Murray Horton
Covert Action Magazine
Increasingly Popular with the Demise of Labour Party Standard-Bearer Jacinda Ardern, the Maori Party Vows to Remove New Zealand from Five Eyes Surveillance Alliance
Te Pāti Māori in New Zealand’s October 14 elections is campaigning on a genuine anti-imperialist platform and could be a significant factor in the election because of the declining fortunes of the country’s Labour Party.
Former Labour Party Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced the date of the election in a January 2023 speech in which she also made the surprise announcement that she was resigning as Prime Minister, and from Parliament and politics completely (she stepped down as PM in February and from Parliament in April). She has now vanished from public life.
Ardern had been the political equivalent of a rock star when she burst on the scene in 2017 and propelled the Labour party to an election victory. Her leadership was dubbed by the media “Jacindamania.” She was seen as a hip young female antidote to right-wing dinosaurs like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Jair Bolsonaro.
However, for a variety of reasons, she had gone from being her government’s greatest asset to being a liability. And her heart was no longer in it, as she wanted to spend more time with her daughter. In June 2023 her successors in Government rewarded her by anointing her as Dame Jacinda Ardern, “for services to the State.”
Ardern’s successor as Labour Party leader and, hence, Prime Minister, is Chris Hipkins, who was a senior Minister in Ardern’s Cabinet but not the Deputy Prime Minister nor the Labour Party Deputy Leader. In such circumstances, the new Leader is chosen by a vote of Labour’s Parliamentary caucus. This was academic, as Hipkins was unopposed, so the succession process was remarkably quick and harmonious (which was certainly not the case in previous Labour leadership changes). Hipkins thus took over just eight months before the election.
The historical odds are against him. In my lifetime (72 years) there have been several such unelected Prime Ministers from both rival governing parties (Labour and National). By unelected, I mean that their being Prime Minister was not endorsed by popular vote in an election won by their party. In every case, Governments headed by these unelected Prime Ministers have lost the first general election after they got the job—most recently in 2017.
New Zealand General Elections Are Fairly Prosaic Affairs
Hipkins wasted no time having what was dubbed “the bonfire of the policies,” dumping the more aspirational policies of Jacinda Ardern. (She became globally famous largely because of her acclaimed responses to events not of her doing, e.g., the 2019 Christchurch mosques’ massacres and the Covid pandemic. Policies that were of her doing produced much more modest or non-existent outcomes).
Hipkins proclaimed that all of his Labour Government’s efforts would be directed at “bread and butter issues,” in response to the cost-of-living crisis (one in which New Zealand is in company with the rest of the world). This is familiar territory for New Zealand elections, and one in which the Opposition National Party, a conservative party which has been in Government more than Labour during my lifetime, fancies its chances as the self-proclaimed party that can “manage the economy better.”
So far, so prosaic. A little context is in order. Since 1996 New Zealand has had a proportional representation electoral system. So, coalition Governments, headed by either National or Labour, have been the norm. Labour came to power in 2017 in coalition with a minor party (one which had been in coalition Governments with National in the 1990s and then with Labour in the 2000s).
But at the 2020 election—the Covid election—something unique happened in New Zealand’s modern political history. Labour won an outright majority, meaning that it needed no coalition partner (its 2017-20 partner was voted out of Parliament). Hundreds of thousands of National voters switched to Labour. The media quoted people as saying “I voted for Jacinda because she saved my life.”
Labour had an absolute mandate for its 2020-23 term, unheard of under a proportional representation system. It did not need any partners but it invited the Green Party Co-Leaders to be both Ministers outside Cabinet (one holds the extremely important climate change portfolio). But, despite having secured more than 50% of the 2020 election vote (something rarely ever achieved under the old “winner takes all” electoral system), the Ardern government sat on its hands, disappointing those who had voted for it expecting change.
One example: Despite the recommendations of a body that it had appointed (headed by a former Labour Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister), Ardern refused to make any changes to taxes, specifically ruling out a capital gains tax, wealth tax or inheritance tax. This was so in an economy dominated by soaring house prices, making buying a home severely unaffordable, particularly for first-home buyers. National, on the other hand, offers tax cuts as its solution to every problem.
Te Pāti Māori Breaks Ranks
All indications are for an election focused on the cost of living, which is the norm. Issues like defense, foreign policy or intelligence rarely get a look in from one election to the next.
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Opinion polls have consistently picked the 2023 election to be tight (some have Labour ahead, others have National). But there will be no 50%+ mandate this year; 2020 was a one-off. And polls have consistently predicted that Te Pāti Māori will play a post-election kingmaker role in forming a coalition—but only with Labour and the Greens; National has ruled out working with it.
