David Seymour, Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke and Willie Jackson must be the 2024 Māori Politicians of the Year

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As 2024 limps home with 4.8% unemployment (9% for our Māori whanau), public service corrosion and ratcheting race relation tensions, it falls to columnists to try and sum up the year and those who impacted it.

2024 was a year of pushback against this hard right Government’s anti-Māori, anti-Treaty, anti-worker, anti-environment, anti-beneficiary agenda. The 84 000 strong Hikoi in Parliament was the largest ever protest in our history.

You can’t pretend that wasn’t significant.

In my mind the 3 Māori Politicians of 2024 are obvious, David Seymour, Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke and Willie Jackson.

David Seymour because love him or loath him, has managed more power as a Māori politician than almost anyone else in Parliament. His disastrously flawed Treaty Principles Referendum Bill will dominate half of next year and he has managed to consistently overshine the actual Prime Minister all of this year. He has single handedly taken over the entire narrative of the Government and he’s ramming his interests through first.

Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke because she became the symbol of a new generation secure in their identity and who will refuse to be second class citizens in their own lands. Her Haka has been viewed over 700million times online and is now being copied in school haka after school haka. She embodies a new hope that can’t and won’t be extinguished.

Willie Jackson must be acknowledged in any Māori Politician of the Year because his oratory skills this year went to new heights. He won the Oxford Debate, his own Parliament Speech was seen 1.7million times and his recent speech at Labour’s Conference was considered by many as the best speech ever given at conference.

Last year it was New National MP for Rangitata, James Meager’s maiden speech that was being celebrated as a new political identity for Māori, in just a year this Government has burnt so much political capital for ACT’s race baiting stunt that James has barely appeared again in the headlines.

If 2024 was a year of rising, 2025 will be the year of crashing as the economic crisis collides with the identity crisis and the Treaty Principles Referendum Bill will dominate all dialogue.