How Te Pāti Māori fell apart: Court documents reveal profanities, strict rules, and backstory to civil war
Friday, 12 December 2025
This story was originally published on December 12, and has been republished following the High Court ruling on Tuesday that Te Pāti Māori unlawfully expelled Mariameno Kapa-Kingi.
ANALYSIS: Te Pāti Māori is an organisation intensely worried about its perception in the media.
This worry runs through the party’s founding documents, its rules for MPs, and is at the root of the conflict that saw two of of its MPs “expelled” from the party.
That expulsion has ironically given the media a giant window into the party’s internal machinations ‒ complete with sweary meetings, budgetary drama, and strict rules about the media ‒ as it was inevitably challenged in open court.
MP Mariameno Kapa-Kingi won an interim reinstatement to Te Pāti Māori (TPM), arguing that the decision to remove her was based on false facts and was unconstitutional, ahead of a more substantive hearing in February.
Read more:
Unscrambling an omelette: Te Pāti Māori case asks court to consider what a party really is
Mariameno Kapa-Kingi says she actually underspent Parliamentary budget
Te Pāti Māori kick out ‘rogue’ MPs Mariameno Kapa-Kingi and Tākuta Ferris
On Thursday, the court released hundreds of pages of affidavits, emails, other documentation to The Post and other media following the case.
Here are the biggest revelations from those pages.
Spending spat brewing since last year, involved high staff costs ‘for doing what’?
The core inciting incident which led to Kapa-Kingi’s expulsion appears to have been a spat over her Parliamentary budget, and in particular a contract for her son Eru Kapa-Kingi.
This is the funding given to all MPs to hire staff and carry out Parliamentary work ‒ travelling to and from their electorate, holding events with constituents, and the like. Electorate MPs ‒ particularly in large electorates like Kapa-Kingi’s Te Tai Tokerau (Northland) ‒ get larger pots of funding.
Kapa-Kingi said in a sworn affidavit that she began to pick up some work for neighbouring TPM MP Takutai Tarsh Kemp in late 2024, as Kemp was ill. She said this was for her staff assisting with back office functioning and support in select committees. She also suggests that she needed some extra funding as her job as whip required more staff time but she did not have the budget to cover that.
An initial transfer of $33,000 was made but it appears that Tarsh Kemp herself was not pleased with the quality of the work done or a request for a further funding transfer from Kapa-Kingi.
First the funding transfer was “put on pause” in December 2024, then in March Tarsh Kemp wrote on Facebook to co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer saying: “I can’t afford another transfer of $45k that’s just ridiculous that work mean they take $79k for 5 months for doing what [shocked cat emoji].”
She also suggested she had partially paid Eru Kapa-Kingi money “again for doing what”. An email from Tarsh Kemp from November of 2024 shows her suggesting Eru Kapa-Kingi should be put on a casual contract only until the end of March 2025.
Kapa-Kingi alleges that nevertheless she had a verbal agreement from Ngarewa-Packer that the transfers would continue so continued to spend more than her electorate entitlement would usually entitle her to. This would explode into acrimony in August.
John Tamihere chairs Te Pāti Māori caucus meetings
The other big theme across the case is Kapa-Kingi’s increasing distrust of TPM president John Tamihere, who she is legally seeking to have removed as president.
Kapa-Kingi says Tamihere had criticised her for her “approach as an MP” ‒ which she describes as fully engaging with Parliament, attending budget speeches and networking events and the like.
She says that on Tamihere’s return to full-time work following a bereavement he changed the dynamic in the party and extended into “leadership of MPs”.
Indeed, she says in her sworn affidavit that Tamihere had been chairing the weekly caucus meetings of MPs in Parliament since September. And it was he who sent Kapa-Kingi an ‘ultimatum’ on her overspending that sent the simmering issue into overdrive.
Kapa-Kingi kept spending despite warning from Parliament
Kapa-Kingi’s overspending eventually reached a point in mid-2025 that Parliamentary Service had to step in, given she was projected to overspend her “year 2” budget by about $133,000.
This all took place in the midst of Tarsh Kemp’s death in June.
