fallaciousreasoning

Martin van Beynen is a Press journalist and regular opinion contributor.

OPINION: When a political party becomes amusing fodder for columnists it really is in serious trouble.

Te Pāti Māori has this year lurched from one disaster to another, which, to be fair, does not make it that dissimilar to other New Zealand parties. However, it was supposed to be different, especially with its tikanga approach to resolving tensions and disagreements.

Well, the approach revealed in the last few days is brutal.

A showdown must have been brewing for some time, but let’s start with Te Pāti Māori demoting whip Mariameno Kapa-Kingi, regarded as the party MP most respectful of Parliament’s processes. Her son Eru, formerly the party’s vice-president and a spokesman for the Toitū te Tiriti movement, then broke ties with the party, saying the leadership had become dictatorial and toxic.

This week party management sent an email to members and either leaked it to the media, or knew, as sure as eggs, that it would find its way there. The email showed Kapa-Kingi’s office was heading towards a budget blow-out and that Eru had allegedly said some nasty, entitled and ethnically disparaging things to a parliamentary security guard.

This could be regarded as Te Pāti Māori being transparent and honest with its members and electorates, except for two things. The first is that the party is not that open. It dictates who it speaks to and what questions it will answer. It is very good at shutting up shop when it suits.

Secondly, the party has been aware, as Stuff’s political correspondent Glenn McConnell has pointed out, of the issues with the Kapa-Kingis for months and yet has waited until now to have a crack under the guise of openness.

All this is entertaining and great material for Māori bashers, but is very sad for people who want to see Māori do well.

New Te Pāti Māori MP Oriini Kaipara did not help things last week by breaching the time limit for her maiden speech, which was followed by a haka in the public gallery.

However, she warrants a bit of slack. Parliament can spare a few extra minutes and Kaipara spoke impressively. The singing from the public gallery was beautiful. Perhaps we didn’t need the history lesson and we could have done without the haka, but she looks very much like a leader of the future.

I’m not sure what ails Te Pāti Māori, but it needs to sort out a few things if it is going to look like a credible partner in any government.

The first is ensuring relatives are not in key positions in the party or on the payroll. President John Tamihere is the father of TPM’s general manager Dr Kiri Tamihere-Waititi, described as a “relentless force in her husband’s success and probably more liberated”. Tamihere-Waititi is married to the party’s co-leader, Rawiri Waititi.

Then we have Mariameno Kapa-Kingi engaging her son as a contractor. She’s not the first MP to hire family, but it’s never a good idea because it leads to conflicts of interest and looks terrible.

The second is doing the mahi. MPs are paid to do a job and that job entails being, well, a member of Parliament. It’s long been said by political reporters that Te Pāti Māori leaders have a sniffy attitude to Parliament and have made little effort to be good parliamentarians.

The attendance of Te Pāti Māori MPs is patchy at best and protocols and rules are continually breached. One observer noted that Te Pāti Māori MPs are “quite content to use Parliament as a soundstage for its social media content. It’s far from the first political party to do this – but it’s the first party that only uses the House for this purpose.”

MPs are paid $168,000 a year. Taxpayers, who include grassroots Māori, deserve better. With all the problems that beset Māori, it was instructive to visit the party’s website this week to see what it is currently campaigning about. The first featured campaign was a petition to “Say No to the FBI in Aotearoa”.

Finally, the party needs consistency. Take the approach to the Instagram post from Te Tai Tonga MP Tākuta Ferris, that accused Labour of using “Indians, Asians, Black and Pākehā” supporters to “take a Māori seat from Māori”.

The party’s co-leaders were disapproving, but Tamihere told Radio Waatea “what Tākuta Ferris said, in substance, was right”.

Looking at the party’s implosion from the outside, it seems it needs more of a clean-out than a reset.

Sorry for the editorialized title - seems a bit hypocritical for a libertarian though

Looking back at our tracks down from Mt Brewster after climbing the South West face

Fairly scathing

The websites look pretty slick too

"Ditch the winter chill” and “expand your horizons in sunny South East Queensland!” reads one newspaper advert, luring New Zealand’s health-care workers towards a new life in Australia. “Warmer days and higher pays”, enthused another, last year, from the Australian state’s police service. Kiwis who chose “policing in paradise” could look forward to 300 days of annual sunshine and a A$20,000 ($12,500) relocation bonus, it declared.

For many New Zealanders that is an easy sell. They are leaving their country in record numbers. Almost 129,000 residents emigrated last year—40% above the pre-pandemic average for this century. It is not a case of last in, first out. The majority of those leaving were New Zealanders, rather than immigrants returning home, creating a net loss of 47,000 citizens.

New Zealand, though a settler country, is also shaped by emigration. Its small economy and relative lack of opportunity have long driven young New Zealanders towards what they call the “overseas experience”, fanning fears of brain drain. Proportionate to its population of 5.3m, it has one of the largest diasporas in the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries. Emigration ebbs and flows: the last spike occurred in 2012, near the end of the financial crisis. As the pandemic raged, many expats returned to hunker behind closed borders, but the outflow quickly resumed. Recently, New Zealand has been in a rut. The economy is in recession and unemployment has risen. Outgoing Kiwis grumble about costly housing and a crime surge.

Unlike most, they have an alternative when times get tough: they are free to live and work in Australia, and vice versa. Almost 15% of them are now based “across the ditch”. It is not just that Australia’s economy has weathered the cost-of-living crisis better. The income gap between the pair has been growing for decades. Adjusted for purchasing power, Australia’s per person GDP is about a third higher than New Zealand’s. Its pensions are more generous, and its centre-left Labor government has made it easier for Kiwis to get passports and benefits. By comparison, New Zealand is “a sinking boat”, says one transplant on a Facebook group for Kiwi expats. Australia is “best for [an] easy life”, writes another.

In the past, fears of brain drain have proved overblown. Young expats have generally returned, and governments have offset losses by letting in immigrants from countries such as India and China. The result was a “brain exchange”, says Paul Spoonley, a sociologist at New Zealand’s Massey University. But there is a risk of that changing, he argues. First, he says, it is no longer just young New Zealanders who are leaving, but more experienced professionals and extended families. Second, inward immigration is now slowing. After a post-pandemic spike, it plunged by around a third last year, though the population is still growing. Christopher Luxon, the prime minister, says the solution is “to build a long-term proposition where New Zealanders actually choose to stay”. But that has not proved easy. In 2009 John Key, then prime minister, set out to “match Australia by 2025”. In Wellington, the capital, some now joke that a more realistic goal would be to “beat Fiji by 2050”.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.nz/post/19902182

The Ahuriri valley, NZ

The Ahuriri valley, NZ