divided, fighting itself (even in court), and so far from the unity of purpose it displayed in 2004 – 2005 and again between 2023 and October 2025, that it has expelled two of its six MPs.
Two more appear storm tossed to the point of exhaustion, or confusion, or grief, and has two leaders and a party president who are so resolutely determined they’re getting it right that one seriously disgruntled senior insider sent me a link to a phrase in Te Aka, the online Māori dictionary: “He mahi hōhā rawa te tangata kāore nei e āhei ki te titiro ahakoa pēhea te mārama o te kōrero." (The person who is not able to see, despite how clear the information is, is extremely exasperating.)
And so here we are. In the maelstrom. Or Rotorua. At the Te Pāti Māori AGM.
On Sunday morning, we drive out to Waiatuhi Marae, in the tiny community of Mourea, between Lake Rotorua and Lake Rotoiti, roughly twenty-five minutes from downtown Rotorua.
I stop to talk to some young people riding horses near the marae, asking them what they dream of?
“To be a millionaire.”
Enough for home ownership, in other words.
If Te Pāti Māori has an electoral stronghold, it’s possibly here, in the Waiariki electorate. Think the Bay of Plenty coastline, starting at Tauranga and sweeping down and east, through Whakatāne and Ōpōtiki, then further east through the magic communities that dot along the top of State Highway 35, then back and inland, through the blue and green of the Rotorua lakes, and the sulphurous steam, and the city itself, and the hot pools that give the electorate its name, then south west, to Lake Taupō and the central plateau. A scenery gobble. All you can eat.
In the 2023 election, Rawiri Waititi received 21,000 votes here – four times more than his Labour opponent. (That word “triumph”, again.) In Labour’s entire history, it won’t have suffered many (any?) larger defeats in a Māori electorate. Te Ururoa Flavell won Waiariki for Te Pāti Māori four times. They like Te Pāti Māori here. It speaks to them.
But does it still?
Te Ururoa Flavell isn’t at the AGM. A former co-leader, a beloved local MP, and one of the party’s first four parliamentarians, he posted during the week that he and his wife, Erana, wouldn’t be coming: “We are disillusioned; hōhā; at all the negativity being put out there for all to see.”
All.
Waiting for Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke to arrive, I was standing out on the road when I met Faith Raroa and her daughter Rereiao. Faith is 26. She works in the disability sector and seems almost supernaturally kind.
Faith lives beside the marae. I ask her what she wants from the Te Pāti Māori AGM.
“Get your s*** together”, she says. (People use variations of that phrase all day. Over and over. It may be the saying of the weekend.) One man kindly spells it out for me rather than saying the word. “S”, pause, “H”, pause, “I”, pause, “T”. But it’s mostly administered bluntly, insistently, and as a curative.
Faith elaborates.
“It’s the kaupapa,” she says. “No one person is bigger than that.”
And then Faith looks towards the marae and says, “We’re all in this waka. The kaupapa matters so much. We have to row together.”
Kotahitanga is another word for that.
I was at Tūrangawaewae Marae in Ngāruawāhia in January 2024, where Kīngi Tuheitia Pootatau Te Wherowhero VII (Kīngi Tuheitia) had convened a National Hui for kotahitanga - unity. It felt transformative. And it was. By November, tens of thousands of people were marching upon Parliament in the Hikoi mō te Tiriti – almost certainly the largest protest march this country has ever seen.
On that Waikato day, Ngira Simmonds, the Kingi’s chief of staff and private secretary, took me to meet the king. It was the afternoon of the king’s speech – those now famous lines: “Be who we are, live our values, speak our reo, care for our mokopuna, our awa, our maunga, just be Māori... Māori all day, everyday.”
Less two years later, at the powhiri before the Te Pāti Māori AGM, Simmonds stands to speak.
He makes a speech that seems to encapsulate the “get your s*** together” mantra, but delivered in flawless te reo Māori, by an Archdeacon who’d previously been chief of staff to royalty. In short, Simmonds didn’t say “s***”.
What he did say was that the party’s leadership has to seriously consider whether they’re capable of uniting the party.
