What’s the big idea? Getting to the point in Māori politics
Saturday, 16 May 2026
Josie Pagani is a commentator on current affairs and a regular opinion contributor. She works in geopolitics, aid and development, and governance.
OPINION: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Mariameno Kapa-Kingi quoted the novelist, Alice Walker, as she announced her exit from Te Pāti Māori this past week.
“The time is right. The idea is here, and that’s the idea that I want to pursue and execute well with our whānau and our Tai Tokerau people.”
Stirring words. If only she had been able to tell us what the idea is.
Despite the best efforts of her interviewer, Julian Wilcox, Kapa-Kingi could not articulate a single policy that “the ones we’ve been waiting for” have been waiting for. She stands for “whare, whānau and whenua” (housing, family and land), which is less a policy platform than an alliterative series of nouns that evokes a new government department announced in an Ardern government’s wellbeing budget.
Compare that vagueness with the Australian Treasurer, Jim Chalmers. On the same day Kapa-Kingi was making headlines, he increased the level of income a worker can earn before paying any income tax to $20,000, and paid for it by increasing capital gains tax. His tax switch in favour of working people will make most of the 170,000 Māori in Australia better off.
Read more:
Specific policy that delivers for the people you represent is the hard work of politics. Hand-waving abstract values are easy.
One reason Kapa-Kingi could not articulate a policy on which she differs from the party she is leaving is that, for all the gestures, haka and defiance, Te Pāti Māori hasn’t done convincing policy work either.
So what is the point of the new party then? Actually I think there is a point.
A party that stands for its community only is the ultimate in local representation and control with an honourable tradition in Māori political thinking.
There has always been a natural tension between local control by iwi and hapu or the ethno-nationalism of TPM.
Not all Māori want to be represented by one party any more than all Pākehā want a single Te Pāti Pākehā.
Divisions have always existed within Māori politics: protest versus governing, bicultural reform (adapting Pākehā institutions) versus specifically Māori institutions.
For New Zealand First, just as Māori-led as Te Pāti Māori, the path is pragmatic. Shane Jones wants to get his infamous “nephs” off the couch by using resources, whether fisheries, land or minerals, to create development in the regions where Māori live.
For TPM, a protest haka in parliament and a hīkoi to Wellington will wrest power into Māori hands, where the priority is more about who has power than what power is used for.
Cutting across these divisions is a debate between rights derived from the Treaty, and special attention to disparities between Māori and non-Māori. They are not the same.
The disparity cause exists regardless of the Treaty. The Treaty cause exists regardless of disparity. No New Zealand government can avoid either the contract with Māori under the Treaty, or be blind to the disparities between Māori and non-Māori.
The so-called “kohanga generation” are more radical than their parents, while about a third of Māori who are older, and more likely to be male, identify as “centre right”. They are profoundly disengaged from politics and don’t necessarily vote at all.
If you were to ask them what their priority is, it would not be the Treaty or climate.
All of these voters need representation. Why should it be by one party?
Let me take you back more than 25 years to the Far North settlement of Te Hapua. The leader of Mana Motuhake, the charismatic Sandra Lee, is giving a rousing speech on the marae telling party members that soon Mana Motuhake, the first Māori party, will sit around the cabinet table. She would soon become Minister of Conservation and Local Government.
Willie Jackson listens to the speech. In 2001 he will successfully challenge Sandra Lee for the leadership and then become a Labour minister in government.
Outside, a guest leans on a farm gate. Perhaps Shane Jones is trying to decide whether to join Mana Motuhake, or Labour, or another party. He chose Labour, then NZ First.
I tell that story not just because I was there. I remember thinking—these different tributaries of Māori politics cannot hold.
Nor should they.
Today, some in New Zealand First and National see a New Zealand in which Māori and non-Māori are entwined. Some see the future in co-governance where power is divided, which is perhaps where Labour is headed.
I predict we are headed to a future in which we do what the Treaty says: Māori delivery, to those Māori who opt in, of schools, health care, social care, regional development.
“Self-direction” was the founding idea of that first Māori party, Mana Motuhake. If only Mariameno Kapa-Kingi could articulate it, maybe it is an idea whose time has come.