New Zealand’s Māori party, Te Pati Māori, which could hold the balance of power at the next election, has ruled out forming a coalition with Act and National, if the rightwing Act party stays its current policy course.
The comments came as a series of polls placed Te Pāti Māori as “kingmakers” in the upcoming New Zealand election. Asked by the Guardian whether the party would consider a National-Act coalition, based on current policies and rhetoric, co-leader Rawiri Waititi said: “It’s a no. Absolutely. It’s a hard no.”
An election is still at least a year away, and current positions are by no means certain to hold. But recent polling has consistently placed the traditional left bloc, made up of prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s Labour and the Greens, neck and neck with the right, formed of National and Act. If those polls hold, neither pairing could form a government alone. A 1 News / Kantar poll released on Monday continued the trend, putting Labour at 35%, National at 39%, the Greens at 10%, Act on 7% and Te Pāti Māori on 2%. If an election were held tomorrow, both National and Labour would require a third party to get them into government. Four successive polls have now placed Te Pati Māori in that position.
Previously, Te Pati Māori have been more circumspect in discussing which parties they would support in a potential coalition agreement – opting for broader statements around ethos and policy direction rather than ruling specific partners in and out.
Waititi said his “hard no” to a National-Act coalition was “because of the Act part of them, and the rhetoric that’s coming out of Act is emboldening racism across this country,” he said. “They’re not the Act that I remember,” he said, with whom the party had worked with on education issues in the past. “All I see is a party that is just actively campaigning against the rights of the tangata whenua [Indigenous people]” and other minorities, he said. “All of those types of things. I can’t support them.”
Under previous leadership Te Pati Māori formed confidence and supply coalition governments with National and Act for three government terms between 2008 and 2017.
Act leader David Seymour said Waititi’s comments were “laughable,” “offensive,” and “completely baseless.”
He, too, said he could not currently work with the party in a coalition. “At the present time, no,” Seymour said. “Because … their explicit policy is for people to have different political rights based on birth.” Seymour said that the Māori party’s platform of constitutional reform, which would place partnership and shared governance between tangata whenua and tangata tiriti [colonial and post-colonial arrivals] at the centre of policy, amounted to discrimination based on ethnicity.
“That is a very difficult thing to work with, but they’ve made it the foundation of their party. They’re the only racist party in parliament,” he said.
Seymour has stirred controversy in the past for his opposition to distinct policies for Māori, including his sharing of a priority vaccination code that had been created in a bid to boost poor Māori vaccination rates during the pandemic. Doctors and health workers called the move “disgraceful”.
Seymour has been highly critical of government initiatives to promote co-governance between Māori and Pākehā, saying the government is “taking us down the path towards a separatist ethno-state”. Act has been calling for a referendum on co-governance, saying that the country’s voters should decide what the principles of the country’s founding document, Treaty of Waitangi, mean, and whether they should grant Māori particular governance rights. The proposed referendum has drawn particular ire from the Māori party, who say that the conversations surrounding it have led to an uptick in racist abuse.
Co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer said that the party would not guarantee its support to any of the main parties at present, and they would only support partners who were committed to a “Treaty of Waitangi-centric Aotearoa”.
“We can’t think what National is going to be like this time next year, what Labour is going to be like this time next year, if it changes by the hour,” she said. “All we can do is really be clear on what our kaupapa [ethos] is and who we’re here for, and what it is that we stand for.”
