This article, the third in a series investigating whistleblower allegations at Manurewa Marae, examines how connections between the whistleblowers, their employment advocate and Destiny Church gave rise to the accusations against the marae, Waipareira Trust and Te Pāti Māori.
Media, Manurewa, and Destiny
Phillip Crump described the whistleblowers as “credible and well-respected community leaders” (NewstalkZB, 7 June). However, as the saying goes there are two sides to every story. Labour MP Willie Jackson told Newshub-AM that Destiny Church was behind the allegations targeting Te Pāti Māori (7 June, see 6m25s).
No one in the media followed up Jackson’s claim. In part, because they considered the whistleblowers separate individuals who experienced similar bullying from the same employer and were concerned for their safety (Sunday Star Times, 2 June; Newshub, 6 June). More broadly, there was a rush to pin the allegations on the marae and Te Pāti Māori.
Media
This is not the first time the media has misread the complex imbrications between Destiny Church and other Māori organisations in South Auckland.
During Covid, Newshub ran a story implying Manurewa Marae was an anti-vax Destiny Church outpost skimming vaccination funding by issuing false vaccination certificates (27 Jan 2022).
NewsHub purported to “reveal” that there was an internal investigation at the marae regarding vaccination certificates. They cited a staff member wearing a marae-emblazoned jacket making anti-vax statements on social media. Newshub also criticised marae Chair Rangi McLean and CEO Takutai Tarsh Kemp for attending a gathering in support of Brian Tamaki who was in Mt Eden Prison for breaching a Covid Public Health Order.
Nothing was further from the truth. The marae launched the investigation as due diligence to dispel conspiracy-influenced rumours that inundated many communities during Covid. The staff member, who is a Destiny member, was making a personal comment. The marae, as a responsible employer, did not require anti-vax Destiny staff to perform frontline vaccination duties. When Destiny staff went to the prison to support Tāmaki, the marae leadership was present to support their staff. That was the manaaki thing to do.
The lack of insight is telling. Two years ago, Manurewa was wrongly characterised as a Destiny outpost skimming vaccination funding. Today, Manurewa is characterised as a Te Pāti Māori outpost peddling grocery vouchers for votes. The difference? The target, not the reality. The commonality? Being Māori.
Destiny Church and Te Ao Māori
There are tensions between Destiny and wider Māoridom. Brian Tāmaki has declared a goal to unite Māori. This is a steep challenge. While Māori comprise a significant percentage of his congregation, the overall numbers are negligible compared to larger iwi and mātā waka urban communities.
Government funding is another point of tension. Destiny services like ManUp, Iwi Tapu and the Apostles Academy are not government-funded relying instead on tithes, fees, and merchandising.
Māori and non-Māori hold Manurewa in good esteem for the quality of their government-funded health, housing, and poverty alleviation services. There is also significant regard for their contributions during Covid and Cyclone Gabrielle. Unlike Destiny, they support people regardless of ethnicity, religious affiliation, or gender orientation.
By contrast, Tāmaki is unpopular. Polls taken in 2006 and 2007 ranked him as the least trusted of 75 prominent New Zealand leaders and in 2012 the least trusted of 100 leaders (ONE News, 26 May 2006; Readers Digest New Zealand, 24 October 2007; Readers Digest New Zealand, 15 August 2012).
Politics
The tensions manifest in different forms. Destiny seeks but fails to gain political legitimacy. In 2004, Tāmaki forecasted that Destiny would rule the country by 2008 and last year predicted they would win 20% of the party vote. However, under the different banners of Destiny New Zealand, the Family Party, and Vision New Zealand across four elections contested, Destiny has slipped from a minuscule 0.62% in 2005 to an infinitesimal 0.15% in 2023.
Takeovers
Destiny has also tried takeovers of established Māori entities. In 2011, Hannah Tāmaki stood for President of the Māori Women’s Welfare League (MWWL). To tilt the election in her favour, the Church formed ten new MWWL branches in a single meeting, on one day, at the same place, their Auckland headquarters. A Destiny trust paid the subscriptions; many did not know they had joined. A High Court decision canned the branches. The coup failed (The Spinoff, 27 May 2019).
