Turning Te Pāti Māori towards the urban Māori working-class would be an exceedingly dangerous move

By Chris Trotter*

Te Pāti Māori's consistent failure to participate in the day-to-day business of Parliament is telling. Citizens availing themselves of the consultative machinery of Parliament, select committees in particular, report Te Pāti Māori no-shows with a regularity strongly suggestive of its non-participation being more of a feature than a bug. The argument that the party regards the House of Representatives primarily as a stage upon which to perform its indigenous political drama is difficult to refute.

To encounter a similarly performative emphasis it is necessary to go back more than a century to the formation of the Labour Party and the maiden speech of its radical socialist leader, Harry Holland:

“We do not seek to make a class war. You cannot make that which is already in existence. We recognise that the antagonisms which divide society into classes are economically foundationed, and we are going, if we can, to change those economic foundations, to end the class war by ending the causes of class warfare.”

Not that Labour’s willingness to outrage the mostly conservative legislators occupying the House of Representatives at the end of the First World War constituted the entirety of its political repertoire. Holland’s speech made clear that Labour had entered Parliament to change things. This was crucial. By submitting itself to the democratic process, the party was acknowledging that a bloody socialist revolution was not required. Economic transformation could be achieved peacefully, constitutionally, by means of legislation.

In fewer than twenty years Labour would vindicate that crucial commitment to democracy by becoming the lawfully elected government of New Zealand – and changing it.

Te Pāti Māori has offered no such democratic commitments to the House of Representatives. Indeed, its MPs have made it clear that the core principle of representative democracy, that the majority must rule, is anathema to the Indigenous minority it represents. To those who object that the only thing worse than the “tyranny of the majority” is the tyranny of the minority, Te Pāti Māori waxes eloquent about how welcome “Tangata Tiriti” (Pakeha) will be made to feel in the new indigenised and decolonised society to which the party is committed.

That Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa Packer have yet to lay before the House even a rough constitutional blueprint for this new society sets Te Pāti Māori apart from all the other parliamentary parties. The most they have been willing to offer, to date, are crude sketches of what might be expected of a Te Pāti Māori government. A Māori-dominated upper house is proposed. The party also favours an unelected oversight body empowered to strike down legislation deemed inimical to Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

That such legislation would conflict in a fundamental way with the constitutional norms accepted by the overwhelming majority of New Zealand citizens, Māori as well as Pakeha, has failed to convince Te Pāti Māori to abandon these radical proposals, or indicate how they might be integrated democratically into New Zealand’s overall constitutional schema.

This is nothing new. It has long been a feature of the political movements dedicated to the decolonisation and indigenisation of New Zealand that they rebuff any and all attempts to promote an open-ended and fully inclusive constitutional debate about how those twin goals might best be achieved.

The largely closed debates within Maoridom that generated the constitutional options set forth by the late Moana Jackson in his Matike Mai Aotearoa document were not opened up to the rest of the nation. Discussion did occur between carefully selected representatives of the Māori and Pakeha elites, but no government of the last twenty years has seen fit to empower and resource a broad nationwide “conversation” on how, or even if, the Treaty and traditional Māori politics generally, are reconcilable with New Zealand’s Westminster system of representative democracy.

Any lingering hopes that such a discussion might be possible were dashed by the intransigent Māori response to David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill.

More recently, the internal strife within Te Pāti Māori has prompted commentators to dismiss entirely the notion that there could be a place in any future centre-left cabinet for members of the party’s current caucus. Offering a Labour-Green government Te Pāti Māori’s guarantee of confidence and supply, with its MPs positioned on the cross-benches, is now regarded as the best the party can reasonably hope to achieve.

It is probable, however, that Te Pāti Māori exiting Parliament altogether would be considered preferable to such an arrangement. Committed to behaving like whipped dogs, in hopes of being tossed the odd small bone by the Labour-Green leadership, would entail a catastrophic loss of mana. Accepting such political domestication would rule out completely the sort of performative politics that propelled Hana-Rawhiti Mapai-Clarke into Time Magazine’s top-100 global youth leaders.

Moving the struggle for indigenisation and decolonisation from Parliament to the streets would rachet up the tension between Māori and Pakeha considerably. A situation of growing political volatility could hardly be prevented, regardless of which combination of political parties commanded the Treasury Benches.

Te Pāti Māori operates on the margins of a vast reservoir of inflammable Māori deprivation. While its interests were limited to mobilising these economically and socially stressed urban Māori electorally, Te Pāti Māori maintained a predominantly cultural and constitutional focus. But defeated and humiliated by the brute institutional force of Parliament, why would Te Pāti Māori forebear from setting a match to the fumes of so much poverty, homelessness, truancy, crime, and addiction? If the Pakeha cannot tolerate the occasional haka, let’s see how they handle fire and riot.

Small wonder, then, that the Iwi Leaders Group has expressed its interest in closing the rifts opening up between the caucus and membership of Te Pāti Māori. The last thing the prime beneficiaries of what Elizabeth Rata calls “Neo-Tribal Capitalism” are looking for is an aggressive turn towards the urban Māori working-class by a Te Pāti Māori with nothing to lose and everything to gain from concocting an explosive mix of tikanga and Marxism.

Labour, too, must be feeling fearful. The last thing Chris Hipkins needs right now is a flax-roots conflagration of racially-charged left-wing populism singeing his party’s behind. Hana-Rawhiti Mapai-Clarke as New Zealand’s indigenous Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is hardly calculated to put the median voter at ease. Racial chauvinism combined with radical socialism has all the appeal of a weeping stick of Dynamite.

Was this how it was always going to end in Aotearoa?

When the working-class was white, Labour believed itself (and was) equal to the task of incorporating its interests peacefully into the wider society of Pakeha New Zealand. But the post-Rogernomics immiseration of urban Māori, and the potential for truly serious political trouble it portends, is an ugly fact that cannot be ignored indefinitely.

A Maori Party aligned with National and the Iwi Leaders Group was one thing; Te Pāti  Māori, posed uneasily in front of the acute deprivation and neglect of urbanised working-class Māori, was always going to be another.

*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.