By allowing themselves to be recorded alongside the Mongrel Mob, Te Pāti Māori, Green, and Labour MPs may have cost the Left the election, says Chrtis Trotter

By Chris Trotter*

Harry Tam is one of those rare individuals with the ability to bring outsiders inside.

As a working proposition, promoting the interests of the Mongrel Mob would strike most of us as a fool’s errand – at best. Gangs are not the public’s favourite institutions. Indeed, in a democracy such as ours they are the political equivalent of Kryptonite. Politicians, like Superman, should keep their distance – especially in the weeks leading up to a General Election.

And yet, once again, Tam has successfully drawn the Mongrel Mob into the heart of the nation’s most important conversations. The gang whose interests he has served for the best part of 40 years finds itself playing a starring role in the final weeks of the 2026 General Election.

If, as Oscar Wilde quipped, “the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about”, then we must concede that Tam has fulfilled his brief.

But we are also entitled to ask the question: Qui bono? Who, if anybody, stands to benefit from the revelation that candidates from all three of the Left Bloc’s component parties – Te Pāti Māori, the Greens, and Labour – allowed themselves to be recorded seeking votes from the Mob?

The obvious answer is: the Right Bloc.

A fortnight ago, most political journalists and commentators, if pressed, would have admitted that in the unfolding 2026 campaign the momentum was with Labour and its allies. National, in particular, was not firing on all cylinders.

Against all odds, the election was shaping-up as Chippy’s to lose.

As the early-voting polling booths open for business and the election gets underway, only the most indefatigably optimistic supporter of the centre-left would argue against the proposition that Chippy has lost it.

Is that fair? Accepting an invitation from Harry Tam to attend a pre-election event held at a Mongrel Mob “gang pad” is hardly the course of action Chris Hipkins would have recommended. Had Labour’s candidate for Tamaki Makaurau, Kerrin Leoni, thought to seek her leader’s advice she would undoubtedly have been told to steer well clear of Harry Tam and his gangsters. Surely, this is Leoni’s disaster, not Chippy’s?

Prima facie, as the lawyers say, it is most certainly Leoni’s disaster. (Co-parented, it is important to acknowledge, by the attendees from Te Pāti Māori and the Greens!)

At a deeper level, however, the mis-steps and mistakes now threatening to hand the election to Christopher Luxon and his allies are the consequence of an internal party culture no longer capable of producing candidates with an instinctive feel for where the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders stand, and of the critical electoral importance of being seen to stand with them.

Forty years ago: back in the days of First-Past-the-Post, mass political parties, and the need for those seeking the candidacy of their party to be up to the job of presenting themselves to the electorate’s voters as ‘one of them’; the development and demonstration of sound political common sense was more-or-less a given. Certainly anyone perceived as lacking in common sense, as understood by the majority, would not have been selected as a candidate.

No aspiring Labour candidate who had heard Norman Kirk campaigning in 1972 to “take the bikes off the bikies” needed an explicit instruction to keep well clear of the Mongrel Mob, anymore than they needed an explicit instruction not to put a loaded gun to their head and pull the trigger.

An electoral system that restricts access to Parliament to those who have secured a plurality of the ballots cast by the electorate’s registered voters has a built-in bias against the unconventional and the unorthodox. One might almost say it is populist by design and anti-elitist in effect. People tend to vote for people like themselves or, on rare occasions, for people who can make people like themselves like them.

Like David Lange.

The Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) electoral system is not like that at all.

Under MMP, the Party List, drawn up with varying degrees of opaqueness by the political parties themselves, directs the energies of the prospective candidates inwards not outwards.

The votes being sought now are no longer those of ordinary citizens, but of party comrades – with all that implies about factional loyalties and ideological enthusiasms. Indeed, the stronger the pull of ideology, the less like ordinary people the Party List candidates become.

To be in the grip of an ideology – especially a radical ideology – presupposes a large measure of detachment from the world inhabited by the majority of citizens.

The causes of the ideologue are not the causes of the median voter.

When the ordinary voter hears the word “gangs”, he or she pictures an organised band of violent and exploitative criminals. In the mind of the ideologue, however, the word “gangs” conjures-up an entirely different picture. In the radical imagination “gangs” represent the victims of colonisation and the hidden abuse of racist institutions.

Outcasts and outlaws which the ordinary voter expects the government to contain and control, the “progressive” ideologue expects the “Settler State” to heal.

Under FPP the ideologue’s position on gangs would be utterly unsaleable. But in a progressive political party compiling its MMP Party List, or selecting a candidate for the most urban of the Seven Māori electorates, abject surrender to the “prejudices” of the majority is neither required nor sanctioned.

Under MMP, where Party Lists make it possible for ideological purity to trump pragmatic electoral necessity, “common sense” is more likely to recommend the acceptance of an invitation from Harry Tam than its rejection. In a progressive party beset (as most of them are) by factional rivalries, the advice of the leader is not always sought.

Someone of a cynical disposition, having lived under MMP for 30 years, might look at the disaster currently threatening to sink the Left Bloc’s chances of victory and conclude that the Party List offers radical apparatchiks an excellent means of bypassing the conservative instincts of the majority and slipping into Parliament individuals who, while possessing the “correct analysis” of society’s ills, are in all other respects unelectable.

It is certainly the case that very few aspects of the MMP system anger voters more than the spectacle of a candidate defeated soundly in a fair electorate fight returning to Parliament with insufferable insouciance as a List MP.

How many Act MPs, how many Greens, would be seated in the House of Representatives if the only way they could get there was under the rules of First Past the Post?

Politicians utterly dependent on the goodwill of voters in their electorate would not have dreamed of walking into a Mongrel Mob “gang pad”. Not in the past, and certainly not now, when every patched member’s hand would be holding a cellphone set to “record”.

Political common sense would have warned an MP of the old school to run a mile. Under no circumstances would they have accepted an invitation from a man with every incentive to show the country how prettily the Mongrel Mob can make the system dance.

*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.