Te Pāti Māori co-leaders have been kicked out of Parliament’s debating chamber after conducting a pōwhiri without permission of all parties to symbolically welcome Meka Whaitiri. Video / NZ Herald / Parliament TV
Opinion by Thomas Coughlan
Thomas Coughlan, Deputy Political Editor at the New Zealand Herald, loves applying a political lens to people's stories and explaining the way things like transport and finance touch our lives.
Christopher Luxon’s decision to cast Te Pāti Māori on to the rule-out heap shows National believes any ambiguity around their relationship with Te Pāti Māori is not worth the coalition-building upside when the election is over.
National and Te Pāti Māori had all but ruled each other out oversix years since they were last in Government. Anyone could see their policy positions were irreconcilable.
The annals of MMP are piled high in cliches about never ruling out this or that, building broad coalitions, and that every MMP election was close.
Luxon was wise to keep the door open for as long as possible. MMP is an electoral system whose guiding principle is “you never know”. Everyone, even Labour’s thoroughly bruised and brassed-off MPs, know it’s best to play nice with potential kingmakers until you no longer have to.
The Herald’s poll of polls shows Te Pāti Māori well and truly in the kingmaker position, with both major parties facing slim odds of forming a government without Te Pāti Māori.
The poll of polls works by feeding polls into a model and running repeated simulations of a potential election. The simulation found Labour and the Greens form a government alone 11.4 per cent of the time, and National and Act could form a government 10.3 per cent of the time.
There is one data point we don’t have, which is how off putting Te Pāti Māori is to voters that might swing from Labour and to National and clinch the election - and that is what this is really about.
The party does not enjoy widespread support outside of the seven Māori electorates. It secured 33,630 votes at the last election, just 15,700 of them on the general roll. In 2020, it polled only slightly higher than Advance NZ, a conspiracy party - although more recent polls suggest it could post much larger numbers come October. We know it doesn’t have much support, but we don’t know how many people dislike the party enough to switch their vote to a party that might lock it out of power.
Luxon’s calculus is that the benefit of his ambiguous position around Te Pāti Māori, which is that he can pick up the phone and hopefully get an answer come October 15 (which is not something to sniff at given the Chris Hipkins’ well-known difficulties at getting pseudo-Pāti Māori MP Meka Whaitiri to answer his calls), is no longer greater than the benefit of being the unambiguous home to people who don’t want Te Pāti Māori in government.
This is a slightly different reason than Sir John Key’s for ruling out NZ First in 2008. This ploy was as much about driving NZ First’s vote down by robbing them of their strategic ambiguity as it was about snatching anti-Winston Peters votes for National.
“If Winston Peters holds the balance of power it will be a Phil Goff-led Labour Government,” Key said then.
Luxon said he hadn’t done any polling around his decision, which appears to have been made rather late in the piece.
Unlike former leader Simon Bridges’ decision to rule out working with NZ First, Luxon’s decision did not go to caucus on Tuesday morning, suggesting the call was made between then and Luxon’s media round first thing on Wednesday.
In lieu of any polling around the size of the anyone-but-Te Pāti Māori vote, Luxon’s captain’s call seems incredibly risky.
The decision makes it easier for Luxon to campaign against the amorphous “left”.
National thinks it can find votes in painting Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori as a single entity - a “coalition of chaos” (a line they appeared to borrow from a Herald podcast on Monday). If this line of attack really is as lucrative as National seems to think, dumping Te Pāti Māori firmly into the “chaos” camp makes it far easier to run.
But Luxon can only take this so far. He’s kept the door open to working with NZ First - a party National has ruled out as many times as it has gone into government with Te Pāti Māori.
It’s hardly tenable to paint Te Pāti Māori as a member of a future “coalition of chaos” while leaving the door open to NZ First, a party whose appetite for chaos is part of the landscape of our politics - and whose MPs have butted heads with Luxon in the past.
Prime Minister Sir John Key announcing the election date and ruling out NZ First. Photo / NZME
Indeed, in response to Air NZ stopping services to Paraparaumu, Shane Jones told Luxon to “poke your nose into the political boxing ring unless you’re going to resign today and join the ranks of the National Party” (it appears Luxon took the advice in the opposite sense to which it was intended). Jones also once said that the “Māori word for bridges with trolls underneath them is … Christopher Luxon”.
Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori are certainly doing their best to become the coalition of chaos National wants them to be, but the building blocks of a National + Act + something else coalition look only marginally more stable.
The most well-known recent deployment of the “coalition of chaos” line was from UK Prime Minister David Cameron during the 2015 campaign in which Cameron successfully fended off said-coalition only to see the UK plunge into Brexit, political paralysis and instability which has seen the UK burn through prime ministers like Henry VIII once churned through wives.
The rule out is an important creature of New Zealand politics.
In an occasionally messy Parliament it gives voters some certainty they’re not casting a vote that will inadvertently send a party they detest to the Beehive.
But it’s also something of a fallacy. The recent history of the rule-outs suggest they didn’t make much of a difference anyway: Key didn’t need NZ First in 2008 or 2011 and in 2020, neither Bridges nor NZ First were in a position to discuss terms following the election.
There’s a case to be made for Key’s ruling-out of NZ First causing them to be swept from Parliament because it stripped Peters of his ability to promise the “kingmaker” position to voters.
But that isn’t the case here. Rawiri Waititi might think he was kingmaker, but it was always a hollow crown, given his party’s incompatibility with National.
Likewise no one really believes that, if absolutely necessary, Luxon won’t pick up the phone on October 15 if he can see Te Pāti Māori in the way of his path to power.
