August 22, 2022
What kind of Queen maker will Māori Party be?
OPINION: What kind of Queen maker will Māori Party be?
The latest Taxpayers’ Union Curia Political Poll has the Māori Party on a staggering 3.5%.
I say staggering because the highest the Māori Party has ever obtained was 2.39% in 2008.
This constant strength in Māori Party vote is driven by demographics, the new community outreach nerve endings generated during the Covid vaccination drives, a social media campaign that is relentlessly positive and the extreme rhetoric of the Right over co-governance alongside the drive by ACT to eliminate the Department of Māori Affairs.
There are more Māori, they are connected on social media, that social media empowers their identity and they are angry about the anti-Māori rhetoric.
This is all combining to bring Māori voters into the ballot box in numbers and intensity we probably haven’t seen in a decade.
It is completely possible that the Māori Party could cross the 5% threshold in 2023.
The reality is that the polarization of politics in 2023 will mean Labour and the Greens can only form a Government with the Māori Party, so what kind of Queen maker should the Māori Party be?
I believe that what is good for Māori is good for all New Zealand.
Some may argue that a Labour/Green/Māori Party could push through radical reforms around the Treaty and mandatory Te Reo, which I think would be a mistake.
The urgent need is in child poverty, housing, climate adaptation and inequality.
We need policies from a Labour/Green/Māori Party government that focus on those issues first and foremost, real economic transformation that takes the tax yoke off workers and puts it on corporations and banks!
To resource the social infrastructure required to be meaningful in the lives of those who vote for us, we need new taxes that target the richest while easing the tax burdon on the poorest.
A Labour/Green/Māori Party Government must see a win in 2023 as a generational tide moving against propertied Boomers and the economic vested interests of today’s pollution and pass legislation worth the mana of that victory.
It is not enough to virtue signal to people any longer, if the progressive side of politics represented by Labour, Greens and Māori Party win in 2023, they must manifest real material change in the lives of our poorest.
Do that and the people will trust that Government with more decolonisation.
Martyn Bradbury
Editor – TheDailyBlog.nz
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