Aaron Smale: Why politicians don't take the Māori vote seriously

NZ Herald

2 days ago

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Christopher Luxon's indifference reflects the larger issue of the major parties ignoring Māori as a voting bloc. Photo / Getty Images
Whoever the press secretary is for Christopher Luxon these days, they might want to have a weekend bootcamp teaching him how to keep his foot out of his mouth.
Apart from when he uses corporate gibberish to masquarade as an answer, on the rare occasion Luxon says something pithy, it often turns out to be an absolute clanger.
Luxon tossed off one such clanger when he questioned whether the September 6 by-election for the Māori electorate seat of Tāmaki Makaurau would be a real fight or 'a pillow fight'. (Kind of ironic given the real pillow fight is in the Epsom seat, which National hands to Act every three years.)
A by-election will be held in Tāmaki Makaurau because the person who held the seat, Takutai Tarsh Kemp, recently died. And she held the seat because the voters of that electorate put her there, unlike some party list mediocrity like, well, take your pick. Luxon's comment was flippant at best and disrespectful to both the late MP and her constituents.
So, no, it's not a pillow fight, it's a vote in the largest Polynesian city in the world.
But Luxon's indifference to Māori voters in the coming by-election reflects the larger issue of the major parties mostly ignoring Māori as a voting bloc.
One of the underlying reasons for this was first pointed out to me by my sixth form history teacher at Edgecumbe College, Gerry Rowlands, an American originally from Florida, a southern state with all the history that entails.
Mr Rowlands posed a hypothetical idea that Māori would be better off all going on the general roll and getting rid of the Māori seats altogether. His rationale was that the electorate we were in was often held by National because of the high number of Pākehā farmers.
But if Māori all went on the general roll, then National – and Labour, for that matter – would actually have to compete for the Māori vote to win. The then-named Eastern Māori seat went from the Bay of Plenty all the way around the East Coast and down to Wairarapa and Wellington. This area has one of the highest Māori populations in the country and the election campaigns in the general electorate seats would look completely different if all Māori went on the general roll.
Mr Rowlands didn't say this but I don't think he'd disagree – the Māori seats are acting as a passive version of what Americans call gerrymandering. That is, Māori are being electorally contained – or at least split – and thereby robbed of their actual voting power by the Māori seats. The Māori vote has been ghettoised; every Māori who goes on the Māori roll is a Māori the candidates and the elected MPs in the general seats can ignore. And they do.
Back to Auckland and the present day. One of Luxon's long catalogue of gaffes since taking up National's leadership was encouraging women to have babies to boost the flagging population. He quickly backtracked. Women have fought long and hard to have control over their fertility and some male politician telling them to start banging out babies for the national cause wasn't landing well.
But what Luxon dimly recognised was that Pākehā numbers are in the early stages of decline, and this decline will only accelerate as the 34% of the Pākehā population that is over the age of 55 falls off the perch at an increasing rate.
Luxon doesn't seem to recognise, even dimly, that Māori and Polynesian populations are rising steadily. Listen to Luxon's political messaging and it's as if Māori don't exist in his calculations.
Labour's Chris Hipkins isn't any better, and in some respects he's worse. When Māori became a political target, he, like Helen Clark before him, dropped them like a hot hāngī rock so he could appear non-threatening to old, white people. The coalition government has had a free run in its attack on Māori because Hipkins does little to stand up for them, or articulate in any coherent way why what's good for Māori is good for everyone. He'd rather let Te Pāti Māori take the flak.
Te Pāti Māori has become a convenient – and, it must be said, easy – political target. But those who bear the brunt of the political attack are actually their voters. Their interests get drowned out in all the posturing from across the political spectrum.
The merits of the Tāmaki Makaurau candidates – Peeni Henare for Labour, Oriini Kaipara for Te Pāti Māori and Hannah Tamaki for Vision New Zealand – are open to serious question. But National, NZ First, Act, and even the Greens, have disqualified themselves from any part in the conversation, because they haven't bothered to put up candidates.
Māori are at the pointy end of issues that concern everyone, particularly those of a younger generation: the cost of housing, the cost of living, the environment and the future of employment.
The economic and social direction of South Auckland and other regions of the country with high Māori populations is the direction of the country as a whole. It's a bare-knuckle fight for the future of the nation. Mr Luxon is just too scared to even get in the ring.