THE COCK ROCHE AND THE HERON

Manurewa Marae’s Menagerie of Mandarin & Māori Mischief

The Public Service Commission has at last released its report on the abuse of New Zealanders’ personal information in connection with Auckland’s Manurewa Marae and the 2023 general election.

The Report has been long awaited and much delayed. It was finalized in early December 2024 (it’s dated 5 December) but Public Service Commissioner Sir Brian Roche – who’d just love to “disappear” the whole assault on New Zealand democracy - didn’t make the Report public until almost three months later, on 18 February 2025.

The dispiriting but unsurprising thing about the Report is that it doesn’t tell anyone with even half a brain and a mild interest in this parlous affair anything they didn’t already know. In particular, the Report doesn’t touch the question on everyone’s lips.

For the crucial question is whether John Tamihere’s Fiefdom unlawfully abused New Zealanders’ personal information to get Takutai Moana Natasha Kemp elected to Parliament on the Māori Party ticket. The awful reality is – that question is being fudged and, on current political settings, will never be properly answered.

The “Inquiry Leads” who produced the Report were Michael Heron KC and Pania Gray. In Māori culture, New Zealand’s White Heron bird symbolises purity and elegance. Unfortunately, there’s nothing pure or elegant about the Report. It’s a lame and flightless duck (for cover).

It’s never a good sign when a Report kicks off with this kind of mumbo jumbo…

“Information has power. In the case of an individual, their personal information is their whakapapa – past and present. It tells a story about where they have come from and where they are going. It is their story; it is their information to give and to share.”

In defence of Heron & Gray however, the Report’s deficiencies are not fundamentally their fault. They stem directly from the Terms of Reference for the Report, which restricted the scope of the Report to finding out whether New Zealand Government agencies did enough to ensure that personal information they collected and disseminated was only used for proper purposes and not misused. Specifically excluded by the Terms of Reference were:

Whether inappropriate incentives were given to data collectors working at Manurewa marae and/or to members of the public to encourage them to complete enrolment forms, and/or to switch from the General electoral roll to the Māori electoral roll.

Whether a text message campaign using the number 2661 required an authorisation statement and/or was otherwise inconsistent with the Electoral Act 1993.

Whether funding provided by the agencies to any service provider was then used inappropriately by a political party for campaigning purposes in the 2023 election.

And who directed the Report and determined its Terms of Reference?...soon-to-be-not Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, and the Minister for the Public Service, Nicola Willis. It was those individuals who decided that the Inquiry would be conducted under the Public Service Act 2020, such that the ambit of Heron & Gray’s findings could only cover the conduct of Government agencies, and not Tamihere’s Tentacles.

What’s up?...and going down?

The basic facts and swirling allegations are essentially as follows:

The Manurewa Marae Trust Board, Te Whānau o Waipareira Trust and Te Pou Matakana Limited (which operates as “Whānau Ora Commissioning Agency”) received personal information from various Government agencies, ostensibly to increase Māori rates of COVID 19 vaccination and completion of the 2023 census.

John Tamihere occupies the following positions in entities involved in the Heron & Gray Inquiry:

• President of the Māori Party

• Chief Executive of the Waipareira Trust: That’s the outfit that exists ostensibly to help urban Māori. As Waipareira Trust submitted to Heron & Gray:

  “[Waipareira Trust] supports urban Māori who, as a product of colonisation, may be disconnected from their hapū, whakapapa and marae. The Waitangi Tribunal has recognised Waipareira as an organisation applying tikanga Māori and exercising rangatiratanga in a modern setting and deserving of special recognition in terms of Te Tiriti”.

  Waipareira Trust is also a political organisation that funds the Māori Party, as well as having bankrolled John Tamihere’s 2019 for the Auckland Mayoralty.

  Waipareira Trust is a registered charity, and therefore exempt from tax. But charities are prohibited from funding political causes, so Waipareira Trust should’ve been deregistered as a charity, long ago. In 2024, the Charities Registration Board notified Waipareira Trust of the Board’s intention to deregister the Trust as a charity, presumably because of the Trust’s brazen political activities. But Waipareira Trust won’t be deregistered any time soon, because the Charities Registration Board is preposterously politically biased.

• Chief Executive of the Whānau Ora Commissioning Agency: This agency is actually a company called Te Pou Matakana Limited which is registered as a charity. The company pays Tamihere over $500,000 per annum for being the chief executive of Whānau Ora. Officially, Whānau Ora is responsible for improving the welfare of families sporting Māori ancestry. More pertinently, Whānau Ora runs the Manurewa Marae.

