Thomas Coughlan: Meka Whaitiri defection - why Labour is playing nice with Te Pāti Māori

OPINION

It’s hard not to feel a little sorry for Chris Hipkins.

He’d tried to make narrowing the “agenda” a focus of his premiership. The agenda, alas for Hipkins, had other ideas.

At first, the prime minister’s unexpectedly expanding agenda was a political positive: extreme weather challenged the fiscals and stoked inflation, but it provided a backdrop for the displays of crisis leadership that recall the best days of this Labour Government.

More recent distractions have been less helpful.

They started in the public service, with the Rob Campbell affair calling into question why Labour had put a firebrand on the board of a crucial public institution like Te Whatu Ora; it bled into the executive with Stuart Nash’s repeated offences, and now Meka Whaitiri, who has defected to Te Pāti Māori.

It’s hard to overstate the seriousness of Whaitiri’s move. The last comparable defection was Tariana Turia, who quit Labour in 2004 and established Te Pāti Māori.

It is an extraordinarily serious defection at an extraordinarily damaging time for the Government - just five months out from an election.

It’s unquestionably and intentionally bad for Labour, but it might be quite good for Whaitiri, or at least her sense of self-worth, which is the only explanation the public and her colleagues currently have for her decision.

Whaitiri had ostensibly been treated well by Labour. After being sacked from Cabinet in 2018 following a damning report that found it likely she had physically grabbed a staffer (something she disputed), Whaitiri was allowed to work her way back into the executive, though not Cabinet.

That does not appear to be poor treatment. Other leaders might have made it clear there was no way back. Jacinda Ardern did not, but she did leave Whaitiri in the waiting room with every indication that would be as far as she would go.

Whaitiri did not give a reason for her defection. Unlike Turia, it appears she did not quit over a difference of policy. Although there have been plenty of policy U-turns under Hipkins, things like co-governance remain in the areas of health and Three Waters.

The response to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, reduced to He Puapua in the public imagination, was frozen last year under the Ardern leadership.

In her brief speech at Waipatu Marae yesterday, Whaitiri gave no indication of why she was bailing on Labour, beyond the unsatisfying reason that it felt right for her.

Her caucus colleagues were bemused. If Whaitiri was unhappy, no one in Labour, it seems, was given any opportunity to make things right, until Kiri Allan was dispatched to meet her at the last moment.

One potential reason is Whaitiri being passed over for the Cabinet seat vacated by Stuart Nash. This instead went to Willow-Jean Prime, a member of the class of 2017 (Whaitiri has been in Parliament since 2013, outranking Prime).

Whaitiri was the most senior minister outside Cabinet and may have believed she was next in line for promotion, particularly given she was the only minister from cyclone-hit Hawke’s Bay left after Nash’s sacking.

Broadcasting Minister Willie Jackson seemed hurt by Whaitiri's defection, saying she hadn't spoken to him. Photo / RNZ/Samuel Rillstone

If this, or something like it, is the reason, then Labour really does have a problem. Being an MP is not a path of self-discovery or self-actualisation - or at least that’s not what it should appear in public. Constituents and caucus must come first, and that does not appear to have been true in this case. Constituents and caucus have a right to feel hurt.

Tens of thousands of Labour constituents in the battered Hawke’s Bay have to wonder why their Labour representatives are focused more on living their own best lives than helping the region recover from the cyclone.

Whaitiri urgently needs to prove this hypothesis wrong - and so does Labour. The party’s many scandals of the last six months are still a far cry from the rank seediness of National’s last term, but the party needs less time focused on its own MPs and more time focused on the electorate.

Whaitiri’s caucus colleagues want an explanation too. Willie Jackson, who co-chaired Labour’s Māori caucus at the same time as Whaitiri and stood by her during the darkest parts of her career, said she hadn’t even spoken to him.

Jackson seemed hurt by the lack of communication on Wednesday and wouldn’t say whether Whaitiri had been disrespectful in not responding to his messages.

“I’m disappointed. We were mates - I went through a lot with Meks, as people know, and supported her. Eventually, we’ll have a kōrero. I’ve sent her a number of messages and rung her enough times. I’m disappointed because I would like to know why she went out.”

Jackson and Labour’s Māori caucus have some cause to be disappointed.

