KEY POINTS:
By anyone's measure, this has been a bruising and exacting week for the Maori Party.
It could hardly have expected Labour to have been happy about its pact with National. However, the initially condescending reaction of Phil Goff to the tryst has quickly turned to outright attack on
Labour's part, the ferocity and intensity of which suggests Labour's mission is to destroy the Maori Party as an electoral force.
Observing this week's battle at close hand in Parliament, National's Gerry Brownlee summed things up: if the Maori Party was not going to be working with Labour, then Labour was not going to let it work with anybody else.
Labour says it is simply holding Tariana Turia and her colleagues to account. However, the Maori Party has received the roughest introduction to the role of Government support partner since NZ First opted to go into coalition with National rather than Labour in 1996.
Turia and Pita Sharples, the party's co-leaders, have exteriors tough enough for Labour's criticism to bounce off them. The pair are also relishing their ministerial roles in John Key's Government. Left to fight it out in the House, Te Ururoa Flavell and Hone Harawira were not quite so relaxed as Labour pinged them relentlessly for supporting legislation implementing National's tax cuts.
The measure put the Maori Party in an impossible position. Its confidence and supply agreement with National requires it to back tax bills. Having campaigned on giving a pre-Christmas handout to the less well-off, the Maori Party MPs found themselves voting for a tax package that thumbed its nose at the low paid and instead benefited the better off.
Labour piled on the agony by moving an amendment directly targeted at the Maori Party which would have made up the shortfall between the Government's and Labour's tax package.
Bill English immediately deployed the Finance Minister's right of financial veto - a device protecting a minority Government's accounts from raids by Opposition parties. That would have avoided a vote. But English then inexplicably withdrew the veto, presumably because he had the Maori Party's assurance it would not be voting for Labour's amendment.
Flavell made it pretty clear in his thoughtful third reading speech that backing National's package had been somewhat traumatic. But he defended his party's stance on the grounds that it had secured more gains from National than Labour had ever offered.
Harawira's response was typically more flamboyant, with him jokingly saying he wanted to "kill" Labour's Trevor Mallard for questioning whether voting for National's tax cuts had been "mana-enhancing" - the supposed state of the relationship between the Maori Party and National as laid down in their confidence and supply agreement.
While Harawira's blushes were later partially spared by his party opposing the bill enacting National's 90-day probation period for new employees, the worrying thing for the Maori Party was that it got little warning that measure was being rushed through Parliament.
It may have made life easier for National. It didn't for the Maori Party. It was a swift lesson on how the major party can trample over a smaller partner without even realising it is doing so.
Labour's strategy is pretty transparent. By piling on the pressure on the Maori Party, it hopes to force the latter's withdrawal from the governing arrangement, thereby making National more reliant on Act and thus forcing National more to the right.
If that doesn't happen, Labour reckons the Maori Party will become utterly compromised by its association with National such that it will suffer the same fate as NZ First in 1999 and get wiped out in the Maori seats.
This may be short-term thinking, however. Labour might be better advised to accept that the strength and appeal of the Maori Party lies in the identity it gives Maori.
As long as the electoral system allows Maori to hold the balance of power and exercise influence, then Maori are better off operating outside the two major parties, rather than from within them. In other words, there will be a Maori party of some sort as long as the electoral system works in its favour. And Labour has to learn how to work with it.
National has no choice but to do so. Key needs the Maori Party to do well in 2011. He likely will be relying on it to hold on to power.
But his relationship with the Maori Party cuts deeper than that.
Key has been quietly shifting National away from the polarising attitude evoked by Don Brash's infamous Orewa speech. This is as almost as significant as his shifting National towards the political centre.
Orewa was out of touch with the reality of a browning population. It may have made National relevant again. But it threatened ultimately to make National irrelevant.
The new faces on the Government benches in Parliament this week are testimony to Key's efforts to transform National into a modern party truly representative of New Zealand's racial and ethnic mix.
In that vein, rather than giving away monopoly rights to Labour, Key is seeking to build a wider, deeper and lasting relationship between National and Maoridom. The deal with the Maori Party gives National an entree to parts of Maoridom it could not otherwise reach. This weekend, for example, Key and Sharples will be at Pukawa, near Taupo, for discussions with iwi leaders from around the country.
Maintaining the relationship with the Maori Party means allowing it to score some substantial "wins". And very public ones at that.
However, while National will happily carve off resources to allow Turia and Sharples to place more education and social services targeted at Maori under Maori control, mounting fiscal pressures may frustrate just how much extra assistance can be given in totality.
Budgetary pressures have also intensified from Labour's speeding up of the treaty settlement process. It is understood the outcome of one set of negotiations yet to be made public has been so generous to iwi that it is way out of kilter with settlements long done and dusted and is likely to provoke calls for compensation.
That could throw a spanner in the works. But National believes Turia and Sharples are there for the long haul. National has been pleasantly surprised by the degree to which the pair are immersing themselves in the governing process.
They have been regulars at Cabinet committee meetings, staying on for agenda items outside their portfolio areas.
That is a very different attitude than the one displayed by Winston Peters, who had a similar confidence and supply agreement with Labour. His position was that while he was a minister in the executive, NZ First was not part of the Government.
That proved to be a fiction even though technically NZ First could vote against Government policy outside Peters' portfolios.
The Maori Party seems to have accepted the reality that the freedom to vote against the Government has its limits and that it will anyway be seen as part of the National Government no matter how hard it tries to distance itself.