He expressed gratitude and admiration for the work they’d done, but less confidence in the bridge building work he believes they’re now required to do. It wasn’t incendiary, but it was pretty devastating. He spoke of sadness, hurt and pain. And when he finished, his waiata tautoko was led by Oriini Kaipara, the party’s new Tāmaki Makaurau MP.
Among those rising to join her, were Dame Rangimārie Naida Glavish, the woman who 40 years ago confronted us with our racism by the simple act of saying “kia ora” when she answered her work phone, and by Potaka Maipi, broadcaster and father of Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, Te Pāti Māori’s superstar MP.
Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke herself wasn’t yet there. She arrived after 1pm. Her presence felt generous.
What makes Te Pāti Māori’s disintegration even more striking is the almost disappearance from high-profile public life of that extraordinary twenty-three year old. The youngest MP in 170 years arrived in Parliament with such a brilliant and intuitive capacity to read the room occupied by Māori youth (and those who support them), to articulate a constructive and galvanizing hope-rage, and to mobilise a generation for whom politics seemed to not be about them, that whatever civil war has riven Te Pāti Māori is currently costing the party (and the country) a generational leadership.
Her haka in Parliament, a piece of theatre breathtaking in its simplicity and effectiveness, has now been watched globally somewhere approaching a billion times. All the keyboard warriors who slag her off, combined (then multiplied by their mother’s cell phone number), wouldn’t even come close.
And where is that extraordinary talent now?
Over the past fortnight, I’ve spoken to people who’ve claimed that some of her own colleagues resented the temerity of her fame, that she’s torn between her profound sense of obligation to speak on behalf of people who do not otherwise see their young, brown selves in Parliament, and her exhaustion and confusion in a party that can sometimes seem to not stand for anything so much as on each other.
Anything Is possible now, including her continued loyalty to Te Pāti Māori.
But Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke has the ear and trust of Te Arikinui Kuini Nga wai hono i te po, the Māori queen, another generational leader in her 20s with what appears to be a capacity for the long game, and her highly supportive whānau have a history of protest leadership, and Labour and the Greens would surely do almost anything to secure her candidacy, but almost certainly won’t, and life outside of Parliament must beckon with its sanctuary of home and calm... in short, what she does next will tell us so much about Te Pāti Māori’s own future.
There, too, rocking on the wild seas she’s found herself tossed upon, is Te Pāti Māori’s successful candidate in the Tāmaki Makaurau by-election, Oriini Kaipara. Having outpolled Labour’s Peeni Henare by two votes to one, she too spoke of a party in the ascendent and securing new and popular talent. She too, I’m told, finds herself in a tumult not of her making or desire.
Look at this photo. It’s posted on Oriini Kaipara’s Instagram account. That’s her, on the left. And Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke on the right. And between them, embraced with what looks a little like a declaratory love, is Te Tai Tokerau MP Mariameno Kapa-Kingi, recently and controversially expelled from Te Pāti Māori.
Yes, that’s the Mariameno Kapa-Kingi who went to the High Court in Wellington to argue John Tamihere’s presidency of Te Pāti Māori is “illegal”.
That’s the Mariameno Kapa-Kingi who party leadership turned against in a fashion that felt disproportionate to any offence.
Standing with her? Embracing her? Posting it on Insta? That’s a point being made.
When they arrive, electorate neighbours, Mariameno Kapa-Kingi (from the north above Auckland) and Oriini Kaipara (from Auckland itself) stay in the carpark for ages. There are hugs, exchanges of news, and the palpable relief of safety.
Kotahitanga.
It is hot now. So hot.
Rotorua, on the early summer weekend of December 6 and 7, is a swirl of bussed in visitors, their phone cameras out like poi, and locals whose waka was Te Arawa.
Life is memory buried until it flowers. My grandparents lived here when I was a child. Every time I return, I’m back with them. It’s the Christmas holidays. Grandma Beryl is smoking the Benson and Hedges that will kill her, and roasting beef until it ceases to be merely well done and turns to kauri. (Her Yorkshire puddings were perfect.) And grandpa John, a scientist, is in his Forestry Research Institute laboratory working on fostering a pine industry by developing straighter trees with fewer knots and better grain. (I thought of him often when I was reporting on the forestry slash in Tairawhiti.)
