Do we like Rawiri Waititi?
Our score: 6 out of 10. Backs rainbow inclusion and has no harmful campaigning on the record we found, but there's a messy party fight and a thin record on his own early life and votes.
Rawiri Waititi is co-leader of Te Pāti Māori alongside Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and holds the Māori seat of Waiariki. A new Curia poll has him comfortably ahead there, even as the party vote is a tight race. We couldn't open a full profile of his early life, so we're sticking to what the reporting we actually read covers.
His biggest headline came with the Treaty Principles Bill haka in Parliament. The Privileges Committee found the MPs' conduct was intimidating and in contempt of the House, focusing on the timing and manner rather than the haka itself, and Waititi was suspended for 21 days. He and the other two MPs said they were denied procedural fairness, and Labour and the Greens called the punishment too harsh.
The harm check is mostly clean. A release quoting him and Ngarewa-Packer said they reject policies excluding rainbow whānau from public life, including sport, and called rainbow inclusion a human right. The contested bit is mandates: in 2022 he said the vaccine mandates should be scrapped, while also saying he didn't support the Parliament occupation and was uneasy about Confederate and Trump flags flying beside Māori flags.
There was also the row over fellow MP Tākuta Ferris's comments about non-Māori campaigning in a Māori seat. Waititi said he and Ngarewa-Packer didn't support the way the comments were made, while party president John Tamihere backed the substance. Labour's Chris Hipkins said it would be hard to work with the party if those views were widely shared in it.
The recent thing is Waitangi 2026. Waititi gave a speech apologising to Ngāpuhi and calling for a new meeting, then supporters performed a haka that Ngāpuhi leaders said undid it. Ngāpuhi chair Mane Tahere called it “the nail in the coffin” for many voters, and Waititi said the haka was marae protocol and offered “here is my head”.
Party infighting is the other cloud. A High Court judge ruled in March that the party's decisions to suspend and expel Mariameno Kapa-Kingi were unlawful under its constitution and ordered her reinstated. Waititi has also been combative with media, telling Parliament “not a single allegation was upheld” against Māori organisations, though police had found insufficient evidence over the Manurewa Marae census-data claims. In March 2025 he re-shared a post about taking a weedeater to the lawns as if they were ACT's David Seymour, which ACT criticised.