Peter Williams
Writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines although verbalising thoughts on www.reality check.radio three days a week.
It’s the worst piece of political punditry in the history of this Substack. Maybe in the history of blogging.
Your noble, but obviously ignorant, correspondent boldly predicted last Tuesday that Te Pāti Māori had given up in the Tāmaki Makaurau by-election because their candidate Oriini Kaipara was so hopeless she couldn’t possibly win against the experienced Labour List MP Peeni Henare.
The opposite happened. Ms Kaipara romped home with close to twice as many votes as Mr Henare. The three other candidates didn’t come within kui of getting their deposit back. (Note the new word I just invented.)
The result is a reflection of the ever widening cultural and political gap between young urban Māori, especially in south and west Auckland, and the rest of the community. Te Pāti Māori’s separatist agenda and arrogance towards the general public, as reflected in Ms Kaipara’s refusal to speak to reporters from the country’s largest news organisations after her win, will do nothing to endear them to non-Māori New Zealand.
Not that they care. Their agenda and rhetoric are dangerous, but this by-election win will only empower them more.
One of their MPs, Takuta Ferris, brazenly broke electoral law with his social media post on election day wearing Te Pāti Māori branded clothing and asking voters to make sure they went to the polling booth.
But nothing will happen. Nobody’s ever prosecuted for breaking election law.
But here’s the rub. After special votes are counted, it’s estimated only 11,998 votes will have been cast representing just 27.1 per cent of the constituency’s enrolled voters.
By-elections are notorious for low turnouts, but this pathetically low level of interest makes the usual moribund local council turnouts look like an electoral stampede.
The great Kiwi democratic machine set up 84 polling booths for the 12 days of advance voting and for polling day itself. Some didn’t attract many clients. Trinity Methodist Church Hall in Pakuranga had eight votes cast and the Garden Room in Grafton just six.
The busiest places were where voters went to shop. Glen Innes Pak’nSave collected 573 and Manukau Mall 779.
Despite the lefties and wokies insisting that all prisoners should be allowed to vote, those currently eligible from places of incarceration (with sentences of three years or less) didn’t show much interest. Two teams went to Auckland’s prisons during advance voting and on polling day itself.
Their total number of votes collected? Zero.
(To be fair, when a polling place has less than six votes recorded it’s listed as zero for privacy reasons, so a minuscule number of prisoners may have voted but we don’t know for sure.)
The question I’d love a definitive answer to is this: has there ever been a lower turnout (as a percentage of enrolled voters) in the history of New Zealand parliamentary by-elections?
The answer would seem to be no. But since the MMP era began in 1996 we can be more definitive.
Another Māori electorate, Te Tai Hauāuru ran it close in 2004 with a measly 27.85 per cent bothering to cast a vote. But Tariana Turia, as the sitting MP who defected from Labour to the Māori Party, was always going to win in a landslide. She duly did with 92 per cent of the votes cast. Tāmaki Makaurau was supposed to be a genuine contest this time.
Every other by-election in the last three decades has attracted at least 30 per cent of the enrolled voters. But this result has created a somewhat ludicrous reality whereby the new MP won with the support of just 14 per cent of the enrolled voters. It’s hardly a ringing endorsement but what can you do?
The lack of voter interest in Māori electorates compared to the general seats, not just in by-elections but in general elections as well, should be a catalyst to have a good long look at why we still have them.
In 2023, the turnout in the seven Māori seats was on average around 10 percentage points below the general seats. So it’s not surprising there are more Māori MPs in general seats than in Māori electorates.
But like electoral law prosecutions, nothing will happen about the status of the Māori seats. By 2029 there might even be another one.
Yet Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi doesn’t know history and can’t count either. His extraordinary statement after Kaipara’s win that “Māori hadn’t had a fair shot at democracy since democracy was implemented in this country” is just poppycock. Māori men had the vote before women in the 19th century and the current parliament has 27 per cent of its MPs with Māori ancestry, considerably more than the percentage of the population descended from Māori.
The result for Labour is so bad you almost wonder if the Machiavellian campaign manager Willie Jackson wanted Kaipara to win, and encouraged Labour voters to do so in order that the Māori voters in Auckland would then have two MPs to represent them in parliament.
But I don’t reckon even Willie could have pulled off something that underhand. In any event he says the result was tough to take, but they’ll try and do better next year.
Now we await Oriini Kaipara’s arrival at parliament. Will she continue to wear that red beret, her tribute to South Africa’s communist political party the Economic Freedom Fighters and its leader Julius Malema, he of “shoot the Boer fame”?
Probably, but then what would this Substacker know?
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
