Four days ago, Labour candidate Kerrin Leoni warned that photographs of her Te Pāti Māori rival with Mongrel Mob members had become the right’s “primary ammunition”. This morning Labour’s Tāmaki Makaurau candidate resigned over her own appearance at a Mob event, and the gang controversy that has dogged the Greens and Te Pāti Māori for more than a week is now Labour’s problem too. Chris Hipkins was right to accept her resignation. The affair has still drawn Labour into the kind of culture war it had kept out of all campaign, three days before advance voting opens on Labour Day.
From the Greens’ problem to Labour’s
When Te Pāti Māori and Green politicians were photographed at a Mongrel Mob “health and wellbeing election hui”, Hipkins called the visit a “huge error of judgement” and ruled both parties out of the police and corrections portfolios. He also told Newstalk ZB, “I don’t want any of our MPs or candidates seen alongside gangs.”
In a Whakaata Māori debate on Wednesday night, Leoni criticised the visit, and Te Pāti Māori’s Oriini Kaipara alleged that Leoni had posted about going “to the same place a week before” and taken the post down. Leoni replied, “No, I did not go to the gang pad the week before, no.” Yesterday Hipkins “absolutely accepted” her account, and Labour declared that “Oriini Kaipara was wrong.” But that evening Whakaata Māori aired footage of Leoni at an event on 3 October attended by Mongrel Mob members, and Labour announced her resignation this morning.
A Labour jacket at a Mob event
Leoni has never hidden that some of her whānau are in gangs. “Gangs are part of a lot of our lives as Māori,” she told Newsroom on Monday, and on Thursday she wrote that she would not “turn my back on them or pretend they are not my whānau because of their associations.” Yesterday Hipkins defended her on exactly that ground, saying “she is of course entitled to interact with her own family.”
RNZ describes that in the video Leoni is in her Labour jacket with a campaign sign showing her and Hipkins, giving out flyers and telling those present, “Some of them you might know, that aren’t enrolled to vote, and they can have the power to change this government.” The Post understands it was advertised on social media as a fundraiser for the Mob’s Rogue chapter, though Hipkins says he has been reassured it was not a fundraising event.
Kerre Woodham said on Newstalk ZB that she would have had sympathy for a photo of Leoni “in a T-shirt, shorts and jandals, having a BBQ with her brother at a whanau function. But she’s in a Labour Party jacket, handing out Labour Party flyers”.
Her position became untenable because the footage contradicted the impression her denial had given, and because Labour had used that denial to call her opponent wrong. In fairness to Leoni, the event came before Hipkins publicly condemned the Green and Te Pāti Māori visit, and it isn’t clear what guidance Labour candidates had been given by then.
Hipkins said she had not given the party “full information”, and he became emotional as he spoke to reporters today at the Hawke’s Bay A&P show. “All of us navigate family situations in politics, and it’s bloody hard,” he said, noting that she had “grown up in an environment where she’s been surrounded by gang members. She is not a gang member herself.” Labour would have been reluctant to let her go, knowing a resignation gives the scandal more attention, but keeping her would have let it run until election day.
Dragged into the culture war
Before the 2023 election, 40% of voters named law and order as a top concern in the Ipsos Issues Monitor; in September it was eighth, on 15%, and Labour had largely stopped talking about it. When the Herald’s Jamie Ensor searched Labour’s policy webpage for “law and order”, the reply was “No policies match your search.”
The gang visits have put the issue back on the agenda, and crime and race have been hard ground for the left, as Labour found with co-governance and youth crime in 2023. Mike Hosking calls the gangs “a visceral reminder of who these people really are”.
Overseas voting began on Wednesday, the leaders’ debates are over, and when the Greens released their fiscal plan on Friday morning, including an extra $3 billion a year for health, it was competing with Leoni’s resignation for attention. Labour has few chances left to change the subject before most people vote.
The left turns on itself
Hipkins said there was an element of “racism” in the reaction and that “Our Māori MPs get held to a very different standard to others.” Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi said responsibilities to whānau do not disappear “because someone finds their presence politically inconvenient”, a line aimed at Hipkins as much as National.
Māni Dunlop writes in the Post that “whānau connections and obligations do not necessarily stop at the boundaries of political life” for Māori politicians, while noting that the decision “will however appeal to the more conservative centre-left constituency that Hipkins believes he must cater to.”
On the left, the No Right Turn blog argued today that if Labour loses, “we will know exactly who to blame: Chris Hipkins”, while Martyn Bradbury blames Kaipara for choosing to “nark on Kerrin live during a debate on Māori TV”. Accepting Leoni’s account that it was a whānau event, as Labour’s Priyanca Radhakrishnan did this morning, only kept the story running.
Heather du Plessis-Allan has already compared the gang photos with the 2017 Metiria Turei controversy, which sent Green support tumbling. Turei, however, was a co-leader confessing her own offence, and the Greens’ lost voters had Jacinda Ardern’s Labour to go to, whereas the voters Labour now risks losing are more likely to go to National.
Has the left lost the election?
It is too early to say the left has lost the election. The Verian poll on Monday projected 60 seats for National, Act and NZ First and 59 for Labour, the Greens and Opportunity, and its fieldwork ended on 19 October, so no poll has yet measured the effect of Leoni’s resignation.
But the left has lost control of the campaign’s final fortnight. Labour wanted this election fought on health and the cost of living, and it will begin advance voting answering questions about gangs. Much of the damage is self-inflicted, from the photos at the gang pad to Leoni’s denial.
Hipkins can be forgiven for feeling the problem came out of nowhere, but the hard lines he drew to manage his allies’ mistake applied to his own candidates too, and one of them fell foul of those lines days before voting began. If the left loses narrowly on 7 November, the post-mortems will start with a fortnight that began with selfies at a gang pad in South Auckland and ended with Labour’s own candidate resigning.
Dr Bryce Edwards
Director of the Democracy Project
In the Further Analysis, below: “How Labour’s lines on the gangs issue changed throughout the week“
I cover the Labour statement declaring that “Oriini Kaipara was wrong”, issued on the day the video aired; the 2023 press conference at which Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said gang-linked programmes were “having a positive impact”; the night Robert Muldoon threw his whisky in a young gang member’s face; and how the Abuse in Care Royal Commission showed politicians a better way to engage with gang whānau. Paid subscriptions keep this independent analysis going.