Parliamentary Service met with her staff in June suggesting she immediately let some of her casual staff go. They wrote to her on July 7 noting that she was going to run out of her annual funding by August if she didn’t stop her current rate of spend.
Kapa-Kingi, still seemingly believing that the recently departed Tarsh Kemp’s funding allocation would be transferred, talked to the Parliamentary Service on the phone about this but did not arrange a proper meeting, despite another email on July 16 to the party itself.
With the matter still not resolved as of August 1 the Parliamentary Service again wrote to Kapa-Kingi and the party noting that she had less than $5000 of her current year’s budget left.
At this stage Tamihere stepped in and gave Kapa-Kingi an “ultimatum” ‒ making clear funding would not be transferred from Tarsh Kemp’s electorate budget and that she would need to write to him detailing the extra whip work for which she was after extra funding.
Kapa-Kingi said she found this ultimatum very hurtful. Instead of discussing it directly with the party she then met with the Speaker and worked out a plan to stop the overspend ‒ including letting go of casual staff and the contract with her son, ending all staff travel, and getting a transfer of 18% of her Year 3 budget, which was signed off by Ngarewa-Packer.
Mariameno Kapa-Kingi allegedly called John Tamihere a ‘f….n c..t’
This agreement with the Speaker seemingly resolved the overspending issue, but left both sides very bitter ‒ in particular Tamihere and Kapa-Kingi.
On September 11, Kapa-Kingi was removed from her role as “whip” in a tense caucus meeting. She says Tamihere was “visibly angry” with her at this meeting and threatened to not endorse her candidacy for her electorate if she left the meeting. He sent her an email the next day saying she had an “inability to communicate”, alongside some data about the results in her electorate, asking her to centre her efforts there.
Then in early October Kapa-Kingi’s son Eru revealed to media that his Toitū Te Tiriti movement had split off from TPM, and called the leadership a “dictatorship model”. In response, party secretary Lance Norman sent an email to a journalist and to the wider party setting out the party’s position on that. Another one of Kapa-Kingi’s sons responded to this email to call him a liar.
Matters came to a head at the long-promised “reset” meeting on October 8.
This is where Kapa-Kingi alleges that Tamihere said he was “coming for [her] boys” and wanted “utu” (revenge).
Norman says in his evidence that Kapa-Kingi called Tamihere a “f….n c…t”.
Kapa-Kingi’s electorate didn’t attend urgent meeting
It appears the rift was unhealable from here. The Party Secretary called an urgent meeting of the National Council on the request of Kapa-Kingi’s electorate the next day.
Kapa-Kingi’s electorate committee asked that three items be added to the agenda ‒ including tikanga training for the National Council and their own lack of confidence they had with it.
Norman circulated a “fact sheet” to be discussed at the meeting, which included many claims about Eru Kapa-Kingi that would later be emailed to all members. This fact sheet contained explosive allegations that Kapa-Kingi has denied and called defamatory ‒ including one of assault.
They did not join the actual meeting however, with Kyla Campbell-Kamariera of the electorate committee saying that once she saw the fact sheet she knew the meeting would not be a “safe space” or “productive”.
From here things descended ‒ first Kapa-Kingi was suspended and then she was expelled, in a meeting of the National Council that she contends was entirely unconstitutional. A High Court judge has agreed that there is a case to be heard here and has temporarily reinstated her.
TPM bars MPs from drinking with media or MPs from other parties
The party’s caucus manual was included in the document bundle. Among many fairly anodyne rules and procedures it is revealed that TPM prohibits its MPs from “socialising with alcohol or other substances with Media or other Political Parites [sic] or Members of Parliament outside of Te Pāti Māori”.
It also requires that all interview requests from national media go through the co-leaders’ office.
While this may seem a small detail, it speaks to the wider issue Tamihere says was behind Kapa-Kingi’s expulsion. It wasn’t just the overspend ‒ it was the media circus it might create, and the media attention that came following her son’s allegations against him.
If he is to win in court in February, it seems likely it will be this media circus ‒ and the clauses in the constitution about bringing the party into “disrepute” ‒ that will be key.