Lift Your Face The Western Way

The hīkoi against ACT’s Treaty Principles Bill was the biggest Kiwi protest ever; the Parliamentary haka produced the most viewed event in New Zealand history ever. 

All sound and fury. The bill was never going to pass. Te Tiriti has endured a hundred aftershocks, but the damage is not too bad. As long as the foundations are still strong, a future government can rebuild. Aotearoa will become a true haven for all hapū and iwi of the -

Hold on. Do you hear that rumbling?

“New Zealand First to campaign on Māori seats referendum”.

In January, Green MP Hūhana Lyndon submitted a member’s bill with the opposite intent: to entrench the Māori seats. She’s exposed a quirk of our electoral system: that these are the only seven electorates that aren’t entrenched. Which means that a simple majority vote of Parliament could topple them. 

Entrenchment itself requires a 75% supermajority, so it’s never going to happen. Since their introduction, many have seen the seats as a temporary measure. Like the monarchy, New Zealanders will some day want to move on. For the past half-century, Māori voters have had the choice to vote in general electorates. 

But half of Māori voters are still voting with their, er, vote. They choose to remain on the Māori roll, with enrolment spiking after the Treaty Principles hīkoi. Why? The unique political culture of these electorates demands sustained community engagement from candidates, on a level rivalled only by Wellington. These candidates can ignore the median voter of the majority of New Zealanders, and dedicate their full service to the centre voter of the Māori electorate - the kōhanga reo generation fed up with same-old politician hoodwinkery and pumped for transformation.

In fact, the Māori seats almost became the secret weapon of the left.

Let’s back it up a bit. The last time National won a Māori seat was 1943. The seats align with Labour, and will only hear out challengers who can credibly pledge to represent Māori even more authentically. Te Pāti Māori’s implosion sets Labour on track to reclaim the seats again.

But 1957 was the last time that the Māori seats made the difference in actually getting Labour into government. The seats mainly benefit Labour by improving Māori representation within the caucus - not by shifting the political scales to the left.

However. Our little-known “overhang” rules mean small parties can fail to win much of the party vote, and still receive overrepresentation in Parliament. Consider the ACT of the 2010s. They received under 1% of New Zealand’s party vote. But National let them win Auckland’s Epsom electorate, so ACT got an extra seat to add onto the right bloc. (If National had won the seat, they simply would have lost a list MP to compensate, leaving them in no better a position.)

That’s hard to reliably pull off in general electorates, where one major party giving up will usually just hand it over to the other major party. But in the Māori electorates, free from pressure from National, Te Pāti Māori had a golden chance to do Epsom on steroids. In 2023, they won only 3% of the party vote - but six electorates. And yet - here’s a wild stat for you - all seven Māori seats seats cast more party votes for Labour than for Te Pāti Māori. By growing both the Labour caucus through the list and Te Pāti Māori’s numbers through the electorates, instead of picking a single lane, Māori roll voters snagged two MPs for the price of one. 

That could create a 2026 election where the right bloc wins the party vote - but the added handful of Te Pāti Māori MPs change the outcome. Hillary wins the popular vote and loses, all over again. That would surely unleash a campaign to abolish the Māori seats.

The Te Pāti Māori implosion dooms that scenario. But it has drawn unwelcome attention - and made Māori seat MPs look useless. Now’s Winston’s chance to hammer home these proportionality problems for the next nine months - along with these points that anybody can see the sense in:

1. The Māori seats are huge and unwieldy - Te Tai Tonga encompasses three fifths of New Zealand’s geography! How on earth is Tākuta Ferris or Insert Tirikatene supposed to make his way across the motu to every constituent? 

2. Māori MPs are overrepresented in Parliament compared to their share of the population. Nothing wrong with that accomplishment; now, though, the seats are past usefulness. National and ACT, who most badly need Māori representation, will never win Māori seats. 

Of course, the specific ongoing benefit of the Māori seats is the unique accountability to Māori roll voters, but that’s precisely the kind of minoritarian incentive that has agitated ACT, National and NZFirst for so long. All have run on abolishing the Māori seats, and all of them failed. ACT now just talks about Treaty principles. John Key ditched National’s hardline 2000s for consensus with the Māori Party, memorably warning that abolishing the seats would unleash “hīkois from hell”. And when Winston Peters set the “bottom line” of abolition in 2017, this policy was conspicuously absent from the final agreement. (If he again forgets his campaign promise this year, you can forget everything I’ve said. Just remember this - never trust Winston.)

