More action, less haka: Peeni Henare’s race for redemption
Sunday, 3 August 2025
For Labour’s Peeni Henare, it would be a redemptive tale - as well as a chance to get Labour back on track for the 2026 election.
The seat that he lost in 2023 by a mere 42 votes to the late Takutai Tarsh Kemp, who died suddenly in June, is now his for the taking. And while modest and taking nothing for granted, he intends to take it back for his party.
As the campaign heats up the Sunday Star Times caught up with the Labour MP in his office in Parliament House in Wellington.
Henare is trotting out a line you hear a bit from Labour about how it is viewing the by-election. That his opponent is former broadcaster Te Pāti Māori’s Oriini Kaipara but that he really running against the coalition Government.
But Henare is clearly looking beyond the vote on September 6 and thinking about untying the Gordian knot Labour found itself in by the 2023 election: one in which Māori voters thought the party didn’t do enough, while a cohort of Pākehā middle New Zealand voters thought it did too much.
The first stop on that journey is for Henare to push back against Te Pāti Māori.
“There’s quite a lot of people who are getting a little tired of the tribalism that the Māori Party’s talking about,” he says.
“In the words of one punter on the weekend, we want more action and less haka.”
The Māori electorate seat of Tāmaki Makaurau basically takes in all of Auckland.
It is pan-tribal, young, a different demographic to the other Māori seats, Henare says.
“More middle class, if you will. You know they've probably got more access to job opportunities, probably on a higher wage, all of those things, if you compare between Tāmaki Makaurau and Te Tai Tokerau, for example
He also says that while he was “privileged” to attend a kura and speaks fluent Māori, all Māori have different upbringings and are on a “reo journey”. It is a way of getting round to saying that both he (and voters, he reckons) don’t like Te Pāti Māori’s claims about being Māori enough.
“Having to justify whether or not you're Māori or you're Māori enough is - just that's really wrong.”
Tāmaki Makaurau, he says, is also aspirational.
“I think we can look towards some of what we've done in the past, but definitely in the space of aspiration. We've got to be strong on the economic space where I know Aucklanders want to be,” Henare says.
“But I do think in part there's also something to be said for the partnership element of Te Tiriti o Waitangi to allow us to do that, and that's how we can continue to have a strong narrative about Māori and the role of tangata whenua in the country, but how we can do this together.”
The 45-year-old, sports-mad father of three - who was a Māori TV commentator for the 2011 Rugby World Cup - has been in Parliament since 2014, but remains one of the younger MPs in Labour’s caucus.
Henare, of Ngāti Hine and Ngāpuhi descent, comes from a prominent Māori family; grandfather Taurekareka `Tau’ Henare held the then seat of Northern Māori. His father led the Māori Language Commission and spent time as a diplomat, meaning Henare spent time in Los Angeles growing up - he still has an abiding love of American sports.
He has a 29-year-old son (“I was a teenage dad”) who is a nurse and two daughters, 12 and 13. He has five siblings, including a twin brother.
His son was born when he was in sixth form at Whangārei Boys’ High School. The next year he was head boy. He tells a story about how he was calling the 2011 World Cup semi-final between the All Blacks and Argentina - and checking his phone at half time found out his then wife was in labour.
“And I'm like, well, you've got to wait another 40 minutes, girl .. we're about to start the second half. And so I finished calling the game, and and one of my names for my baby is Argentina.”
He’s been married, divorced and now his partner is Skye Kimura, a cultural consultant at Anthem.
He also teaches Māori language and history: “I've been privileged to have been taught the history of my tribe and my people and my whakapapa.”
On spec, the Tāmaki Makaurau seat should be there for Henare’s taking. In 2023, the likely low water mark for Labour, 27,000 people voted, and Henare and Tarsh Kemp got a bit more than 10,000 votes each
National’s Hinurewa Te Hau won more than 1250 votes in 2023 - votes likely to go to Henare this time around as National will not be running a candidate in the race. Also of interest, Darleen Tana who won a touch under 3000 votes, has also been waka-jumped out of Parliament by her erstwhile party, the Greens.
Nominations for candidates close at 5pm on Tuesday - but the race is between Henare and Kaipara.
Henare says he sees the opportunity to take Labour - which has had a poll resurgence since the disastrous 2023 election, large by proposing little and staying publicly united - out for a test drive.
Last weekend he was out at Otara Market with Chris Hipkins. Since Wednesday he’s been out campaigning with Labour MPs Willie Jackson and Shanan Halbert.
“The [Otara] market is a great test for us and everyone. Nobody spoke about Te Pāti Māori. They all spoke about the ills of this Government, how they feel unsupported. There were quite a handful there, because they're all small businesses - many of them who have voter’s regret, buyer’s regret or buyer’s remorse, looking towards new options for next year.”
Henare has his eye on Labour’s prospects beyond the by-election. It is, he says, a chance to test a few things.
“I also am quite clear that from the lessons of 2023 what can we do in a by-election? How can we test different avenues to connect? How can we test different styles of connection, and not just for myself, but for the party?”
And he is pretty blunt about what Labour failed at in its last term, echoing comments from both Jacinda Ardern and Chris Hipkins that “we were focusing on everything, and instead of being hyper-focused on some of the more important things - you know, we tried to do too much”.
And he is quite open about the way a lot of the policies for Māori ended up being perceived.
“A lot of the stuff that we did in particular around Māori communities, etc, could have been seen by the general public as not focusing on everybody, right? And that's been a lesson for us.”
He uses one example where Labour got the politics wrong, and in doing so, didn’t take everyone along for the ride.
“The example I always give is we lowered the bowel screening age for Māori and Pacific to 55 …. There was a good reason to do it.”
But he says, “for a dollar amount, which was minuscule in the scheme of things we could have done for everybody, you know”.
Overall, after a break from being an electorate MP, Henare is ready to come back, redeem himself - and in doing so, start the road back to government for Labour.
“I've taken the time to reconnect, re energise, and sit down with the community and say, OK, why was it that the tide turned against us?
“When I say us, I mean Labour in 2023 and what can we do to bring whānau back on board in this journey? And so it's been, you know, in my mind, about how I can do that - redeem not just for the seat, but for the Labour Party, because it was a crushing defeat.”