Barry Soper: Newstalk ZB senior political correspondent on Toitū Te Tiriti cutting ties with Te Pāti Māori

Change is afoot at Te Pāti Māori - as a prominent activist group has severed ties with the party.

Toitū Te Tiriti spokesperson Eru Kapa-Kingi claims the Party has a dictatorship decision-making model.

His mother, Mariameno Kapa-Kingi, was recently demoted as the Party whip.

Newstalk ZB senior political correspondent Barry Soper unpacked the saga further - and what the loss means for Te Pāti Māori's political future.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's fourteen away from five. Barry Soper, Senior political correspondence
with us right now.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hi, good afternoon, Heather.

Speaker 1 (00:05):
What's going on in the Maori Party?

Speaker 2 (00:07):
Well you may well ask quite a lot really. When
you get the son of one of the Maori Parties
MPs who was their whip up until recently and who
was fired as the whip and the job was taken
over by the leader or one of the co leader,
Debi Packer, you know the party is not certainly going

(00:34):
along as smoothly as what it should do. And this
guy ru Cuppa Kingi. He was the person who organized
that massive Equoi to Parliament which was a great equal
no violence and it was held pretty well. But reminds
me a bit of the time when the Alliance Party
was falling falling apart in two thousand and two and

(00:56):
Jim Andersen went off and formed the Progressive Party. There's
a difference here. The Maori Party have seats, so they
constituenty MPs and if you've got them arguing like this,
then you're, you know, the people that are representing their constituency.
It's much harder to break away.

Speaker 1 (01:16):
And what you're trying to make is am I right
in thinking that that if the leadership doesn't like what
Maria men Or and Ferris takut Feris are doing, they
can't fire them are electoral MPs.

Speaker 2 (01:27):
That's exactly right, and that's the difficulty they've got. But
when you look at the Sun, the organizer of the Hequi,
he's saying that their leadership is nothing short of a dictatorship.
Now that's what we've been told, but we don't know
is exactly he's run.

Speaker 1 (01:44):
If you're a successful party in the way you know,
the way that we do politics currently and have done
for a very long time, it's always run centralized, right.

Speaker 2 (01:52):
Oh, yes, of course your leaders call the shots. The
leaders tend to call the shots. But when you've got
a rebel MP, and look, I've seen many rebelly MPs
over the years, and your older listeners will remember, starting
with Mike Minogue and Rob Muldoon back in the early eighties.
You know, the MP's they do sometimes go out and

(02:16):
speak like t Ferris terrible getting the names. I'm afraid
that that fellow fires that chat Ferris, who runs who
represents the whole of the South Island. You know, I

(02:36):
don't know what he was doing in that late night
cross on social media, but he didn't seem to I
think know what he was doing himself, even though he
did triple down on it.

Speaker 1 (02:47):
Can I can I just suggest though, that the loss
of Eru Kappa Kingi is actually quite significant for the
Maori Party because he runs He he was very very
he assisted them a lot with that he was.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
A candidate and the former vice president.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
Yes, but that hikoi that he ran for them was
h fantastic. He is to them, I think a little
bit like the unions are to Labor. It's like the
loss of the unions would be quite significant to Labor.

Speaker 2 (03:12):
Yes, yeah, yeah, So it's significant for the party. And
the difficulty, of course is for Chrysipkins because I see
he's distanced himself yet again from the Maldi Party. But
the more they behave like this, the less it looks
like that Labor would lead a government at the next election.

(03:33):
I don't think it would anyway, but the Malordi Party
would have to be part of that.

Speaker 1 (03:37):
Any word from Jonesy on the old Energy announcement.

Speaker 2 (03:40):
You'll have been deafened by Jonesy's silence, actually, and I
think I'm sure he doesn't want to repeat of what
we saw when the twenty seventeen government was formed and
he was standing on the stage with Jasinda Dern and
Megan Woods when they announced there would be no more
exploration of oil and gas in this country. And you

(04:01):
remember he buried his hand, had his head in his
hands on stage. It's pretty obvious it's a real protest.
But look, Jonesy feels that there should be more. There
should be more radical this reform of the electricity system.
He would like to see renationalization of it. He wrote
a twenty page report for Winston Peters outlining his views

(04:25):
some time ago. So look, the fact that he didn't
turn up to the announcement was no accident. I talked
to him today and he said, oh, there happened to
be a Maori Women's Welfare League meeting in Katya as
it was on your back door. Jonesie, Oh, that's very handy.
But I'll tell you what. He will be speaking tomorrow

(04:49):
at a thing with Winston Peters. There will be a
lot of protesters there, I would imagine on the Palestinian
situation with Winston turning out, But I think you'll find
him putting paid to the suggestion by Chris Hopkins continually
that no gas has been found in New Zealand because

(05:09):
gas has been discovered.

Speaker 1 (05:11):
Yes, hey, very quickly, can you just run me through
what's gone on here with the monyeru wom that I
because the cops said, is not enough evidence to lay
corruption charges yet.

Speaker 2 (05:18):
And look, it's fear if the police say that because
they not only brought in the serious fraud offers to
review their investigation into it, they also broad in the
Public Service Commission and they say there's not enough evidence.
Now you'll remember a lot of people that worked at
the Morai said that information was being handed over. They

(05:39):
were looking at corruption charges possibly being laid, but they
said the evidence is not there. That doesn't mean that
there was nothing to answer for.

Speaker 1 (05:49):
Okay, thanks very much, Verry sober Chief seeing up a
little correspondent.

Speaker 2 (05:54):
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