Naming and Shaming
More recently, with the National-led coalition dismantling Māori budgets, initiatives, and public services, Brian Tāmaki senses an opportunity to cash in by crusading against what the far right calls the “Māori Elite”. He regularly names and shames leaders like Dame Naida Glavish, Sir Mark Solomon, Marama Davidson, John Tamihere and Willie Jackson, the Labour Party Māori Caucus, Māori MPs in the Greens, and prominent members of the Iwi Leaders Forum, accusing them of spending billions on lavish lifestyles while underdelivering to Māori. He wants the Māori seats removed, and Te Pāti Māori banned as a “terrorist organisation.”
Government funding is likely to remain elusive because Tāmaki bullies vulnerable communities. For instance, claiming that same-gender attraction caused the Christchurch Earthquake and Cyclone Gabrielle, our Islamic community is inherently malevolent, and pedestrian Rainbow crossings are the Devil’s work. Concerns about his views will not matter for Tāmaki because while rational thinking is not a strength beseeching the Lord for miracles certainly is.
Destiny and the Whistleblowers
Destiny’s recent shift dovetails with the events that unfolded at Manurewa. Last year, StatsNZ contracted the Whānau Ora Commissioning Agency to complete 10,000 census forms. Manurewa agreed to process 1800. The whistleblowers were in a group tasked with completing 800.
Manurewa paid teams a $100 bonus for each form completed. A payment dispute emerged. The whistleblowers say Manurewa withheld $20,000 because of “errors” which they contest (Newshub, 6 June).
Sources say the group, assisted by the Ministry of Social Development staff member associated with the allegations, copied programme documentation from Manurewa to wrest funding from the marae and establish a new social service. Staff and non-staff reported them. The whistleblowers left.
Whistleblower representative Allan Halse says Manurewa has not tabled evidence substantiating this claim. However, this writer has seen and heard accounts of this from independent sources. The writer has also seen evidence of social media harassment and heard of intimidation against the counter-whistleblowers who dobbed them in.
Sources say administrators subsequently discovered the whistleblowers had “deleted hundreds of emails” ostensibly to cover their tracks.
The group formally registered the new entity in October. The company has 11 directors. Six of the directors are members of Destiny Church. Two actively promote church material on Facebook, one fastidiously reposts Brian Tāmaki anti-Rainbow rants. Two are in-laws of Brian Tamaki’s son Samuel Tāmaki who leads Destiny Australia.
The new company works with the Whānau Ora Community Clinic (WOCC), an independent health service owned by two members of Destiny Church. One was an Election 2020 candidate for Hannah Tāmaki’s Vision New Zealand. The other donated $25,000 to the party during Election 2023.
Derek Tait, Brian Tāmaki’s right-hand man in the South Island and an avowed anti-Covid vaccination advocate, was a Christchurch-based director of WOCC during its Covid vaccination drive in Canterbury, a compromise he justified as “for a bit of extra cash.”
A Destiny Church member who worked for WOCC, Rick Southey, was the judge in the fake trial that found the Labour government guilty of “crimes against humanity” during the August 2022 anti-government protest at Parliament organised by Freedom and Rights Coalition leader Brian Tamaki.
Destiny and the Whistleblower Allegations
Given the Destiny linkages, it is not surprising that eight months later when the Manurewa allegations surfaced, a larger number of whistleblowers spoke with and made their principal document dump to Brian Tāmaki rather than mainstream media (BrianTamaki.com, 5 June).
Equally unsurprising, Hannah Tāmaki and Vision New Zealand were the source of one of the main complaints to the Electoral Commission accusing Te Pāti Māori of bribing voters with refreshments at the Manurewa voting booth during last year’s election. At least one other complaint came from within the Election 2023 Brian Tāmaki and Sue Grey-led Freedoms New Zealand umbrella group that included Vision New Zealand.
Allan Halse and Destiny Church
Allan Halse, the whistleblowers’ representative, is the third cog in the Destiny connect. Halse is not a member of Destiny Church but does have close links. Between September 2020 and January of this year, he and church supporter Bernadette Soares featured in more than 80 Facebook podcasts.
Soares was a Vision New Zealand candidate in Election 2023 and supported the Brian Tāmaki-led Freedoms and Rights Coalition during Covid. She attended anti-mandate protests at Auckland’s Domain, the 2022 Parliament Protest, and was present at an Auckland Police station and Mt Eden Prison when Tāmaki was arrested.
Social media posts also show Halse shares similar views with Brian Tāmaki regarding the Labour government’s work mandates during Covid.
