Source: Radio New Zealand
Mariameno Kapa-Kingi. VNP / Phil Smith
MP Mariameno Kapa-Kingi says she hopes today’s court hearing will secure her reinstatement to Te Pāti Māori and pave the way for a reset of the party’s leadership.
Last year, she contested her expulsion from the party and was temporarily reinstalled in an interim judgement. A substantive hearing is now taking place at the High Court in Wellington.
Speaking outside on Monday morning, Kapa-Kingi told reporters she hoped the court could finalise the matter so everybody could move into 2026 “fired up and good to go”.
“I’m hoping that the reinstatement is secure and proper, and then we’ll see what happens from that point. But the reinstatement is key.”
Kapa-Kingi said she was also asking the court to require Te Pāti Māori to conduct a “proper full and open and honest process” regarding its leadership through a special general meeting.
“Good strong leadership is open … it’s about respect. It’s about love. It’s about kindness. It’s about all of those things that that we value as Māori and those things need to be obvious and apparent in the leadership. And I don’t know whether that’s so right now.”
Kapa-Kingi said she had never departed from the party’s kaupapa and was intending on visiting Waitangi for the annual commemorations later this week.
She said she was not sure how the party’s co-leaders Debbie Ngarewa Packer and Rawiri Waititi would be received up north given they had declined to attend a hui called by Ngāpuhi in November.
“We were disappointed and wished that they had turned up.”
Arriving at the court, Te Pāti Māori president John Tamihere said he was feeling “pretty chipper”.
“[Let’s] just see how the game goes,” he said. “There’s a lot of things at play, so let’s just await the finding.”
In an interim ruling published in early December, Justice Paul Radich said there were “serious questions to be tried” on the manner in which Kapa-Kingi was expelled from the party.
He said there were “certainly tenable arguments” that the expulsion was founded upon “mistaken facts and procedural irregularities”.
Te Pāti Māori’s lawyers had argued reinstating Kapa-Kingi was likely to “create extreme tension within Te Pāti Māori’s MPs and leadership”.
They argued the national council did have authority to expel Kapa-Kingi as it was the “primary heavy-lifter of hard decisions” in that context.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
