This is the tenth instalment in my series examining the elite-driven dysfunction now corroding New Zealand – what I’ve been calling “Broken New Zealand”. I’ve already looked at National and Act’s corporate capture, Labour’s political timidity, the Greens’ inability to harness the new economic populism, and the wider collapse of faith in our markets, regulators, and political class.
Now it is time to turn to Te Pāti Māori.
For many people, the idea that this party could be part of the solution seems intuitive. Māori communities bear the sharpest edge of New Zealand’s broken markets: sky-high food costs, predatory lending, a failed housing system, the electricity duopoly, and health inequalities that no government has ever truly addressed. If any political force should be leading the pushback against elite power and market capture, it ought to be Te Pāti Māori.
But the uncomfortable truth is that Te Pāti Māori cannot lead such a crusade, because the party’s inner architecture has become a parallel version of the same cronyist system it claims to oppose.
What TPM has developed is a Māori-branded variant of elite capture. It has mutated into a political machine deeply tied to state contracting, opaque finances, personal patronage networks, and a culture of internal control that mirrors the worst habits of the Establishment. And at the centre of that system sits John Tamihere.
So, Te Pāti Māori isn’t the solution to Broken New Zealand. Increasingly, it is an example of it.
The false promise: What Te Pāti Māori could have been
There was once a plausible path where Te Pāti Māori could have reinvented New Zealand politics. A Māori-led left-populist force – one that challenged oligopolies, corporate excess, and bureaucratic paternalism – would have had enormous moral authority and political power. Māori communities are disproportionately harmed by oligopoly, broken markets, and under-regulated lenders. These markets punish Māori households hardest.
In other words, Te Pāti Māori had the structural mandate to champion an economic insurgency against elite power. They had the constituency, the history, and the lived experience behind them.
But the party never went down that road. It couldn’t. Its internal political economy made it impossible.
The Tamihere empire
To understand why Te Pāti Māori is paralysed on economic justice, you have to examine the parallel world of organisations orbiting its president. John Tamihere is not simply a party figure; he is the gravitational centre of a sprawling network of trusts, commissioning agencies, and political structures.
He is simultaneously: 1) Party president, 2) Chief executive of the Waipareira Trust, and 3) Chief executive of the Whānau Ora Commissioning Agency.
This is not a political party with an affiliated social-services arm, but it is a vertically integrated political-business ecosystem. State funds flow into agencies Tamihere runs; staff circulate between the organisations; political operations piggyback off publicly funded structures; and governance lines blur to the point of invisibility.
The financials are striking. The Waipareira Trust’s most recent accounts show:
Net assets exceeding $104 million
Over $75 million in cash reserves
A 24% profit margin (higher than nearly all major commercial companies in the country)
Senior executive remuneration averaging $511,000 each, far above the Prime Minister’s salary
This is not what most people imagine when they think of an urban Māori “charity”. And without these vast state revenue streams, Te Pāti Māori’s political machine could not function. The party is not funded by mass membership or grassroots fundraising. It is structurally dependent on the same state contracting architecture that funds the Waipareira empire.
That is the heart of the problem: TPM cannot attack a captured state when the captured state is its own operating model.
Brown crony capitalism
Some commentators hesitate to use the term “crony capitalism” in relation to Māori organisations, fearing accusations of cultural insensitivity. But the phenomenon transcends ethnicity. Crony capitalism emerges wherever public money, weak oversight, and centralised authority combine.
The model is simple: You identify government funding streams, then position allied organisations to capture them. You reduce accountability mechanisms (often justified through the language of tino rangatiratanga). Then you use political networks to keep the funding tap flowing. It is the same logic as the big corporate lobbies, but just with a different vocabulary.
Tamihere has effectively created an indigenous elite class whose interests no longer align with those of the Māori working class. The rhetoric remains about uplifting whānau, but the material outcomes disproportionately benefit those at the top.
This is why Te Pāti Māori cannot front a campaign against market capture or corporate welfare. It would be attacking the very incentives underpinning its own structure.
Integrity failures and the charity–politics nexus
The integrity issues surrounding the Tamihere network are extensive and long-running. They are not isolated accidents; they form a pattern.
Political finance: Charities Services spent four years investigating the Waipareira Trust and the National Urban Māori Authority over money funnelled into Tamihere’s campaigns. The amounts involved were significant: $385,000 in interest-free loans to political campaigns; $80,000+ in “sponsorship payments”; Repayment timed suspiciously close to a huge jump in executive salaries. Charitable law is explicit: tax-exempt public funds cannot subsidise political campaigns. Yet the loans happened. They were repaid, eventually, but only under intense regulatory pressure.