While Te Pāti Māori makes political hay by pillorying Labour’s occasionally mealy-mouthed approach to matters Māori, the current Government has made advancements in that area.

Te Aka Whai Ora (Māori Health Authority) means Māori have direct input into $22 billion of health spending as well as $44 million for commissioning health services. Whānau Ora’s budget for commissioning has nearly doubled, going from $71m in 2017 to $135m in 2022. Budget 2021 alone allocated $380m to Māori housing initiatives. They’re fairly big Budget wins and stand up to what Te Pāti Māori achieved in government with National.

Jackson and other Labour MPs have fallen over themselves to be kind to Whaitiri about her defection, noting it was a decision for her. This is of course true, but putting the decision down to that alone obfuscates the fact that it has immense implications for the constituents who elected her.

Former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern kicked Meka Whaitiri (right) out of Cabinet, but welcomed her back to the executive. Might Whaitiri have hoped the sacking of Stuart Nash (left) was a way back into Cabinet too?

The defection opens up some interesting possibilities.

In the event the Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer fails to win the seat of Te Tai Hauāuru (which appears unlikely), it puts the pressure on to keep its party vote high lest a loss in that seat sees Ngarewa-Packer turfed out of Parliament if Whaitiri wins her Ikaroa-Rāwhiti seat.

Labour has been careful not to turn its guns on Te Pāti Māori - an about-face from 2017 when its seven Māori electorate candidates, including Whaitiri, took the dramatic step of running electorate-only campaigns to oust Te Pāti Māori from Parliament entirely.

Te Pāti Māori has changed since then, pivoting to the political left. Co-leader Rawiri Waititi, sensing disaffection with the party’s history of supporting National, made much of the fact it had been born out of disaffection with Labour over the Foreshore and Seabed Act. The pitch was a strong one - the party wasn’t a vehicle for backing National. In its new guise, it was about holding Labour to account.

This redrawing of the electoral landscape forced Labour to come to terms with the party’s permanence. In 2017 Labour may have hoped it was gone for good, leaving it to worry only about relationships with the Greens and New Zealand First. Its revival has forced Labour to open channels of communication and keep them strong.

And strong they are.

They’re strong enough that Jackson appeared well aware, without having spoken to Whaitiri herself, that Te Pāti Māori hadn’t courted her, but rather she had courted them. He also knew that party president John Tamihere was as surprised by the defection as anyone else.

It’s easy to look at the speculation that former Labour MP Louisa Wall is on the verge of announcing her candidacy for Te Pāti Māori, to connect the dots to Whaitiri’s defection and assume it is part of a Tamihere plan to stack his list with disaffected Labour MPs.

The fact that Tamihere was surprised by Whaitiri’s decision kills that theory - as does the fact that he continues to speak to both Jackson and the Labour leadership. Jackson said Labour had a meeting with Te Pāti Māori’s leadership earlier this week.

Those channels will need to stay strong. There’s very little chance, on current polling, that Labour and the Greens could form a government without Te Pāti Māori (the Herald’s Poll of Polls gives this an 11.4 per cent chance). Labour needs to find a way of grappling with the policies Te Pāti Māori wants to campaign on, but which may undermine Labour’s centrist pivot. It will also have to live with the fact that Whaitiri might end up back in Cabinet after the election.

For National, the choice is whether to claim a vote for Labour is a vote for Te Pāti Māori and highlight some of the parts of Te Pāti Māori’s policy that are less appealing to centrist voters.

Luxon tiptoed towards this on Monday, painting Labour-the Greens-Te Pāti Māori as a single bloc, but he’s done this before and swiftly walked back any suggestion that he was ruling Te Pāti Māori out of any post-election talks.

Using Te Pāti Māori to drive Labour voters to National would be immensely hopeful if it worked but, if it doesn’t, it risks hardening Te Pāti Māori’s existing antipathy to National.

Labour isn’t the only party with a difficult path back to government. Our Poll of Polls gives a National-Act pairing a 10.3 per cent probability to win - they would probably need Te Pāti Māori too.

Wednesday’s political conniptions, for all the stress they’ve caused Hipkins and Labour, haven’t changed the basic fact that Te Pāti Māori is still far more likely to help Labour than National.