Donna Lynn Awatere Huata is a former member of the New Zealand Parliament for the ACT New Zealand Party and activist for Māori causes.
Dame Tariana Turia is a New Zealand politician. She was first elected to Parliament in 1996. Turia gained considerable prominence during the foreshore and seabed controversy in 2004, and eventually broke with the Labour Party as a result. She resigned from parliament, and successfully contested a by-election in her former electorate as a candidate of the newly formed Māori Party, of which became a co-leader. She retired from Parliament in 2014.
The New Zealand foreshore and seabed controversy is a debate in the politics of New Zealand. It concerns the ownership of the country's foreshore and seabed, with many Māori groups claiming that Māori have a rightful claim to title. These claims are based around historical possession and the Treaty of Waitangi. On 18 November 2004, the New Zealand Parliament passed a law which deems the title to be held by the Crown. This law, the Foreshore and Seabed Act 2004, was enacted on 24 November 2004. Some sections of the Act came into force on 17 January 2005. It was repealed and replaced by the Marine and Coastal Area Act 2011.
The Te Tai Hauauru by-election was a by-election in the New Zealand electorate of Te Tai Hauāuru, one of the Māori electorates. The date set for the by-election was 10 July 2004. It saw the re-election of Tariana Turia, a former MP for the Labour Party and now co-leader of the Māori Party.
The Māori Party is a political party in New Zealand representing the interests of the Maori ethnic minority. It contests the specially-reserved Māori electorates, in which its main rival is the mainstream centre-left Labour Party. Under the current leadership of Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, it promotes the following policies: uphold tikanga Māori, dismantle systemic racism, and strengthen the rights and tino rangatiratanga promised in Te Tiriti o Waitangi. The political position of the Māori Party is generally described as centrist or centre-left.
In New Zealand politics, Māori electorates, colloquially known as the Māori seats, are a special category of electorate that give reserved positions to representatives of Māori in the New Zealand Parliament. Every area in New Zealand is covered by both a general and a Māori electorate; as of 2020, there are seven Māori electorates. Since 1967, candidates in Māori electorates have not needed to be Māori themselves, but to register as a voter in the Māori electorates people need to declare that they are of Māori descent.
Te Ringa Mangu Mihaka or Dun Mihaka is a Māori activist, author, and political candidate in New Zealand.
Sir Pita Russell Sharples is a New Zealand Māori academic and politician, who was a co-leader of the Māori Party from 2004 to 2013, and a minister outside Cabinet in the National Party-led government from 2008 to 2014. He was the member of Parliament for the Tāmaki Makaurau electorate in Auckland from 2005 to 2014. He stepped down as co-leader role of the Māori Party in July 2013.
A list MP is a member of parliament (MP) elected from a party list rather than from by a geographical constituency. The place in Parliament is due to the number of votes that the party won, not to votes received by the MP personally. This occurs only in countries which have an electoral system based wholly or partly on party-list proportional representation.
William Wakatere Jackson is a New Zealand politician and former broadcaster and Urban Māori chief executive. He was an Alliance MP from 1999 to 2002, and in 2017 was elected as a Labour MP.
Anne Merrilyn Tolley is a New Zealand politician and former member of the New Zealand House of Representatives representing the National Party. She was New Zealand's first female Minister of Education from 2008 to 2011 and the first Minister for Children from 2016 to 2017. During the Fifth National Government, she was also Minister of Social Development, Minister of Corrections, Minister of Police and Minister of Local Government. She served as Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives from 2017 to 2020. She is currently the Chair of the Commission overseeing the Tauranga City Council, which was appointed after a review in 2020 identified significant governance problems within the Council.
Māori politics is the politics of the Māori people, who were the original inhabitants of New Zealand and who are now the country's largest minority. Before the arrival of Pākehā (Europeans) in New Zealand, Māori society was based largely around tribal units, and chiefs provided political leadership. With the British settlers of the 19th century came a new British-style government. From the outset, Māori sought representation within this government, seeing it as a vital way to promote their people's rights and improve living standards. Modern Māori politics can be seen as a subset of New Zealand politics in general, but has a number of distinguishing features, including advocacy for indigenous rights and Māori sovereignty. Many Māori politicians are members of major, historically European-dominated political parties, but several Māori parties have been formed.
In New Zealand, waka-jumping is a colloquial term for when a member of Parliament (MP) switches political party between elections, taking their parliamentary seat with them and potentially upsetting electoral proportionality in the New Zealand Parliament. In 2001 legislation was enacted that required list MPs to leave Parliament if they waka-jumped; this law expired after the 2005 election. In 2018 a similar law was passed which requires a defecting MP to give up their seat on the request of their former party leader. Electorate MPs may re-contest their seat in a by-election, whereas list MPs are replaced by the next available person on the party list.
The Māori renaissance is the revival in fortunes of the Māori of New Zealand beginning in the 1970s. Until 1914, and possibly later, the perception of the Māori race, although dying out, was capable and worthy of saving, but only within a European system From the 1970s, government policy changed to promoting a bicultural New Zealand society. This change has led to Maori being politically, culturally and artistically ascendant.
Te Tai Hauāuru is a New Zealand parliamentary Māori electorate, returning one Member of Parliament to the New Zealand House of Representatives, that was first formed for the 1996 election. The electorate was represented by Tariana Turia from 2002 to 2014, first for the Labour Party and then for the Māori Party. Turia retired and was succeeded in 2014 by Labour's Adrian Rurawhe who again retained the seat in 2017.
The Marine and Coastal Area Act 2011 is an Act of the New Zealand Parliament created to replace the Foreshore and Seabed Act 2004. It was brought in by the fifth National government and creates a sui generis property class for the marine and coastal area, in which it is vested in no one. This is in contrast to the Foreshore and Seabed Act 2004 in which the foreshore and seabed were vested in the Crown.
Whānau Ora is a major contemporary indigenous health initiative in New Zealand, driven by Māori cultural values. Its core goal is to empower communities and extended families to support families within the community context rather than individuals within an institutional context.
Adrian Paki Rurawhe is a New Zealand Labour Party politician of Ngāti Apa descent. He is the speaker of the New Zealand House of Representatives, the second Māori to hold the position, and Member of Parliament for Te Tai Hauāuru.
Debbie Anne Ngarewa-Packer is a New Zealand politician. She is a Member of Parliament and co-leader of the Māori Party, and is the leader and chief executive of the Ngāti Ruanui iwi. She stood for the Māori Party during the 2020 election in the seat of Te Tai Hauāuru. While she failed to win the electorate, she was placed first on the Māori Party list, where she won a list seat once the special votes were counted.
