David Farrar: Hone's gamble

Hone Harawira. Photo / APN

Tomorrow the voters of Te Tai Tokerau will deliver their verdict on Hone's gamble. They will elect a Member of Parliament to attend the 21 sitting days scheduled for the House of Representatives, before the House is dissolved for the 26 November general election.

I suspect Hone never thought it would be a real contest. His expectation was to gain a quick mandate, so that he would be secure for the general election. He would have thought that the by-election might go the way of Te Tai Hauarau for Tariana Turia or Tauranga for Winston Peters, where no one else of significance turned up.

In 2008 Hone won with 62 per cent of the vote, more than twice the 29 per cent that Kelvin Davis got. His percentage of the vote was the 15th highest of the 70 electorates. It was not a marginal seat.

However there is a real chance Hone may lose his seat tomorrow. The only poll done to date had him only 1% ahead. The Maori seats are difficult to poll, so the result could well differ significantly from that. However I would be surprised if the majority is greater than 1,000 either way.

Why has the seat become so competitive? Well party because the Maori Party has run the most brazen "Don't vote for our candidate" campaign in recent times. First they selected the lowest profile candidate they could find. Then they made sure he missed almost every debate and meeting there was. Just for good measure Tariana Turia also mused out loud he wasn't much of a politician. I can't think of what else the Maori Party could have done to promote tactical voting, short of having Pita Sharples walk naked through the electorate with a "Vote Kelvin Davis" message tattooed on his chest and other areas.

This may surprise some people, but if Hone does lose tomorrow I will have a degree of regret over that. There are many areas I am critical of Hone, but I have absolutely no doubt of his sincere motivations to improve the lot of "his people". I also found he is refreshingly open and candid, often too candid.

Politically, I also think it was not a bad thing that such a radical activist could end up a Member of Parliament. It was a good signal to other radicals out there that you can achieve things working within the system, rather than merely agitating outside it.

But the problem for Hone, in my opinion, is he never did make the transition from activist to parliamentarian. He rejected hard fought victories like the Foreshore & Seabed Act repeal because the National-Led Government wasn't prepared to hand over title for every km of coastline in New Zealand.

His attention to detail is atrocious, and detail matters. The most well known example is his missing the actual vote on the Marine and Coastal Areas Bill. But we saw another example of that this week. The Mana Party announced its Treaty of Waitangi Policy and their first policy was:

Remove the 2014 deadline for lodging historical claims with the Waitangi Tribunal to better enable iwi with such claims to properly research and state their cases.

The only trouble with this policy is the deadline is not 2014, but was 2008. S6A of the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975 states:

... after 1 September 2008 no Maori may submit a claim to the Tribunal that is, or includes, a historical Treaty claim

So Mana's presumably most important policy, is wrong on the most basic of details. There are tens of thousands of people who could have picked up that error. The former MP for Te Tai Tokerau was not one of them. This speaks volumes about his ability to actually be a parliamentarian, rather than an activist. Sue Bradford managed to do both - Hone has not.

The 2014 deadline the Mana Party refers to is presumably National's aspiration goal of settling all outstanding historical claims by 2014.

The future of the Mana Party rests on tomorrow's by-election. If Hone regains the seat, then the Mana Party can campaign at the general election that a party vote for them will not be wasted and bring in additional MPs.

If Hone loses to Kelvin Davis, it will go down in history as a huge political blunder. It is doubtful at the general election Labour could muster the same resources into the seat, as they are doing for the by-election.

It will be a strange by-election night. National and Labour supporters will both be cheering on Kelvin Davis to win. Maori Party supporters will be cheering for him in whispers. Even Green Party supporters may be cheering on Kelvin as they see the Mana Party as competing with them for voters. On the other hand Hone will have his formidable mother cheering him on, and no political force has yet been discovered powerful enough to stop Mrs Harawira, so we wait to see what the good people of Te Tai Tokerau decide.

* A disclosure statement on David Farrar's political views.