Mariameno Kapa-Kingi, MP for Te Tai Tokerau, delivering her maiden speech in 2023. Photo / Mark Mitchell
When MP Mariameno Kapa-Kingi was demoted by the leadership of Te Pāti Māori a few weeks ago, it was not immediately clear what the problem was.
As whip, she had diligently fulfilled her duties in attending the House, ensuring that the party’s voice was heard on important bills, votes were properly cast, and represented her party on the business committee, and other committees of Parliament where co-operation is the order of the day.
It has become apparent that Kapa-Kingi’s demotion exposed some deeper issues within the party.
It is also apparent that Kapa-Kingi is not someone to be underestimated.
In her 60s, and the oldest of Te Pāti Māori’s MPs, she may seem like a gently-spoken “nanny” figure of the caucus. But she is no kitten.
She talked in her maiden speech about having been delivered by her people to “the lion’s den” but added: “What I know of lions .. is that it is the lionesses that do the hunting and, might I add, keep house. So it seems I find myself in the right place, ready to do my job in the way they would have me do so: relentless, fearless, and ready to protect or pounce whatever may come.”
Kapa-Kingi doesn’t often make headlines like the strident co-leaders, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi, who are accomplished at delivering withering five-second sound-bites.
They are more aloof from the institution of Parliament.
Kapa-Kingi is seen not only as an anchor for the party’s presence at Parliament, but someone who is clear about her role there, works with it and with other parties.
There is the rub, or at least part of it.
The party leadership keeps its distance, and is part of Parliament for some purposes and not others, half in, half out.
Kapa-Kingi does not have discernibly different political views from her colleagues. Like them, she speaks about the liberation of Māori, of being unapologetically Māori, of Te Tiriti, tino rangatiratanga and sovereignty.
But she is less aloof. She operates as a part of the institution to which she was elected as MP for Te Tai Tokerau in 2023, 132 years after her tūpuna Eparaima Kapa was elected the independent MP for northern Māori in 1893.
Kapa-Kingi’s style is more like that of Māori Party founder Tariana Turia, who fully engaged with the institution to which she was elected, and used it to her advantage rather than holding her nose or giving the impression of being at war with it.
Once Turia had formed the Māori Party, her emphasis was less on the fight and more on faith in Māori to provide solutions.
It was no surprise that Kapa-Kingi was given responsibility as whip despite being a first-term MP.
She is no stranger to politics, having worked for Labour Taupo MP Mark Burton in the 1990s.
She held leadership positions both at Ngati Hine Health Trust in Whāngarei and as CEO of her tribal authority, Te Rūnanga Nui o te Aupōuri, at Te Kao, where she was born. She has supported urban Māori groups as well.
“She’s a pragmatist,” said senior Labour MP Willie Jackson who first met her when he ran the Manukau Urban Māori Authority.
“She is prone to a bit of extremism every now and then. But I don’t think there is anything to fear with Mariameno.
“She’s got a good head, is a good thinker, a real contributor in the House and at select committee...and she works very well with us in the House.”
But he added: “I do think it is sad what is happening at the moment.”
Speaker Gerry Brownlee had a lot to do with Kapa-Kingi in her role as whip.
“On a personal level, I’ve always found her extremely pleasant,” he said.
“She was a very positive contributor to the business committee and fairly quickly understood how that body works and what it is able to do. She was constructive,” said Brownlee, though he added that Ngarewa-Packer was as well when she was on the committee.
Kapa-Kingi joined Brownlee in June and three other MPs from National, Labour and the Green Party on an interparliamentary trip to Japan’s parliament and led the group in waiata after visits and speeches.
What drew Kapa-Kingi to that particular trip was her early association with Japan, having gone there as a young woman because of her interest in the martial art of Aikido. She ended up living there for several years in her early 20s.
Unknown to Brownlee, Kapa-Kingi’s trip itself has been the subject of some debate within the party, with some expressing a view that it was a luxury that was inconsistent with the party kaupapa.
It is also understood that some party members in the regions were recently sounded out about the possibility of Mariameno Kapa-Kingi becoming a future leader and that found its way back to the leadership group.
That may have had more to do with her demotion than differences in approach or strategy, or the supposed need to reorganise the caucus in preparation for the 2026 election year.
In an institution which some say is oppressive to Māori, it is difficult to find anyone around Parliament to say a bad word against Kapa-Kingi, except perhaps Act’s Children’s Minister Karen Chhour.