“We Will No Longer Act As a Pacific Spy Base for the Five Eyes Alliance”
This is where it gets interesting—Te Pāti Māori is very different from its earlier Parliamentary incarnation. In February 2023 it announced its new defense, intelligence and foreign policy, which completely differentiates it from the four larger parties in Parliament: “Te Pāti Māori says a ‘transformative’ defense and foreign affairs policy will see its MPs vote against overseas military support, by New Zealand forces. Co-Leaders Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi unveiled the neutrality policy during their Annual General Meeting…[I]f in power, they would withdraw from the Five Eyes security pact between Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the UK and the US.”
“We will no longer be a political football in the wars of imperial powers. We will no longer act as a Pacific spy base for the Five Eyes Alliance [U.S., Australia, Great Britain, Canada and New Zealand],” Waititi said. “We have determined a Māori-centric foreign policy and a Māori-centric defence policy shaped for us and by us without selling or trading our mana [authority/prestige] by just simply asserting it,” Ngarewa-Packer said.
“The Time for War, Killing and Imperialism Is Over”
“Waititi said the party’s aspiration was for Aotearoa* to adopt neutrality policies similar to Switzerland. ‘In 1987 Aotearoa declared we were nuclear-free. Te Pāti Māori now declares Aotearoa must be militarily neutral, a Switzerland of the South Pacific,’ Waititi said.” [* Aotearoa is the Indigenous name for the country. It is very widely used by people of all races, in all contexts, and is the semi-official “co-name” for the country.—MH]
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“The party took heat from Ukrainian expatriates last year when Waititi claimed the Russian invasion of Ukraine was caused by the ‘politics of America, NATO, and other countries.” Ngarewa-Packer says Aotearoa should still “stand alongside indigenous peoples in their fight for their sovereignty over their own lands” and it supported the Government’s sanctions bill against Russia last year.
“The party would still fund a defence force but it would be a ‘support force for the Pacific, for our Polynesian world,’ and to tackle civil defence emergencies,” according to Ngarewa-Packer. ‘With the extreme weather events of the past few weeks [i.e., major floods and a very destructive cyclone (MH)], we’ve seen just how important it is that our defence force is focused on responding to threats to our own people,” she said.
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Demand for Military Neutrality
Te Pāti Māori President John Tamihere spelled out the party’s conditions for being a coalition partner in a May 2023 mainstream media interview: “And the one which will scare lots of horses is his demand for military neutrality. This, he says, means ‘being a friend to everyone and an enemy to no-one,’ and acting only to defend our own territory and act as a peacekeeper, but no longer being part of the Five Eyes spying compact with the U.S., UK, Canada and Australia, or, in his eyes, kowtowing to Australia’s military decisions.”
“And the Chinese? He’s got no problems there. They are a good trading partner; he wants Huawei here to provide telecoms competition (he has a thing about the cost of duopolies on the working man); doesn’t worry about them spying given how the whistleblower Edward Snowden showed how the CIA has a propensity to spy just as much on its friends as its enemies.”
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2014: The Election Where Spying Was an Issue
As a post-script: there was one very recent New Zealand election, 2014, where spying was a campaign issue. Here is a very brief summary. A German-American billionaire, Kim Dotcom, came to New Zealand in 2010 under a fast track immigration “investor plus” immigration scheme (someone who had invested $NZ10 million in NZ). His company, Megaupload, was a leading player during the file-sharing phase of the Internet. But the U.S. tech moguls of the time cried foul, claiming that Megaupload was just one big copyright violation.
They wanted to get Dotcom, and the U.S. government went after him. In 2012 New Zealand’s very obliging National Government mounted a spectacular U.S.-style police raid (using the anti-terrorism Special Tactics Group, involving 76 cops and two helicopters) on Dotcom’s multi-million-dollar rental mansion. Dotcom and several of his Megaupload executives faced extradition proceedings to answer the U.S. indictments.
This is where it gets interesting. During the court proceedings it was let slip by the police that the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), New Zealand’s partner agency in Five Eyes, had been spying on Dotcom in the lead-up to the police raid. By law the GCSB was not allowed to spy on New Zealand citizens or permanent residents (Dotcom was a permanent resident). The then-Prime Minister, John Key, publicly apologized to Dotcom in 2012.
But did the Government punish the GCSB for its crime? No, it rewarded the criminals and changed the law to make it legal for the GCSB to spy on New Zealanders. In 2013 tens of thousands of people marched against the GCSB Bill but it sneaked into law by the narrowest of margins. At the 2014 election Dotcom founded his own political party and formed an alliance with an existing party which already had one MP in Parliament.
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I've been studying the Maori language for six years now, Jack, and they have the most advanced conceptualization of the unseen world I've ever encountered. It's built into their language.
Hopefully when they say remove, they mean remove the "Labor Party" as in removed from the world of the living...