Manurewa Marae runs (and is) an Auckland marae. Over all of the relevant time period, Manurewa Marae was run by Māori Party Member of Parliament, Takutai “Tash” Kemp. Kemp only ceased to be chief executive of Manurewa Marae when she was elected to Parliament in the Māori electorate known as Tāmaki Makaurau. On a recount, Kemp won that electorate seat over the Labour Party’s Peeni Henare by 42 votes. Each candidate received over 10,000 votes. It was an extremely tight race.

The unaddressed allegation is that John Tamihere orchestrated a scheme to abuse personal information that was originally provided by Government agencies to try and increase Māori rates of COVID 19 vaccinations and 2023 census participation. The allegation, coming from whistle-blowers at Manurewa Marae and others, is that Waipareira Trust, Whānau Ora and Manurewa Marae (under Tamihere and his minions) misused personal information in order to identify and contact individuals to whom the information related and get them to switch to the Māori electoral role and vote for Kemp.

Has anyone paid a proper price?

In the face of the allegations, Statistics New Zealand commissioned its own report. By no coincidence whatsoever, Stats NZ publicly released its report on exactly the same day (18 February) as the Heron & Gray Report was released. Both reports found that Stats NZ had failed to ensure that information provided to Waipareira Trust, Whānau Ora and Manurewa Marae was used solely for 2023 census purposes.

In the wake of the reports, Stats NZ chief executive officer, Mark Sowden, has…well, what? Stats NZ’s website states “This afternoon [18 Feb] Stats NZ Chief Executive Mark Sowden announced to Stats NZ staff that he has decided not to renew his contract at the end of his current five-year fixed term [emphasis]”. Which is a decidedly curious thing for Sowden to announce. Statman seems to think he could have unilaterally renewed his own contract. Perhaps in practice he could have – it’s become that bad.

But legally, Stats NZ’s chief executive is appointed by the Public Service Commissioner, Sir Brian Roche. And why didn’t Roche sack Sowden, when he received the Heron & Gray Report in early December? Why did he let Sowden smilingly see out his term, until the end of March 2025? Because the CockRoche looks after his fellow public service apex predator insects, that’s why.

Another Government agency at the heart of all this is the Electoral Commission. According to the Heron & Gray Report:

The Chief Executive of the Electoral Commission received a complaint about the use of Census data gathered by Manurewa Marae kaimahi for political purposes on 11 October 2023. The Electoral Commission told the complainant to refer its complaint to Stats...

The Electoral Commission’s chief executive is Karl Le Quesne. He’s been that since 21 April 2022. King Karl personally allowed the Manurewa Marae, with Māori Party candidate Takutai Kemp as Marae chief executive and run by Whānau Ora (with Māori Party President John Tamihere as Whānau Ora’s chief executive), to be used as a polling booth for New Zealand’s 2023 general election. Quisling Le Quesne did so having already received a complaint about the misuse of personal information at the Manurewa Marae. And L Q did so knowing full well that the Māori Party proudly plays by no recognized rulebook. Then Le Quesne tried to downplay Kemp’s actual conflict of interest as (quoting him) “a perceived conflict of interest”.

What we look for, and can reasonably expect, from our senior public servants is good judgement. Whatever else, for Le Quesne to have allowed a marae run by the Māori Party and a candidate for the Māori Party to be used as a polling booth was terrible judgement on his part. How does Karl keep his Electoral Commission chief executive caper? Public Service Commissioner Sir Brian Roche. That’s how.

A proper investigation

It’s quite possible that the head of two heavily Government-funded entities has orchestrated a scheme to misuse individuals’ personal information in ways that have subverted New Zealand’s democracy.

The complexity of the matter means that properly inquiring into it can’t be compartmentalized. By choosing a discrete inquiry into the roles of Government agencies – with downstream referrals to New Zealand’s parlous Police and Privacy Commissioner – the Government has fragmented and thwarted a proper, comprehensive investigation of what went on. And by having a partisan public-service-apologist Public Service Commissioner examine his Mandarin mates, the Government has allowed the public service to mark its own homework.

What’s needed is an overarching Royal Commission, with statutory powers of investigation and interrogation, conducted by someone outside of the Blob. (Not that a Royal Commission is any guarantee of robust credibility. The Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Christchurch Mosques Massacre contrived to find that the Police didn’t break the law in issuing murderous Tarrant with his lethal gun licence.)