THE Maori Party aka Te Pati Maori, claim to represent the Maori people of New Zealand i.e. those who identify as indigenous because of some partial blood connection to the original migrants from the Pacific region who migrated in waves to the two islands around 1250AD.
This gathering of political malcontents is the outcome of the decades-long agitation by Marxists, who, like their Australian counterparts, ran anti-colonial narratives and protests which were eventually inserted into university and then school curricula.
As shown by former Australian Communist Party member Geoff McDonald, this campaign originated in Vladimir Lenin’s 1920 Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Questions for the Second Congress of the Communist International (Comintern).
The document redefined Marxist theory by linking anti-colonial liberation struggles directly to the “global proletarian socialist revolution”.
Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke was elected in 2022, aged 21, as the Maori Party MP for the electorate of Hauraki-Waikato, the second youngest MP to be elected since James Stuart-Wortley, who became an MP in 1853 at the age of 20.
It’s doubtful that Maipi-Clarke knows anything about anti-colonialist Marxist theory. But she is the product of a Marxist-influenced state composite school education that provided her a “Māori language immersive education” that steeps students in Maori culture as oppposed to “oppressive European colonial culture”.
In this warped world view, Maori lived “in harmony with nature” and had a “spiritual connection to the land and sea that Europeans didn’t”. The fact that Maori indulged in bloody inter-tribal warfare in which the victors ate their enemies is uncomfortable and disputed history.
Also sidelined is the historical fact that tribal leaders willingly took part in the early colonial economy, growing and selling produce and eventually purchasing ships for coastal trading and venturing as far afield as Australia.
Maipi-Clarke and her party have come under intense public criticism for organising, in conjunction with the Greens, a “wellbeing hui” (meeting) with the Mongrel Mob gang, who gained notoriety in recent years for hundreds of violent ram raids on businesses.
Maipi-Clarke responded to the criticism as “racist abuse”, but the public, as indicated by a string of posts on X and other social media, weren’t going to buy this cliched response.
A post by @NumberEightNZ sarcastically questioned whether Maipi-Clarke’s home has been ram raided, attaching a screenshot of her Instagram post about completing a 1News interview on “facing racist abuse” during her campaign.
Maipi-Clarke and her father Potaka Maipi went running to the media over an alleged attempt by someone to break down the fence at their home while shouting “racist slurs”. He also claimed there had been two break-ins and a threatening letter in the mailbox.
He told 1News he believed the attacks were “coming from those who are angry his daughter is standing up against poverty and racism”.
The drama certainly provided a boost to her profile in the election campaign, which raises questions about how real are the alleged violent reactions to Te Pati Maori’s election campaign.
The party’s rabble-rousing co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer played the “moderate and reasonable” line appealing to leaders “to get back on track with discussions about policy. “Make it less about race,” said the politician whose politics are all about race.
Ngarewa-Packer was expelled from Parliament in September, when she used an unparliamentary profanity (the c-word) during a heated debate over the Summary Offences (Move-on Orders) Amendment Bill, which increased police move-on powers.
Te Pati Maori MPs are notorious for disruption of Parliament whose constitutional validity, moral authority, and colonial foundations and jurisdiction over Māori they frequently attack.
Chris Beck from the New Zealand Political Discussion and Research Group says while the Greens and Te Pāti Māori defend their engagement with Mongrel Mob members, “perhaps they should spare a thought for Eddie Peters and his grieving whānau (family).”
Eddie Peters, 45, was brutally attacked in Flaxmere in November 2018, by a patched Mongrel Mob member Erueti Wirihana, punched him, pursued him and stomped on his head. Eddie died in hospital days later.
Wirihana then conspired to create a false alibi to obstruct the police investigation. He was eventually sentenced to seven years in prison.
“So here’s a thought for the Greens and Te Pāti Māori. Why not visit Wirihana in prison? Perhaps pose for a few smiling photographs?” Beck posted on Facebook.
“The Greens talk about engaging with gang members and their whānau (family). But what about the whānau whose lives have been destroyed by gang violence?
“Meeting gang members is one thing. Turning those encounters into smiling political photographs is another.”