Tākuta Ferris speaks out on Te Pāti Māori email as his electorate complains
Wednesday, 15 October 2025
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Te Pāti Māori MP Tākuta Ferris says there “wasn’t a consensus” about an explosive email his party sent out on Monday night making a range of allegations against one of his fellow MPs and her son.
Ferris said his electorate committee, which wrote to Te Pāti Māori executive leadership complaining following the email, had every right to do so, and that he wasn’t happy with how the saga was playing out.
He was speaking to The Post two days after his party sent an unsigned email to members alleging that MP Mariamaeno Kapa-Kingi was overspending her parliamentary budget by $133,000 and that her son Eru Kapa-Kingi had been barred from Parliament after an incident with security staff.
Asked if he supported the email going out, he said “there wasn’t a consensus about that”.
Ferris represents the Te Tai Tonga Māori electorate, which takes in the entire South Island and part of the North Island.
He said Te Tai Tonga was well within its right to express disappointment in the party leadership.
“There was no commitment to Te Tai Tonga that [the email] was going out to the broader membership or any further. So that's the point that the executive and the kaumatua of the Te Tai Tonga are making,” Ferris said.
Ferris would not be drawn on whether he personally backed the email, but said “the Te Tai Tonga position is pretty clear”.
Asked if that was his position too, he replied: “I’m the MP of Te Tai Tonga.”
Ferris said he was not pleased with how the saga was playing out.
“I'm not happy. I mean, we're supposed to be here doing a job for our people, continuing the kaupapa of Te Pāti Māori, which is to represent te iwi Maori, and to do it in an unrestricted, free and organised way…it should be informed by our rohe [territory or region], led by our rohe, and that's where we need to get to.”
Asked if Mariameno Kapa-Kingi still had a place in Te Pāti Māori, he said she absolutely did.
“There needs to be reasonable working through of issues - that hasn't been achieved. Casting people out on assumption is not the way I work, and it shouldn’t be the way te iwi Māori works.”
Ferris said he hadn’t read the entire email sent out to the members but he had been aware of the incident with Eru Kapa-Kingi at last year’s Budget.
“That was like common knowledge. It was worked through, worked out,” Ferris said.
The initial email included links to six documents, seen by The Post, one of which was an emailed complaint from a Parliamentary Services staff member with allegations about Kapa-Kingi on Budget Day 2024.
The complainant alleged Kapa-Kingi shouted obscenities at Parliament staff late at night after “tailgating” someone through security at the Beehive.
That complaint included an allegation that Eru Kapa-Kingi shouted: “I will f…ing knock you out”.
Kapa-Kingi: I tried to fix this internally
Kapa-Kingi had not responded to repeated requests for comment, but on Instagram he posted a brief statement.
“I joined Te Pāti Māori as a young, passionate man, with the belief I could help create a better world for our people. Instead, I learnt a long and hard lesson ‒ power can truly corrupt people you once looked up to.”
In a later post he said he had tried to solve issues within TPM internally but had failed to do so.
“I suffered silently through those same emotions for years because I was a die hard TPM supporter, but then saw things unfold on the inside. I tried multiple ways internally to fix the problems, and kept coming up short.”
“I didn’t come out to throw stones at anyone, but to step truth and stand on kaupapa.”
Mariameno Kapa-Kingi told the NZ Herald the overspend had been resolved and that the incident involving her had gone through a Parliamentary Services process.
“There was an incident and it went through the usual processes through Parly [Parliament] Services and, yeah, there was a process that was run,” she told the Herald.
Acting chief executive of the Parliamentary Service Amy Brier told The Post it did not comment on “individual employment matters or internal party correspondence.”
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Clarification: An earlier version of this story indicated that Te Tai Tonga had made a “vote of no confidence” in Te Pāti Māori leadership, as had been earlier reported in other media and seemingly confirmed by Ferris himself when speaking to The Post. His office later got in touch to clarify that it was not a vote of no confidence but a letter of complaint from the Te Tai Tonga executive.