But ACT would surely cry “Aye!” to a post-election vote on whether to hold a Māori seats referendum. National are further right today than in Key-and-English times. And polling shows that - if the right bloc win over 50% of the party vote between them, and return to power - leverage will tip from Luxon, who can expect a worse result, to Peters, who is set to boost NZFirst’s numbers. (That being said? Never trust Winston. If he goes with Labour, seat abolition is out of the question. But he’s winning it all in this government. Why risk a repeat of his 2017 “betrayal”?)

How has Winston pulled off this rise? NZFirst’s electoral benefit to the coalition is that the party catches National voters who are unhappy with the economy, but socially conservative. Think a middle-aged, working-class white guy bemoans how Labour lost the plot with all this racial division and mandate carry-on, voted National in 2023, but found Key arrogant and has concluded that Luxon is useless. He might stay home or begrudgingly hear Chippy out. 

But NZFirst are the escape valve for voters like him. They keep disgruntled voters who are also spooked by progress within the right bloc. A high-profile “one law for all” campaign - juxtaposed against the Greens’ entrenchment bill, an ivory tower elite protecting their own - suits that niche perfectly. And this threat to the Māori seats slots perfectly into his competition with ACT to maintain pole position amongst dedicated conservatives, too. Where David failed on Treaty principles, Winston can claim a concrete success.

Of course, Winston has to win the referendum first. The Treaty Principles Bill drew enormous hostility from engaged activists, but if it had made it to a referendum amongst the wider public…well, just look at Australia’s Voice referendum. 

The proposed Indigenous Voice to Parliament lacked a simple, compelling message about what it would achieve. The wider public never got it. Just picture Labour - often cautious to the point of incoherence - trying to reconcile its statements with the flourishes of Te Pāti Māori and the Greens. Our right bloc can imitate Australia’s with populist race-baiting: the indigenous minority want to create division to take away from you, and you must stop them to save what’s good about the country. Lies, but then those play well on social media.

Yet Australia’s anti-Voice vote could also work with Australian progressives who denounced the Voice as insufficient. In Aotearoa, it doesn’t matter how progressive you are: nobody left of Don Brash thinks that Māori seats are an impediment to Māori empowerment. Last year’s Māori ward referenda, during the local elections, read as a massive rejection of special seats for Māori representation. But - in both the popular vote, and the majority of referenda - more support stood for the wards than against. Both Labour tiptoers and kōhanga reo Kapital-clutchers like Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke and Tamatha Paul want to win the seats as their platform for progress.

And nobody in the right bloc is widely popular. Few people are happy with much at all about New Zealand’s direction at the moment. Like Key’s flag fantasies, this vote could easily become Kiwis’ expression of irritation with the government’s misjudged priorities. 

But any minority will always have a tough time of it in any democracy against the majority. If “Yes” wins - then what?

Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill would have dumped endless messy policy headaches in the laps of government ministers - to the chagrin of his coalition partners. The Māori seats, however, could be wound up elegantly. 

1. Every voter on the Māori roll gets bumped onto the general roll with the other half of Māori voters and everybody else. Because Māori electorates overlap general electorates, every Māori roll voter has a new home.

2. Parliament is seven seats lighter for a bit, until the Redistricting Commission handles this influx the same way it does all population movements. 

That’s it!

The right bloc will benefit for decades to come. The left loses that golden chance of an overhang bonanza. More importantly: even at the height of the hīkoi, Te Pāti Māori barely polled at 5%. “Tangata whenua” is a large and diverse blanket group for all the iwi and hapū, the differences of opinion, in education, class…no Māori party has consistently commanded the party vote of even a third of Māori, and none ever shall. Te Pāti Māori will be gone from Parliament for good. 

Labour and the Greens will somehow have to cough up >50% of the vote together. Before the 2020 phenomenon, that hadn’t happened since 1946. The left will have to wait for the government to collapse or some black swan event on the party landscape. And if you’re pinning your best hopes on Winston doing a backflip or Opportunity cracking into Parliament…you’re in big trouble. 

The Māori seats are the Greendale Fault of New Zealand politics. Decades of wound-up tension are ready to remake the landscape. The government will face those hellish hīkois. Everything from Waitangi to Rātana Day will never be the same again. 

And 292,825 irritated Māori roll voters -

who have never been represented by National MPs -

less than ten percent of whom vote National -

will be dumped into general electorates across the country. 

That’s an average of four thousand new voters per electorate. Sure, a lot of Māori roll voters live in safely Labour general electorates. 

And all the other tens of thousands will create a crisis across swing seats for National candidates - and rewrite the interview for what representatives of all New Zealanders look like and act like today.

So. Winston. If you finally want to get a “Winnie”, and leave a lasting legacy - let the earth quake at your command. But think long and hard first. No stone shall go unturned.

And my message to everybody else?

Never trust Winston.