Summarised by Centrist
Te Pāti Māori still hasn’t filed an audited report for its 2023 financial statements, more than nine months after the legal deadline. The 2023 accounts were submitted months late and unsigned, with the audit still missing despite the party having paid for it and promising that it’s on its way.
The Electoral Commission referred this latest breach to Police. Yet, rather than issuing any fines or arrests, the Police opted to let the party off the hook with only a formal warning in December.
Bryce Edwards’ latest Integrity Briefing says this is part of a long pattern of the party’s repeated failures, suggesting either incompetence or disdain for the electoral finance laws.
Te Pāti Māori president John Tamihere brushed off concerns, joking, “Rest assured the naughty Natives always comply to the letter of the law.”
Edwards warns that this “cavalier attitude” coupled with the party’s calls to “‘establish a Māori Electoral Commission to take things back into our own hands’ should be read as a dead end for establishing stronger electoral integrity in this country.”
The Waipareira Trust, also led by Tamihere, donated $100,000 to his 2019 mayoral campaign and a further $285,000 to political efforts, including Te Pāti Māori’s 2020 and 2023 campaigns. As a publicly funded charity, such donations are prohibited. The trust now faces deregistration and a potential multimillion-dollar tax bill.
Despite claiming grassroots independence, Te Pāti Māori benefited directly from this funding network. Edwards says that Tamihere’s overlapping roles amidst his “fiefdom” blur the line between charity, party, and personal gain.
In 2021, Te Pāti Māori failed to declare over $300,000 in large donations, including $158,000 from Tamihere, and nearly $50,000 from the National Urban Māori Authority (also a publicly funded charity), until months after the election
One $120,000 donation came from Aotearoa Te Kahu Limited Partnership, which Edwards describes as an opaque corporate structure, whose real backers remain undisclosed.
Meanwhile, other investigations are ongoing. Manurewa Marae, led at the time by now-MP Takutai Kemp, is still being investigated over allegations it misused census contracts to boost the party’s 2023 campaign.
