Te Tai Tokerau MP Hone Harawira. Photo / John Stone
A poll showing the race for the Te Tai Tokerau electorate is neck and neck has been dismissed by Mana party leader Hone Harawira - but Labour's Kelvin Davis says it backs his party's own polls showing the seat is within his grasp.
A survey reported on Maori TV's Native Affairs put Mr Harawira on 38 per cent support and Mr Davis just 1 per cent behind on 37, well within the poll's 4 per cent margin of error.
The contest for the country's northernmost Maori electorate is not only shaping up to be the tightest race in Northland, it is also the only one that could influence the election's overall result.
On current polling Internet-Mana needs to win Te Tai Tokerau or face political oblivion. If Mr Harawira wins the seat he could bring in an extra two to three MPs for the left.
If Mr Harawira loses the seat, his party will need to win at least 5 per cent of votes nationwide to get into Parliament. Most polls show Internet-Mana hovering around 2-3 per cent.
The Mana Party leader said the Native Affairs poll was flawed because only people with landlines were called. "My key voters, the young and the poor, don't have landlines, so the people who vote for me don't actually get asked."
Mr Harawira said it was nice to know he held the lead even among more conservative, landline-owning voters, "but it's disappointing to see Native Affairs still using flawed processes and presenting their results as fact".
The same poll in 2011 put him on 41 per cent and Mr Davis on 40, but the election night result was 49-40. Another problem with the poll was that is was conducted two months ago, Mr Harawira said.
Mr Davis said his rival had no choice but to dismiss the poll. If it had shown him 5 per cent ahead he would have said it was a good survey.
The poll reflected his own belief, and the party's own polling, that it was going to be a tight race.
"This certainly has set the cat among the pigeons," he said.
The survey's most telling finding, however, was that a majority of people felt Mana's alliance with Internet Party founder Kim Dotcom was not good for Te Tai Tokerau. It had created a sideshow that had obscured real issues such as jobs, housing, education and domestic violence.
"At a tangi I went to a kaumatua said, 'How has it come to this, that a German is using a Maori seat to keep himself out of an American prison?"'
Winning Te Tai Tokerau may be as crucial to Mr Davis' political future as it is to Mr Harawira's. If Mr Davis does not win the seat, Labour needs 29-30 per cent of the vote to get him in on the list. Polls show the party's support languishing around 25 per cent.
Mr Harawira disagreed that Mr Dotcom had cost him support, saying the Internet-Mana roadshow had packed out halls all over the North. The response had been overwhelmingly positive, and the feedback he was receiving was that the contest "is not even close".
He quipped that the best poll so far was the Campbell Live poll on Kaitaia's main street earlier this week, in which passers-by used winegums to show their political preferences. Mr Harawira got 67 winegums, Mr Davis 33, the Maori Party's Te Hira Paenga 7 and independent Clinton Dearlove 2.
The Maori TV-Reid Research poll of 500 voters put Mr Paenga on 9.4 per cent. A further 9.2 per cent of respondents did not know who they would vote for.