I am staying at the Novotel. There are TPM people everywhere.
I’ve been attending party conferences and AGMs (off and on) for roughly 30 years.
They’re seldom truly authentic. Bravado. Braggadocio. Bullshit. Standing ovations for half policies and tea towel homilies. The quest for reassurance when things aren’t great. The quest for humility when things are.
But this feels human and real and vital.
Cars arrive all morning. From Rotorua, of course. From Tauranga. From Taranaki. From Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland. (A bus, too, from our largest city.) People have come from Te Tai Tonga, an electorate which really is the entire South Island, the Chatham Islands, and a significant part of Wellington city. Some are hopeful. Some are defiant. Some arrive dispirited and leave even more so. By early afternoon, there are hundreds there. Co-leader Rawiri Waititi points out that the last AGM attracted about 20 people. There is laughter. Even from the people who don’t feel like laughing.
Everyone I meet, or see, or have talked to on the phone during the week, is hoping something good will come of it. Unity, if that’s not too big a word. And a return to an external purpose.
But rapprochement involves compromise. And who’s leading that? (Which was the question Ngira Simmonds kept asking.)
In the end, it felt set, and uncompromising, and intractable.
It felt like it had changed nothing. Or not very much.
Every time I was near someone leaving, I asked them how it had been for them.
For the most part, people attached to the two co-leaders and the party president felt it had gone well, and even very well, people attached to expelled Te Tai Tonga MP, Tākuta Ferris, felt it had gone badly, people attached to Mariameno Kapa-Kingi were pleased the High Court’s decision on Friday meant she was there, and were deeply committed to her, but weren’t sure there’d been any change of heart towards her from the party’s leadership, and people there with Oriini Kaipara and Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke had hoped for more.
In November 2005, after the election that had put her, Pita Sharples (Tāmaki Makaurau), Hone Harawira (Te Tai Tokerau) and Te Ururoa Flavell (Waiariki) in Parliament (that first triumph), Tariana Turia, who’d left Labour, stood against it, and won, made her maiden speech as Māori Party co-leader.
She talked of a “Parliament that for the first time includes within its midst a party dedicated to the advancement of a strong and independent Māori voice and Māori people.”
Māori voice - singular.
This is a high bar. No-one ever requires a singularity of Pākehā voice. But Māori have achieved it remarkably often, particularly when unified by opposition to the predations of colonialism, or to betrayals, or attacks on the Treaty, or violations of it.
Whatever made the people at Waiatuhi Marae on that sun drenched Sunday join Te Pāti Māori in the first place, endures. The dreams are the same. But something has been lost and not yet recovered.
“Trust,” Party President, John Tamihere said, in a feisty media conference at the end of the long, hot day.
When asked it he’d stand down if it was in the best interests of the party, he replied: “I'll stand down if there's a good reason to stand down. If the reason is that a few people don't like me, that doesn't cut the mustard.
“You've got to have reasons about policy, about the program, about politics. Not personality. Just because you don't like somebody, doesn't mean to say you should guillotine them.”
And yet, and yet, and yet... Tākuta Ferris and Mariameno Kapa-Kingi, both guillotined.
There are now 300,000 people enrolled to vote on the Māori roll, and another 270,000 Māori voters on the general roll.
That’s a lot of voters.
One of them spoke to me on the way out. She thought the day had gone really well. I told her not everyone was saying that. “Sure”, she replied, “but if you’re an All Blacks fan and they get a new coach that you don’t like, you don’t suddenly switch to supporting the Wallabies”.
I was thinking about whether the analogy held when I met a woman heading back to Auckland.
“How was your day?” I asked.
“A waste of time,” she replied.
Where to now for Te Pāti Māori? And are they any closer to getting there after their AGM?
The answers depended, all day, on who you asked. But the fact there we so many different answers didn’t feel like Te Pāti Māori at its best, didn’t feel like kotahitanga, and didn’t feel like a unified voice.
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