Te Pāti Māori in court: MP rejected offer for new vote on her expulsion
Monday, 2 February 2026
Mariameno Kapa-Kingi rejected a last-minute offer to re-do a vote to expel her from Te Pāti Māori (TPM), it was revealed in court on Monday.
Kapa-Kingi’s lawyer also revealed that TPM’s co-leaders had been forecast to overspend $42,000 in the same tally used to attack Kapa-Kingi’s alleged overspending.
The party was in the High Court today defending its decision to expel Kapa-Kingi, a decision made in part due to an allegation that Kapa-Kingi had been forecast to overspend her own budget by $133,000.
Justice Paul Radich did not specify a date for a full decision on the matter but said he was conscious of the “ticking clock” of the election so would look to move fast.
Read more:
High Court forces Te Pāti Māori to re-admit MP Mariameno Kapa-Kingi after expulsion
Unscrambling an omelette: Te Pāti Māori case asks court to consider what a party really is
Kapa-Kingi was expelled in November but took this decision to court. She won an interim reinstatement in December ahead of the full hearing on Monday, which remains in place.
Despite this, her lawyer noted that the party had not actually advised Parliament that she should be treated as a TPM MP - a matter that the judge will rule on ahead of the full decision.
TPM argued that her expulsion was necessary thanks to worries over a projected $133,000 overspend of her parliamentary funds and because she was bringing the party into disrepute - in part because her son had gone to the media to describe the party as “dictatorial”.
Kapa-Kingi argued that the problems with the funding only came as a result of her covering for the duties of a dying fellow MP and were in any case resolved to the satisfaction of the Speaker.
Her lawyer, Michael Colson KC, argued that Kapa-Kingi was improperly expelled from the party - as the decision-making body that expelled her was not able to under the party’s constitution, was not meeting legally in any case, did not follow the proper procedure to expel her, was breaching the general tikanga (customs) requirements of the constitution, and that the party was now applying a “revisionist” view of how the expulsion had happened.
In the course of this argument he revealed that the party’s co-leaders also had a forecast overspend in the same year of Parliament - of $42,000.
Colson said it was “ironic” that the party would rely so heavily on Kapa-Kingi’s own forecast overspend to expel her given the co-leader’s position.
The party provided documentation suggesting the co-leaders ended the year in question with an underspend.
TPM: We offered another vote
Davey Salmon KC, acting for TPM, noted that the party had offered to hold another vote on Kapa-Kingi’s membership but this had been declined.
A letter of January 16 suggested another vote of the party’s National Council could be held into whether Kapa-Kingi could be expelled if Kapa-Kingi wished to, an apparent bid to settle the matter outside of court.
The offer required that Kapa-Kingi stop her legal attempt to have party president John Tamihere removed from his post, one aspect of her legal claim, and that both sides abide by the outcome.
But Kapa-Kingi rejected this, with her lawyer arguing that a simple retread of the vote did not in fact live up to the party’s constitutional disputes process.
TPM lawyer: Party was being brought into disrepute
Salmon sought to move the conversation on from the focus on party funds, arguing that Kapa-Kingi’s lawyer was overly reliant on this point.
He said the party was also hugely concerned about the political implications of her son and her comments - specifically the fact that she did not distance herself from his criticisms of the party - and that this had put the party in crisis.
Salmon quoted British TV show House of Cards when arguing that Kapa-Kingi had not sufficiently distanced herself from comments her son made about the party being run in a dictatorial manner, with Salmon comparing her to fictional character Francis Urquhart saying “you may well think that, I couldn’t possibly comment” - as essentially a way to confirm something
He said he and the judge could not really adjudicate on the political decision-making process of leaders.
“We’re not experts in politics and PR. We don’t have the justifiable sensitivity that perhaps Mr Tamihere has about how badly nepotism and misuse of public funds can play in an immediate sense.”
He argued that the entire case should not be a judicial review but should be considered as a contracts case. If it was a contracts case then TPM’s lawyers would be able to cross-examine Kapa-Kingi and use discovery to compel the production of documents.
Salmon said that the contract - in this case the party constitution - had a remedy that Kapa-Kingi could have pursued, but by taking a judicial review case she was breaching the contract.
He said if the court did decide the case was judicially reviewable it should tread very lightly as this was a massive intrusion into the world of politics.
He said it was silly to argue that Kapa-Kingi’s spending issue could not be considered under the “misuse of party funds” clause in the party’s constitution, as it was clear that this was intended to be a general reference to funds including Parliamentary funds.
“[If not] it would lead to an absurdity where this source of funding could be misused with no consequence,” Salmon said.
Question of fairness rather than process possible
Justice Radich queried Colson on how the defence would react if he accepted that there were procedural irregularities in her expulsion but decided to assess the case more widely in the interests of fairness.
Colson said Radich would have the right to do that but argued that Kapa-Kingi’s expulsion was both procedurally wrong and substantively unfair.
“Ultimately a political party created to fight injustice has committed a serious injustice against one of its own,” Colson said.
Both sides have previously made clear that the party constitution is poorly drafted and potentially even contradictory. Much of the case relies on which clauses of the constitution should be relied upon for the expulsion.
The backstory
The expulsion of Kapa-Kingi and fellow MP Tākuta Ferris came after a period of immense internal turmoil for the party.
In June, Tāmaki Makaurau MP Takutai Tarsh-Kemp died. In the midst of the by-election to replace her - won handily by TPM’s Oriini Kaipara - ructions emerged in the party over social media posts by Ferris and the removal of Kapa-Kingi as whip. Those ructions eventually resulted in a media firestorm featuring Kapa-Kingi’s son, an unsigned email with explosive allegations against him and Kapa-Kingi, and the attempted expulsion of Ferris and Kapa-Kingi.
One of the crucial allegations was that Kapa-Kingi was tracking to overspend her parliamentary budget by $133,000, and in part these funds were being used to pay her son.
Kapa-Kingi argues that this spending was to cover work for the ill Tarsh Kemp, but the party has produced a text message from Kemp suggesting she herself was tiring of this arrangement.
Kapa-Kingi has since provided evidence that shows her budget was eventually brought into line. But this only came after Parliamentary Service involved party leadership and required her to transfer funds from the last year of the parliamentary term.
Justice Radich agreed in December that the funding matter had been resolved, and subsequently granted an interim reinstatement for Kapa-Kingi.
Speaking to The Post in December, TPM co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer said that despite this there was “no coming back from” the decision of her family to criticise the party in public.
“There was absolutely no coming back from that, because if you really want to address your movement, if you’re really concerned - and it’s valid to have concerns - then his family know that this was not the way to do it. If you don’t address it internally it’s because you don’t want to.”