Te Pāti Māori dominates, no good news in by-election defeat for Labour

Sunday, 7 September 2025

ANALYSIS: Peeni Henare’s shellacking in the Maori electorate of Tāmaki Makaurau will be a genuine blow to Labour’s momentum.

Henare lost the seat by 42 votes to the late Takutai Tarsh Kemp in 2023.

This time, his Te Pāti Māori opponent Oriini Kaipara won 64% of the vote, compared to Henare’s 32%.

Just 27% of enrolled voters turned out. Some 9377 votes were counted on Saturday. About 20% of votes are yet to be counted (special votes) taking the total to 11,998. But while perhaps interesting for predicting results on election night 2026 in the event of a close call, those will not materially affect this result.

This was a sound defeat. And while Labour will make much of the low turnout, it wasn’t that low compared with other recent by-elections. Turnout was a bit over 35% in the Port Waikato by-election (held just after the 2023 general election) and only 31% turnout in the Hamilton West by-election in 2022, which brought National’s Tama Potaka into Parliament for the first time.

The low turnout argument doesn’t really wash as far as Henare and Labour’s performance goes.

In 2023 there were about 27,000 votes cast in Tāmaki Makaurau. On Saturday night there were about 9400. In order to even draw level with Kaipara, having won only 32% of votes, Henare would have to win nearly 60% of the special votes and the 15,000 voters that stayed home this time.

Nothing is impossible. But given the swing, doing that would be highly highly improbable.

For both Henare and Chris Hipkins this is a significant fail. Hipkins has had a remarkable run in taking on Christopher Luxon, keeping Labour together and boosting their polling.

But there had been no markers. This is a marker and it suggests that the 54th New Zealand Parliament with its febrile atmosphere around race relations and te ao Māori and the Treaty of Waitangi have been politically profitable for Te Pāti Māori (and probably ACT and NZ First) at the expense of Labour and National. In the Māori seats at least.

This is not a by-election where too many broader lessons can be drawn. Labour’s key political challenge is not to win Māori electorates (it already wins the party vote in those) but to take votes of the National Party. Those are different challenges.

But it will be grist to the mill for Hipkins skeptics, in Auckland in particular: that he is too Wellington, too much of a woolly centrist, doesn’t have enough policy and is struggling with a core factional voter base of Māori.

It also won’t do anything positive for Henare’s career ambitions.

Labour was also using this as a testing ground for cost of living and economic messages. Among those who vote, those arguments obviously fell flat ‒ or people voted on other things such as the candidates.

For Te Pāti Māori, this is a tremendous result. It continues to demonstrate its ability to dominate a strategy of mobilising voters and winning electorate seats.

The real test is in 2026, but if Kaipara proves a good local MP, she will start that election with the advantage of incumbency.

Labour will now put the defeat behind them, but it will provide a dose of reality about any imagined popular move towards Labour and how hard it will be for the first-term opposition party likely to be pulled in different directions.