Chris Hipkins’ big decision over the summer: Destroy Te Pāti Māori or work with them?

Wednesday, 17 December 2025

John Tamihere between David Seymour and Winston Peters during the 2020 election.

Henry Cooke is deputy political editor at The Post, and writes a column every Wednesday. His column will return in January after a break over Christmas.

OPINION: Hidden among hundreds of pages of documents released in Te Pāti Māori’s High Court case last week was a fact that would be stunning for any other political party: the president chairs its weekly parliamentary meetings.

It’s hard to imagine Sylvia Wood chairing meetings of the National Party caucus, or Jill Day chairing Labour MPs. They are important office-holders but their remit is the party outside Parliament - fundraising, volunteers, campaigns - not the real business of politics that happens in Parliament. That’s why every other party has its caucus meetings chaired by its parliamentary leader.

Labour leader Chris Hipkins has a big call to make.

But for Te Pāti Māori (TPM) the revelation was barely noticed. Everyone knows John Tamihere is the one who runs the show. The co-leader is married to his daughter, who is also the party’s general manager. Party secretary Lance Norman worked at Tamihere’s Whānau Ora Commissioning Agency. Tamihere’s role is so large, and was so crucial to the civil war engulfing the party in recent months, that part of Mariameno Kapa-Kingi’s High Court case was a push for him to stand down as President.

The person who most needs to be aware of Tamihere’s role is Labour leader Chris Hipkins.

He would rather not have the headache of journalists asking about TPM at almost every press conference he holds. But on current polling TPM’s entry into Parliament is absolutely crucial for him having any shot at government.

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The basic conundrum is the amount of vote TPM might “waste” on the left. It is still polling around 0.5%-3%, depending on the poll. Under the rules of MMP, that would usually not get the party into Parliament - unless it wins one of the Māori seats. If not then the “wasted vote” will probably doom Labour.

John Tamihere and Willie Jackson duke it out - way back in the day. The relationship between the two is crucial.

Let’s use the last Talbot Mills poll for example - a friendly poll for Labour, at 38% to National’s 33%, the Greens on 9%, NZ First 8%, ACT 7%, and TPM 2.4%.

If TPM fails to win a seat (and the three MPs this 2.4% would entitle it to) Labour can’t get anywhere near government with the Greens alone, reaching just 59 seats, to the current coalition’s 61. If TPM does manage to win just one seat, it will actually get three MPs and get the left bloc to 61 seats and government.

This leaves Hipkins with two real options:

Move to eradicate TPM so entirely there is extremely little vote “wasted” on the party, on the chance it really does lose all its seats. Hope your firm stance on TPM gets you enough centrist voters to mean any vote lost on the left is made up in the centre.
Distance yourself from TPM without ever quite ruling it out. Try to win the Māori seats but don’t go so hard you risk actually winning all of them and destroying TPM entirely - or you might just lock yourself out of government.

It would, of course, be quite presumptuous for Hipkins to assume he has the power to make option one fully happen. TPM thrashed Labour in the Tāmaki Makaurau by-election after all. But he does have a few cards he hasn’t played yet.

The first is rhetorical. Hipkins could move on from his current line about TPM not being “ready for government” and simply say he would rather go into opposition than work with the party after the election, a rule out on the scale of John Key’s rejection of NZ First in 2008. Māori roll voters - who tend to be incredibly strategic and party vote Labour - would probably hear this signal, even if they didn’t necessarily like it. Would it be enough? Unclear.

The other move is more concrete: He could ask every single Labour candidate for the Māori seats to step off the list. This ruins TPM’s strategy of noting voters can get “two MPs for the price of one” and forces Māori roll voters to pick. Last time Labour did this in 2017 it won every seat. In 2023 two of its Māori candidates tried this - Cushla Tangaere-Manuel, who won, and Nanaia Mahuta, who lost.

Labour appears to be actively considering the latter option. After brushing off the idea following the by-election loss, MPs involved talk about it more and more seriously whenever you ask.

But that doesn’t make this option easy. The co-chair of Labour’s Māori caucus is Willie Jackson, who openly talks about Tamihere as one of his closest friends. If he wants to work with TPM, Jackson will be a useful bridge. But if he goes for the destruction option, which might involve a lot of direct criticism of Tamihere, it might be hard to get Jackson fully on board.

What we will likely end up with is some kind of mash-up of these two options. Hipkins will proclaim his intention to win every seat and go particularly hard in most them, happy in the knowledge that someone like Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke is probably not about to lose her seat, even if he threw everything he had at her. (She has stayed largely above the drama within the party, and has a Facebook fan group with 11,000 members.) Then you play the cards as they fall after the election - whether they involve Tamihere or another wily old operator: Winston Peters.