With 75 percent of the count in, Labour’s Cushla Tangaere-Manuel is leading Te Pāti Māori’s Meka Whaitiri by almost 2,000 votes in Ikaroa-Rāwhiti.
The seat, the subject of controversy when Whaitiri defected to Te Pāti Māori in May of this year. Whaitiri is ranked third on the Māori Party list and is likely to get into Parliament through the party vote, currently tracking at around 2.5 percent, twice what Te Pāti Māori managed in 2020.
Whaitiri told Whakaata Māori earlier that they are ‘in it for the long haul’ and that Te Pāti Māori has a lot of work to do. She has also said that she would focus on the Māori economy if returned to Parliament.
While Whaitiri has not yet conceded defeat, it appears that Labour is likely to hold the Ikaroa-Rāwhiti electorate.
Labour candidate, and first-time poltician Cushla Tangaere-Manuel went into Election Day ahead in Ikaroa-Rāwhiti according to Whakaata Māori polling early in the election campaign.
Now with voting finished, she’s looking to be heading into parliament for the electorate whiich spans from the East Cape to Wainuiomata and every in between along the eastern seaboard of the North Island.
However with many of the larger booths yet to come in that could change, possibly on multiple occasions.
Whaitiri has held the seat since first winning it in 2012 for Labour, following the death of Parekura Horomia. However, in May this year she shocked the party, and shook the political landscape in Aotearoa when she switched allegiance to Te Pāti Māori, and in doing so removed Ikaroa-Rāwhiti from the clutches of Labour for the first time.
Both candidates have traveled extensively the length and breadth of the vast, largely rural electorate over the past 6 weeks hoping to capture as many of the votes as possible and hoping no doubt to encourage much of the 13,000 voters who didn’t vote in 2020.
Tangaere-Manuel is not on the Labour Party list, meaning Ikaroa-Rāwhiti is her only road to parliament.
Were she to take the seat, the win would be a reprieve for Labour in the Māori seats. The party looks as if it could lose all its current Māori seats to Te Pāti Māori from Te Tai Tokerau in the north to Te Tai Tonga in the south.