In 2022, Soares and Hannah Tāmaki and supporters of Vision New Zealand and the Freedom and Rights Coalition supported Halse at the High Court in Hamilton as he defended actions to liquidate his company (NZHerald, 10 April 2023).
Employment Advocate
Halse is a staunch defender of workers he believes employers have bullied. He has represented over 1200 employees of which 30-40% are Māori. He has as many as 100 clients at any one time. In 2017, he secured $100,000 for a kindergarten teacher and the following year $60,000 for a relief ambulance driver (NZHerald, 10 April 2023). A Waikato Times exposé cited three clients with nothing but praise for Halse (23 March).
Naming and Shaming
Halse also has detractors. Halse is an employment advocate, not an employment lawyer as some media assume. Unlike employment lawyers, who are accountable to the Law Society and the Lawyers and Conveyancers Tribunal, employment advocates are not subject to formal regulation.
Simon O’Neill, a former advocate, and Anthony Drake, the President of the Employment Law Institute of New Zealand (ELINZ), suggest Halse exploits this loophole to threaten employers with public naming and shaming as leverage to achieve better outcomes for his clients (Waikato Times, 23 March).
In 2022, the ADLS Employment Law Committee asked the Labour government to regulate employment advocates. Among other cases, they cited an Employment Relations Authority (ERA) finding that Halse sent several emails threatening to publish negative comments in the media and on his social media platforms about First Security Guard Services in a bid to get them to settle (The Law Association, 29 September 2022).
Several ERA, Employment Court, and High Court findings in a long-running dispute between the Rangiura Trust Board and Halse shed further light on this issue (NZ Herald, 10 April 2023):
- Halse made disparaging posts about Rangiura on Facebook, including after legal orders to desist, harassed two employees he did not represent and named and shamed the trust’s chairperson, a volunteer at the trust, in what amounted to “witness intimidation”.
- He made unfounded public accusations against the trust’s lawyers to stop them from representing the trust resulting in his social media followers making serious threats against one lawyer, including one contact who said he would “take him out”.
- Halse emailed threats of adverse publicity to the Waikato District Health Board if it did not withdraw funding from the trust and “shut it down” in “an improper attempt” to undermine the trust’s funding and ability to continue the legal action against him.
- He tried to have Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern intervene in the case, threatening negative publicity about the Labour Party if she did not.
One finding with relevance to the allegations against Te Pāti Māori is that:
- Halse used inflammatory and unfounded claims “outside the bounds of appropriate, reasonable, or professional representation” and that his public attacks on Facebook were “distorted and disconnected from reality” constituting reprehensible attempts to intimidate his opponents in a manner “designed to damage their public reputations and to generate public hostility”.
For his part, Halse believes that the ERA and Employment Court are biased and that corporate lawyers are out to get him because he is so successful.
Perhaps the last word is from Judge Joanna Holden who in 2020 wrote: “It is ironic that a person who holds himself out as an advocate for people who suffer bullying in the workplace, and who claims to have a good understanding of the impact that bullying has on people, has deliberately adopted such behaviour himself.”
Findings
There are tensions between Destiny and other Māori entities. The whistleblowers and their employment advocate have links with Destiny. We should not over-read the connections, nevertheless, in the context of public naming and shaming, they seem palpably relevant.
The whistleblowers confirm that a dispute arose over payment for the completion of census forms. Sources from the Manurewa community say the whistleblowers were part of a group that scraped documentation from the marae and set up their social service. Half of the directors of the new entity are members of Destiny Church.
Earlier attempts at mediation between the parties either broke down or did not occur. At that juncture, the whistleblowers dovetailed with Brian Tamaki’s and Halse’s propensities for naming and shaming; Tāmaki targeting vulnerable groups and Halse getting stuck into companies and businesses.
This morphed into a deluge of inflammatory, inconsistent, and internally contradictory allegations against Manurewa Marae, Waipareira Trust and Te Pāti Māori.
Twelve government investigations are underway at huge cost to the taxpayer. The whistleblowers have given statements to the Police, the Privacy Commissioner, StatsNZ, and KC Michael Heron is leading the Public Service Commission inquiry into the allegations.
There is a significant risk that Destiny will flood the investigations with unfounded claims and testimony resulting in unfair outcomes for Manurewa Marae and Te Pāti Māori.
Dr Rawiri Taonui is an independent writer. He was formerly the Head of the School of Māori and Indigenous Studies at the University of Canterbury and Head of the School of Māori Art, Knowledge, and Education at Massey University.