The biggest headline Kapa-Kingi has created as an MP, besides her unseating former Labour deputy leader Kelvin Davis up north, and her recent demotion, was when she accused the Government of having a mission to “exterminate” Māori and Chhour of being “a puppet”.
It was in May last year, during a debate on the bill to abolish Section 7AA, the principal Treaty of Waitangi clause, from the Oranga Tamariki Act.
Kapa-Kingi, a former social worker, rejected the argument that Oranga Tamariki should be “colour-blind”.
“Because to say we are all one people, is really to say we should all be white people, erasing the very hue of our identity and culture that makes us whole as tangata Māori, tamariki Māori, mokopuna Māori.”
It was a recurring theme from her maiden speech when she described her parents’ efforts in raising their 10 children, after moving from a small farm in Te Kao to Onerahi in Whangarei during the urban drift of the 1960s.
They had both spoken Māori, but in Kapa-Kingi’s words, “my parents, like many others, were not only stopped from speaking Māori but they were also stopped from being Māori.”
“On balance, colonisation ruins a people, destroys their place and corrupts their identity, and expects that you be grateful for the opportunity,” she said.
Kapa-Kingi went to school in Whangārei and when it came time to leave, she checked in with the vocational counsellor who had two ads pinned to her office wall, she told Waatea broadcaster Dale Husband in an interview, published in E-Tangata.
One ad was for a job in a shoe factory, and one was for George Courts, the department store, which had a Whangārei branch. She had looked at the George Courts ad and said she was going to go to that, to which the counsellor had said: “No, no, no. You need to go to the shoe factory.”
Nonetheless, she decided to go for an interview for the George Courts job of office junior and got it on the spot. She stayed for several years and left as an office senior. She worked for a time at Marsden Point oil refinery and did a Māori language immersion course at Waikato University with her husband, Korotangi, a carver.
The couple have four children: triplets Heemi, Tipene and Eru, born in 1996, and a daughter, Tōrerenuiarua, born four years later.
The children had “taken rank in the resistance and are living versions of mine and their tūpuna’s highest aspirations”, Kapa-Kingi said in her maiden speech.
She said words such as colonisation and oppression were discussed at her dinner table when she was growing up.
“But those are conversations I’ve normalised with my own kids.”
Eru has a political profile probably greater than his mother’s after helping to form the Toitū te Tiriti movement with other young activists and leading the largest protest to Parliament in living memory, last November, against the Treaty Principles Bill.
He was a Vice-President of Te Pāti Māori until March, and was a list candidate in 2020 and 2023.
Last week he announced that Toitū Te Tiriti had decided to end its ties with Te Pāti Māori, and he accused the party leadership of being dictatorial and toxic, although without specific examples.
He didn’t identify any one particular leader in his criticisms, but the leadership group comprises former Labour cabinet minister John Tamihere, co-leaders Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and general manager Kiri Tamihere-Waititi, the daughter of Tamihere and wife of Waititi.
John Tamihere signed up to the party in 2020 when it was out of Parliament, and he had lost the Auckland mayoral contest to Phil Goff. In April 2022, Tamihere became party president for a three-year term.
Tamihere was always considered on the right in Labour, and Willie Jackson, who is close to Tamihere, has previously described his friend’s transformation as going from Alan Duff to Malcolm X.
Tamihere has an abrasive and controlling style but he also helped the party to claim six of the seven Māori seats in 2023. He is also thought to have considered standing in the Tamaki Makaurau byelection before younger members of the party encouraged Oriini Kaipara to declare.
Eru Kapa-Kingi has insisted in a series of interviews that Toitū’s move to independence is not related to his mother’s demotion, and a reset for the group had been on the cards for some time.
Speaking on Arataua Media, he said many of the movement’s supporters were supporters of Labour and the Green Party as well, and it needed to be independent.
He did not believe the party executive listened to members and did not believe there was a clear strategy to become part of a coalition government after the next election.
“I have the deepest respect for our matriarch, Tariana Turia. She was very close with my mother when she was alive, so I deeply believe in her legacy, and I want that legacy to carry on because it is noble,” he told Arataua.
The troubled Te Pāti Māori met at Parliament yesterday on the first day of a three-week sitting bloc. Tomorrow, Kaipara will be sworn into Parliament and after her maiden speech, the party leadership will announce a “reset”.
Quite what Kapa-Kingi’s role in the reset will be is yet to be revealed, but when she was first elected, she aimed to serve.
“Being of service is something I love to do and I’ve become good at it,” she said.
“...I encourage us all to find our lane, e te iwi, and I’m confident that I’ve found mine here.”