The tussle for the Maori Party's soul

Nelson Mail editorial, February 9, 2011
Hone Harawira has got what was coming to him with his suspension from the Maori Party caucus. If he is genuine in his dismay at the move then he is more politically naive than might have seemed possible. Surely even a life-long rabble- rouser has, after five years in Parliament, developed a firm grasp on the essence of the party discipline which the institution depends on - starting with not upstaging your leaders and not bagging your colleagues, and certainly not making a habit of it.
That being the case, it is impossible to see his continued defiance of the party hierarchy at Waitangi over the weekend as anything other than a calculated manoeuvre, using his home-turf advantage to claim the high ground in an ideological tussle. It is blindingly obvious that this is a fight for the soul of the Maori Party and whether it can be most effective inside or outside the proverbial political tent.
Co-leader Pita Sharples spoke passionately at the weekend of the prospect that the very existence of the party - indeed, of any Maori party - could be snuffed out if the current ruckus undermines parliamentary confidence in its reliability as a political partner. Yet Mr Harawira stands by his and his supporters' conviction that the party can only honestly live up to its own principles if it causes more of a fuss about its senior coalition partner's policies as they impinge on poor Maori.
The concern he expresses is a genuine and familiar one, of a minor party founded on strong ideals being forced to test the malleability of those principles as it tries to make gains inside Parliament. It has been a source of disillusionment to supporters of the likes of the Greens, ACT, New Zealand First and the Alliance. It is no surprise that despite all his belligerence, occasional obnoxiousness and self-righteous certainty, Mr Harawira can point to a sizeable number of allies for his insistence that for the good of Maori, principles must come first.
By being shut out of caucus - and surely leaving the party itself with little choice but to toss him out altogether - he appears to have been the biggest loser in the power struggle. But as an independent MP, entirely unconstrained by party discipline, his former colleagues must be anxious about how he might yet come back to haunt them.
Waitangi weekend only hardened the positions of the two sides, each of the camps providing the other with further evidence of the ever-widening and probably unbridgeable gap between them. While Mr Harawira reminded the world that he is most at home with the more radicalised, loud-mouthed, anti- Pakeha elements of Maori activism, Mr Sharples invited a different sort of derision for the sight of his chummying up to John Key and hanging out in, as one Harawira supporter put it, a flash hotel in Paihia.
Whatever the reality behind those two images, they neatly encapsulate the deadlock, one which seems bound to end badly. The real question will be how the voters regard the tussle. Only that will determine whether the party has a future as a kingmaker, or any future at all; or, in other words, if raging from the sidelines is ultimately better for Maori than cuddling up to that most conservative of Pakeha institutions, the National Party.