Editorial: All bets off as Labour joins byelection fight

Hone Harawira. Photo / Chris Loufte

Needless and self-serving as it is, the Maori Party and Labour have made the right decision to enter Hone Harawira's byelection.

The voters of Te Tai Tokerau deserve a choice. Few of them may bother to go to a polling station when they know they will have to do it all again a few months later, but it would have been a mistake to hand Mr Harawira an endorsement unopposed.

He was probably counting on the Maori Party rising to his challenge but would have hoped Labour would decide to keep its powder dry for the general election.

Mr Harawira was favoured to win a duel with his former party on his own turf, particularly as it is no more than a trial run for November, but in a three-way contest all bets are off.

Labour still holds two of the seven Maori seats. In Te Tai Tokerau it received more party votes than the Maori Party at the last election and its candidate, Kelvin Davis, finished a respectable second to Mr Harawira in the electorate ballot.

Labour has by no means given up hope of regaining all the Maori seats and a byelection victory would be a springboard for November.

The byelection is an appetiser for a main course that could decide the role that Maori play in national politics well into the future.

Labour of course, represents the previous role, when Maori were part of a mainstream party, accommodated as one of many groups whose votes the party needed and whose interests it would occasionally express.

The Maori Party represents them as an independent force willing and capable of dealing with whichever mainstream party can form a government.

That could not have been said three years ago. The association with Labour was so entrenched, and Maori voters' preference so clearly expressed in their party votes, that the only future for the new Maori Party appeared to be as an adjunct to Labour.

Mr Harawira's new party represents a different kind of independence, the kind that keeps itself apart. He is a protester not a politician, and proud of that.

The byelection will show how many Maori in the north see a future in standing apart, and how many want to engage with governments to carve out space for Maori to make decisions for themselves.

To the extent that his Mana Party has any policies, they have been borrowed from the far left.

Maori should beware - the far left is a zone of political philosophy that wants to submerge cultural distinctions in the interests of class solidarity. An indigenous minority has much greater aspirations available.

The Maori Party has a good prospect of coming out of the general election in a pivotal position to bargain with the party that wins. Almost certainly that party will be National but the survival of its partner Act is much less certain.

Act's new leader will haunt the contest for Maori votes. Mr Harawira is already trying to smear the Maori Party by association with him; the Maori Party will point out that it needs a strong presence in the next Parliament to nullify the possible influence of Dr Brash.

If the contest becomes nasty - as the contribution from the Harawira family already suggests it could - voters might turn away from both Maori options and go back to Labour.

Maori electorates have low turnouts at the best of times and it is unlikely all of the 20,455 who voted at the last election will bother with a trial run forced by their sitting MP for his own purposes.

At the last election, just over 12,000 gave their electorate votes to Hone Harawira when he stood for the Maori Party. It will be interesting to compare those figures with the byelection result.

Until a few days ago, that was the only interest the exercise offered. Now, it offers something more: a three-sided contest that Labour could win.