Opaqueness and non-compliance: Te Pāti Māori’s administrative record adds further concern: Multiple failures to file annual financial statements on time; Police warnings for repeated non-compliance; Whānau Ora entities operating outside the the public service are not subject to the Official Information Act, shielding expenditure from public view. A party that does not meet basic statutory requirements is not well positioned to lead a national integrity revival.
The Manurewa Marae episode: Whistleblowers alleged: Census forms photocopied and their data entered into party-linked systems; a “Jotform” system used to collect data that later fed political campaigns; $100 supermarket vouchers used as incentives during roll-switching and voter outreach; the marae acting as a polling place while its CEO was the candidate – a glaring conflict of interest. A Public Service Commission inquiry found the system riddled with failures and lacking safeguards. It stopped short of declaring corruption, but often the absence of legal proof is simply the consequence of weak law, not strong ethics.
Internal rupture: A party built for control, not representation
Te Pāti Māori’s recent implosion confirms what many suspected: this is a political organisation where internal democracy is secondary to centralised authority.
Two MPs (Mariameno Kapa-Kingi and Tākuta Ferris) were expelled in a process so irregular that even former co-leaders and party founders criticised it. The party’s constitution required a broad consultative process; instead, the decision was reportedly driven through by around 11 votes, many allegedly from officials simultaneously employed in the Waipareira network.
Electorate branches were sidelined. Members were bypassed. Those expelled described the process as “unconstitutional”, and insiders repeatedly used the term “dictatorship”.
And looking at the organisational chart, it’s hard to see it as anything else. The nepotism is almost comical in its brazenness. Tamihere’s daughter manages the party. She is married to the co-leader, Rawiri Waititi. Tamihere’s wife is the COO of Waipareira. On top of that, family and close associates dominate council positions, candidate lists, and trust directorships. In key regions, local electorate chairs double as Waipareira employees.
Duncan Garner’s podcast looked at all this earlier in the week, arguing that Tamihere has essentially hijacked the party and morphed it into an extension of his own patronage network. It is a “family business” funded by the taxpayer.
This is not the behaviour of a party preparing to challenge elite power. It is the behaviour of a party determined to protect its own. Parties that want to take on elite power do not purge members who ask questions. They empower them.
The current schism in the party shows the opposite. The party that talks most loudly about self-determination has developed a culture in which internal scrutiny is treated as disloyalty. This is not the conduct of a political actor positioning itself to challenge corporate giants. It’s the behaviour of a leadership determined to keep its own network intact.
Performance politics and policy emptiness
For all its energy in Parliament (haka protests, walkouts, viral moments) Te Pāti Māori has accumulated very little focus on things like housing conditions, banking reform, supermarket market power, electricity pricing, and poverty reduction.
The theatre is constant; the outcomes are thin. The pattern is simple: TPM gravitates toward culture-war issues because these do not threaten the economic foundations of its organisational model. The hard questions, such as breaking up duopolies, regulating banks, and controlling corporate lobbying, never receive the same intensity.
Who this failure hurts most
The tragedy in all of this is that Māori communities needed a party willing to confront New Zealand’s elite system. They are disproportionately harmed by failed markets, predatory corporate behaviour, and anaemic state regulation.
Te Pāti Māori could have been the vehicle for reform. Instead, its internal structure mirrors the very forces Māori communities are trying to escape: concentration of power, opacity, patronage, and elite enrichment justified through political rhetoric.
Broken New Zealand needed a challenger. Instead, with Te Pāti Māori it got a mirror image of the pakeha Establishment.
Conclusion: Te Pāti Māori as elite mirror, not elite challenger
Te Pāti Māori cannot lead the fight against crony capitalism and broken New Zealand because it has become one of its local embodiments. It cannot attack corporate welfare while depending on state-funded patronage. It cannot demand transparency while resisting it internally. It cannot condemn elite capture when its own governance resembles the same model in different colours.
The party rails against the elites, but behaves like an elite. It might denounce pakeha elites but depends on their same logic. It claims to empower the marginalised, but centralises power within a narrow circle.
So Te Pāti Māori is not the answer to Broken New Zealand. It is one of its symptoms. And until the party confronts its own contradictions and dismantles the empire at its core, it will remain part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Dr Bryce Edwards
Director of the Democracy Project
Further Reading: